It is true, the dumpster was filled with thousands of pages of paper records that I have digitized and I was very proud of the space I created in my office. Then I looked around and found I have a significant number of notebooks on my shelves. 67 to be exact.

I decided it was time to review the contents of those notebooks and make sure:

1. I still needed to keep the information
2. I did not also have the same information in another notebook
3. I could find the information if I needed it.

So, being a bit-nerd at heart, I created a database that includes each of the notebooks and the major tabs that define what is in each. In the 67 notebooks, there are 621 tabbed topics.

I have set the database up to inquire into the topics with a wildcard query across all notebooks to answer the question – “Where did I put that?” I can now find the data that I, well as of today, felt was important enough to keep for future reference.

There are a number of the topic fields that I might go back and itemize the detail contents. Again, I am a bit-nerd, so I set the database as relational and can create all kinds of sub-groupings when the mood strikes.

Now back to finding the elusive, hiding, ancestral lines.