Evernote

The amount of information available as you research your ancestors can be staggering. How can you collect and organize all this stuff? Thankfully we have the app Evernote to help us. The information collected in Evernote is always available because it is in a cloud-based program. You can have it on your phone, tablet, and computer and it synchronizes all the information you add from each device into one place. Evernote was created just for this day of information overload.

Evernote gives you a place to organize all your genealogical data, no matter what form it is in. It also has a powerful search engine to help you retrieve your data again. This tool can help you sort through your volumes of information and may help you break through those brick walls that can keep you frustrated.

Evernote is organized into notebooks just like you have with your physical binders. I have notebooks of the different areas that my ancestors lived. I have divided my New Hampshire notebook into notes for the various counties, and I divided those counties into notes for vital records, maps, etc. The type of notes you can save are handwritten notes, photos of people and things, photos of documents, audio files, pdf’s, web clippings, to-do lists, research and correspondence logs. You can also share notebooks with other researchers.

My favorite part of Evernote is the web clipper. It is a Chrome extension that I use when I come across articles on the internet that I am interested in. I click on the green elephant icon, and it will save the article to my Evernote in a notebook that I ask it to. It includes the date saved and the URL of where I found it. For example, I found a map that shows the location of my ancestor’s farms located in Bridgewater, New Hampshire. I clicked on the green elephant on my Chrome extension, and it saved the map to my New Hampshire notebook in Evernote which included the information I needed to find it again.

With all the information available for researching our ancestors it is great to have an app like Evernote to help us organize it all. There are many instruction YouTube videos for Evernote. There is also a great book, How to Use Evernote for Genealogy by Kerry Scott, that will give you step by step instructions on how to use this program.