michaeljohnneill 9:51 am on December 11, 2015

File Names That Don’t Confuse

File names for images made from county records should be as specific as possible in terms of location. I should have included at least the county and state. I saved file names that indicated the year of the tax list, a volume number, and the last name of interest. I should have included the state as well. The page numbers were included in the actual image–in this case.

Marti 11:35 am on December 11, 2015

Like this idea!
Some number of years ago, I finally settled on a file naming convention for all my genealogy that seems to work well; I will have to go back and add this to it.
So the format would look like this:
Lname Fname Year ##-Mon day description of what it is with the specific location included access date
An example of this:
Smith Fredrick 1932 11-Nov 27 Bedford County PA personal property 11Dec2015
- michaeljohnneill 2:30 pm on December 11, 2015
  
  I like that. Someone suggested a folder structure that would indicate the county and or state. The problem I have with that is that if things get put in wrong folder or moved around, then I have a problem. This way is more consistent and I can tell where it’s from right from the file name.
Theresa 3:01 pm on December 11, 2015

Something I learned recently and have started doing is using tags, which makes searching even better and also I’m putting the entire source citation into the metadata of the file. This also helps when searching for a file.

Genealogy Tip of the Day

with Michael John Neill

File Names That Don’t Confuse