5 Efficiency Techniques That Fortify Your Family Tree

With so many responsibilities to juggle, your time is precious. When you do find time to work on your family tree, you don't want to waste a second.

That's why you need to focus on your efficiency. Efficiency helps you get more done in less time. Here are 5 different ways for you to reap the benefits of efficiency in your genealogy work. They boil down to: (a) focusing on one thing at a time and (b) not reinventing the wheel.

Efficiency techniques give you a higher quality product: your family tree.

1: One Task at a Time

When you do find time to work on your family tree, don't waste a second. Make your own version of this task list (see "How to Run Your Genealogy Research Like Clockwork"). Then choose whichever one you're in the mood for and get right to it.

Your task list should include a mixture of things you know you need to do and things you want to do. For more ideas of things to add to your task list, see "Work in Batches to Strengthen Your Family Tree".

2: One Process at a Time

When I find a census page that contains a large family from my family tree, I need to go through a whole process. I have to:

• Download the census sheet image.
• Give it a name that follows my chosen file-naming pattern.
• Crop and enhance the image in Photoshop.
• Add metadata to the image.
• Attach it to the head of household in my family tree and share it with each member of the household.
• Add facts from this census to each member of the family.
• Create a source citation and attach it to all those facts.
• File away the original image, or keep it in my holding pen until file backup day. (See "This 3-Step Backup Routine Protects Your Family Tree".)

Did you realize you're following a process? Does it have a lot of steps? Think them through and make sure nothing got overlooked.

You'll find it's more efficient to complete the entire process in one sitting. Don't go through the steps for the head of household and worry about the rest of the family later. That's so inefficient. Instead, "Get into a Groove to Fortify Your Family Tree".

3: One Record Type at a Time

Last month I completed a task I thought of long ago. I wanted to find images of the ships my ancestors took from the old country to the new one. Somehow I never got around to doing it. Then I made it a priority. I spent part of two days working on nothing but the ship images. Now, after so much procrastination, it's done!

But most days I spend my genealogy time on one thing: Italian vital records. My ongoing project is to add all the missing source citations to my family tree. The bulk of them are citations for the Italian vital records in my tree.

Focusing on that one task makes me very efficient. If you have missing source citations, you'll be more efficient if you tackle one record type at a time. It could be ship manifests, census records, vital records, or anything else you need. To make your source citations shine, see "Add Consistency to Your Source Citations".

4: One Whole Family at a Time

While working on my missing Italian source citations, I've tried different techniques. I needed to see which is most efficient. First of all, it's by far more efficient to work on one town at a time. My missing source citations come from several different towns. By working on one town at a time:

• I save typing. All my source citations are going to use the same town.
• I stay in one section of the Antenati portal (where they keep the vital records). That means I don't have to navigate to another part of the website.
• I avoid picking the wrong town while adding the citation to Family Tree Maker.

But I did try an experiment. I opened the 1812 birth records for this one town. I went through them page-by-page, looking up the people in my family tree. (They're ALL in there.) I added each missing citation to my tree. I did this all the way through the 1819 births. It was nice that I didn't have to do anything in my web browser but turn the page. But I found that I had to move around in my tree so much that I accomplished less in a day.

What's more efficient is to work through an entire family of siblings at a time. There's no moving around in my tree. I can see them all on one screen in Family Tree Maker.

I have a copy of all the vital records on my computer. It's very efficient for me to:

• search for all the siblings at once using their father's name.
• open each set of Antenati records in a new browser tab.
• customize my source citation template for each sibling.

That's how I complete so many in a day. See "How to Become a Genealogy Efficiency Expert".

5: Use Templates

Why waste time retyping something long and complicated from scratch? Let's say you're creating source citations for a specific type of document. You have tons of these documents to cite, and it'd be nice if they all followed the same style.

No problem! Give some thought to how you want these similar citations to look. Then type out and save a template in a text file. I crank out more than 100 source citations a day for my Italian relatives' vital records. I'm sure not going to type each one out in full each time. That's not efficient. Instead, I start from a citation template and make a few changes to match the record. See the Efficiency section of "2 Keys to Tackling a Big Family Tree Project".

I keep a handful of specialized templates in my text file. These ensure consistency while saving time.

Are you using efficiency techniques to maximize your precious genealogy time?