How exciting! You must be absolutely thrilled!

I am very happy for you.

except that some relative on that side went down with the Maine.

I've contacted the seller to get updated info. I could never afford to even look at it, let alone buy it, but I might be able to find out more personal details. The brothers all split up over money when the patriarch died in 1915 is the story, but his will says he left $100 and nothing else. He started out owning a large piece of what is now Brooklyn, back when it was New Lots, a farm town.

With the 1940 census out, I've been able to fill in everyone back to 1920, and from 1910 back to the Civil War where apparently George Faubel Sr was at the first battle of Bull Run. But I have lots of missing bits to find before I can be sure.

My biggest hurdle is 3 notebooks, various index cards and loose papers, and bits of data on my hard drive that is so scattered I don't know where to begin organizing it.

have, and that's just what you know so far about your family history. I hope you're soon able to discover more about your ancestors as you sort through everything you've accumulated and as you find new information pertaining to them. Very interesting that your ancestor was in the battle of Bull Run! Mine was a Appomattox, which I like knowing.

Sometimes important clues can be found in seemingly insignificant bits of information you stumble upon. When my half-sister died last year, her daughter gave me a box of old papers and photos that my half-sister (same moms, different dads) had been storing ever since our step-mother died in 1965. In the box of mostly family pictures from the 1950s and old birthday and Christmas cards Mom had saved, I found a wedding invitation from 1896 addressed to my great-grandfather, my dad's grandfather. With it was a note to my dad written in 1942 by his aunt, daughter of my great-grandfather. She said it would be nice that if before Dad was sent overseas with the Army and was still in California, he tried to find the long-ago bride and groom to say hello from their old friend's grandson. She thought they might still be living and residing in San Bernardino. The bride's father was a prominent post-Civil War photographer in San Bernardino. It was he and his wife who had sent my great-gf the invitation to their daughter's wedding.

I Googled the couple's names and located a descendant of theirs at a gen. forum and wrote to her. I reasoned that if my great-gf was the friend of a professional photographer's, maybe he took my great-gf's picture, and if so, maybe the picture still exists. It was this photographer's descendant I'd contacted through the gen. forum who found my great-grandfather's photo a year later among her ancestor's personal photos.

Leave no stones unturned, nor shots in the dark untaken. That's my motto!

My Mom lent me her and my oldest sister's files of papers and notes on their genealogical research. I scanned every page and have it all as images on my computer. As I go through them, I can copy each page into the appropriate folder.

I keep folders for each family group and under that a folder for each individual. Files in those folders are dated by the event, with abbreviations for location, and a word for the type. So an image of a birth record would be for example 1814_NY_Cayuga_birth.jpg. I use the same convention for files downloaded from Ancestry or any other source. Each person's information is then easily sorted by the year and place.

As I sort the notes, I copy the image page over to the file, then change the name with the information for that person. It makes it easy to review and since often Mom and my sister made notations as to additional places to search, I can go try those when I am ready.

It took a while to scan everything, but now it's much easier to access and sort.

different "notebooks" for each family or subject. each notbook has sections that I renamed for people. I love that I can copy something from the internet and it automatically sources it for me. I can search the whole notebook for a word, and it will pull up every note it's in.

I think it's basically the same as your idea with a few fancy gizmos

Using file formats that are standard - JPGs and PDFs mostly. I got tired of trying to keep database programs up to date and having to relearn how to use them every time I was forced to upgrade.

Ancestry and Fold3 both have their document images as JPGs. I copy the source information into WordPerfect and save as PDFs. Or I save web pages as PDFs using CutePDF.

The key thing for me is getting everything into digital format to make it easier to sort and to put copies into the appropriate places for each individual or family.

My great uncle was George D. Faubel. My father's middle name was George. Whenever we are in DC, we visit the USS memorial at Arlington Cemetery. Contact me at faubelkl@earthlink.net, if you'd like.

I just got an email from you too, and saw the message board link. I'll be in touch you should edit your post to take out the email, for your privacy.

It's for your own safety (to keep spammers from grabbing it). When you meet up with family in this forum, it's fine to send a DU mail with your email in it, but since you probably don't want 76,000 offers to buy Viagra, I wouldn't do it in your post.

Just a friendly reminder to try to preserve your privacy.