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8 page PDF research guide includes:
Guide for Spring Cleaning Your Digital Tree
A scanned deed with no filename, no citation, and no county context is not evidence. Appalachian research makes that problem harder to solve than it sounds, because the county that existed when a record was created is often not the county on the modern map, and a family that appears under three different surname spellings across the same decade of tax lists will disappear from a search that only knows one of them. Getting a digital tree in order means attaching names, dates, citations, and place knowledge to every file until each image can be found, read, and cited by anyone who picks up the research after you. This companion gives you the standards and the method for doing that work in Appalachian-specific conditions, from file naming conventions that account for shifting county boundaries to name variant recording that catches dialect spellings and nicknames used as legal names.
What's Inside
- Five-standard digital organization reference covering file naming, master image preservation, full repository citation in metadata, place normalization and boundary linking, and name variant recording, with Appalachian-specific guidance and examples for each
- Record-type digital handling guide for deeds and land records, wills and probate, tax lists, bounty warrants and land patents, church rolls and minutes, and photographs, covering critical fields to capture, linking requirements, and common digital errors for each type
- Repository and tools guide covering the National Archives bounty land warrant collection, BLM General Land Office Records, the Library of Congress Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, FamilySearch digital images, the Digital Library of Appalachia, and Cyndi's List organizing resources
- Digital audit worksheet with file audit log, name variants tracker, records-to-locate log, and audit analysis prompts
- Notes pages