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Keeping Track of Cousins

© Christine Sievers

If you have done genealogy for a number of years, or even a shorter time on the Internet, you will have accumulated hundreds of cousins. Many of our ancestors, after leaving the crowded cities of their homeland, had large families. It seems as though they expanded to fit the open spaces of the growing America. These large families produced the hundreds of cousins that we now have in our family tree.

Often, people think of genealogy as tracing our direct ancestors back as far as we can go. But, that misses the very rewarding pursuit of seeing how wide we can extend our family tree. These cousins, past and present, not only add color to our tree, but can give important clues to busting down our brick walls. If we find no records for an ancestor or the trail seems to vanish, looking up the records of distant aunts, uncles, and cousins can clear the path.

Then, there are our living cousins. They may have records, family stories, and information that can fill in the records of our direct ancestors. Beyond the practical, making contact with these lost cousins gives us the extended family that our culture has neglected. Besides, it is just plain fun to reconnect.

The Internet has provided a boom to contacting lost cousins. I now have a list of 3rd and 4th cousins that I email regularly, swapping family stories, and sharing my life with. One cousin provided huge branches of my extended family tree. Another cousin has given me family that is still living in the Netherlands. Other cousins are putting their heads together with mine to uncover the trail that was lost.

This leads me to the main focus of this article- how can I keep track of and file in an organized, easy to use way all these cousins. I am always in the process of revising my filing system. Of course, I have made family group sheets for them. I started with manila folders, moved to binders, adding a binder for each new surname. That soon proved impractical. There are a lot of females in the family tree. Each time they married they changed their name, had families that usually included females that changed their name and had more females. I guess you get the point, and have probably discovered yourself, how quickly surnames grow.

Naturally, I have my dream genealogy filing system. I would have an entire room just for genealogy work. It would have walls of bookshelves. These shelves would be filled with binders, color coded for each branch of the family tree. Each surname would have its own binder, even if there was only one family group sheet in it (a family with only females that had children). Then, these binders would be flagged for direct ancestors, and another flag for those branches that are still in the research process.

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