DON’S FREEWARE CORNER - AUG 2015
FAMILY HISTORY USES OF EVERNOTE
©2015 Donald R. Snow
This page was last updated 2015-08-10
These Freeware Corner notes are published in
TAGGology, our Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy
Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter, and are posted
on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where there may be corrections or updates.
FAMILY HISTORY USES OF EVERNOTE
In past Freeware Corner and other class notes I have
written about the program EVERNOTE and how to use
it. Their website is https://evernote.com/
. You go to the website, set up a free account,
and download the program. The BASIC version is free,
the PLUS version costs $24.99/year, and the PREMIUM
version costs $49.99/year. The free version is
enough for many uses in family history and most of
what we will discuss in this article is from that
version. The paid versions add more features
and, after using the free version for a couple of
years, I decided pay for the PREMIUM version to get
the additional features. EVERNOTE sync's
(synchronizes) your notes to all your computers and
devices via the Internet. To learn the steps to use in
any of the versions see my other notes or the EVERNOTE
blog at https://blog.evernote.com/
. There are also many other helps and tutorials
online such as http://evernote.com/getting_started/#1
, http://evernote.com/evernote/guide/windows/
, the "Unofficial Evernote Manual" at http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-use-evernote-the-missing-manual-full-text/
, and the MakeTechEasier Evernote Keyboard Shortcuts
Cheat Sheet at http://download.maketecheasier.com/MakeTechEasier_Evernote_cheatsheet.pdf
. For many more helps and tutorials you can
Google the web and look on YouTube. This
Freeware Corner article shows some ideas for using
EVERNOTE in family history from my own experience and
seeing how other people use it.
EVERNOTE VERSIONS FOR ALL COMPUTERS AND MOBILE
DEVICES
One of the most helpful things about EVERNOTE is that
there are versions to run on every operating system
and every type of computer and device, e.g. Windows,
Mac, iPhone, Android, and everything else. This
makes it so that notes you save on one device or
computer are available to you on any of your other
devices or computers, if they connect to the Internet,
so they can be updated. You can write and edit
notes without being connected to the Internet and as
soon as it detects an Internet connection, it updates
your online file "in the cloud" and from there it
sends the updates to each of the other devices where
you have set up your account. This makes it so
that you can use any of your notes in EVERNOTE
anywhere you happen to be, as long as you can get to
the Internet, e.g. at a FHC.
EXAMPLE 1: SAVING URLS AND FAMILY HISTORY
WEBSITES
EVERNOTE will allow you to copy and paste URLs (links)
or entire webpages into notes. To save a URL
just type it into a note. When you put the
cursor at the end of the URL and press the space bar,
you will see the link turn into an active link that is
underlined and look the way you are used to seeing
links. You can also save links by going to the
webpage in a browser, copying the URL from the address
bar, and pasting it into a note in EVERNOTE. To
save the entire webpage in a note just go to the
webpage in the browser, press CTRL-A (A=All) to
highlight the entire webpage; then CTRL-C (C=Copy) to
copy the entire webpage to the clipboard; open a note
in EVERNOTE and press CTRL-V (V=Paste) to paste it
into the note. You then have a copy of the
entire webpage with all the links active and this
remains in your EVERNOTE file even if the webpage
changes later, which most do within a few
months. Besides highlighting the entire webpage,
you can highlight just portions of it and paste those
into notes. Or you can use tools like EVERNOTE
WebClipper which brings in the page without all the
extraneous stuff around the edges. There are
also other programs that help in getting webpages
copied so they are more readable. Using these
processes I have made notes in my EVERNOTE file where
I save various webpage links, e.g. I have a note in
which I paste all URLs that pertain to my family or me
and others in which I keep webpages that pertain to
different FH topics.
EXAMPLE 2: RESEARCH LOGS
You can set up EVERNOTE notes to keep track of all
the sources you check for an individual and what you
found there, if anything. Some sources you will
want to add to FamilySearch Family Tree, but others
you will only want to save in EVERNOTE or in your own
genealogy database for reasons such as privacy
laws. Of course, you can save them in more than
one place to form more complete lists. An idea
would be to set up a table or chart in a note with
columns for details of what you found in each
source. Since notes in EVERNOTE don't have to be
in any certain format, you can easily write or copy in
things and have them in the note in chronological
order of when you found them or else when they
occurred. I find it helpful to put the date I
found the source at the top of the note so my research
logs are mostly in the order I found the information
with the latest at the top. There is a simple
way to include check boxes so you can form lists, such
as sources to check, for example, and put checks in
the boxes when you have finished the item. All
these ToDo lists are searchable to see which are
completed and which are not.
EXAMPLE 3: CONTACT INFORMATION, ADDRESS,
EMAIL ADDRESSES, AND PHONES
I have EVERNOTE notes for contact information for my
relatives, genealogy contacts, friends in cities such
as Provo and St. George, and for businesses for which
I need to remember the contact information. For
my LDS wards I download the pdf's of the ward
directories from the LDS Church website and save them
into an EVERNOTE notebook for the ward. PDF's
are automatically indexed, so I can search my EVERNOTE
file for any name or identifying information to bring
up the information. The BASIC (free) version of
EVERNOTE waits until that night to index pdf's you
copy in, but the paid versions index pdf's
immediately. You never see the pdf index text
layer since that is saved in your EVERNOTE account "in
the cloud", so to search such files, you need to have
an Internet connection. It indexes any writing
it finds even in pictures such as signs or printing on
a blackboard that you photograph. It doesn't
index handwriting, but does have a speech-to-text
conversion built in so you can dictate and it will
type the text. I haven't found this voice
recognition very accurate, though.
EXAMPLE 4: LETTER AND OTHER COLLECTIONS
If you have scans of letters of an ancestor, you can
copy and paste those scans into notes in
EVERNOTE. If you have the transcriptions of
handwritten letters, you can paste them with the
scanned images, and the transcriptions will all
indexed for you. I have developed a naming
routine for letters so they all sort chronologically
in EVERNOTE. They are searchable and editable in
EVERNOTE. Then, using the Export feature in
EVERNOTE, I have exported all these as html files so
they are viewable in a browser or can be uploaded to a
website. You can also export EVERNOTE notes or
notebooks as text files. Exporting a letter
collection as html files allows you to use all the
features of a browser; for example, in most browsers,
to increase the size of the font so they are more
readable, hold down the CTRL key and roll the mouse
wheel. You can also use the search features of
the browser to find particular aspects of your
collection. I have used this procedure to form a
letter collection of Erastus Snow's Personal and
Family Letters that is now posted on my FH
website
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
. This procedure can be used for any collection
of files, e.g. an ancestor's recipe collection or a
collection of newspaper articles such as obituaries.
EXAMPLE 5: PRESENTATIONS
In the paid versions of EVERNOTE there is a
Presentations mode which allows you to just click and
show any note as a series of slides with various
additional features to show it. This can be used
to show a slideshow on your own computer or device or
to show on a screen, if you have an LCD projector or
larger monitor attached. The Presentation button
is a small computer monitor in the upper right corner
of the note. This Presentation mode is not
available in the BASIC (free) version, so I won't say
any more about it here.
EXAMPLE 6: PHOTOS OF ARTIFACTS AND COMMENTS
ABOUT THEM
EVERNOTE uses the built-in camera of a device to take
pictures and store them as notes. So you can
open EVERNOTE and take a picture of an artifact and
save it as a note. Then, in the same note, you
can add an audio note describing the artifact, where
it came from, its history and relationship to the
family, etc. If the artifact belongs to a
relative you could have them describe it in their own
voice and record the audio note in EVERNOTE. You
then have the picture and an audible description of it
in the same note. To add an audio note you need
a microphone on your device, of course. Just
click on the small microphone (upper right corner of a
note) and then click Record. When finished,
click Stop and the note will be an icon link where the
cursor was when you started.
EXAMPLE 7: FAMILY HISTORY CONFERENCE PAPERS
Many family history conferences provide pdf copies of
the papers presented in the conference. For the
BYU Family History and Genealogy Conference last month
(Jul 2015) each registrant was given a 2-gig flash
drive with a pdf of the entire 600-page syllabus on
it. At some conferences they give CDs with pdf's
of the class notes and some conferences post the
papers on the Internet before the conference, e.g.
RootsTech. EVERNOTE is a great place to store
such papers. Just drag and drop any pdf into an
EVERNOTE note and it will be indexed and available to
you. For the BASIC (free) version you will have
to wait until the next morning to have the pdf
indexed. For the paid versions it will be
indexed immediately. If you have the papers as
separate pdf's, highlight them all in Windows Explorer
or another file manager program, right click the
group, and select Send To > EVERNOTE. When
you install EVERNOTE on your computer, it puts this
this right-click "context" menu of Send To EVERNOTE on
your computer. When you Send To EVERNOTE the
pdf's, you will see each pdf being sent into a
separate note in the EVERNOTE notebook you had open
when you clicked. Several years ago I started
saving FH conference class note pdf's this way.
As a title for the note, I put the surname and given
names of the speaker, then the title of the paper, and
a note about where the FH class was given.
During the conference I keep these notes in a notebook
for that conference. After the conference is
over, I drag and drop the notes into a notebook called
FH-Syllabi, so I have all the papers from previous
conferences in one notebook. They all sort by
the author's name and I can see immediately the talks
that someone gave and the conference and date.
All these notes are searchable for my use later.
EXAMPLE 8: STORING INSTRUCTIONS, MANUALS,
AND CATALOGS
Notebooks can be formed to store instruction manuals,
information articles about certain topics, how-to's
for family history, and catalogs of various
sorts. Such an EVERNOTE notebook makes finding
information and manuals easy and they don't get
lost. You can save any things you want this way,
for example, cooking recipes you like. I use
EVERNOTE notes to store information about freeware
that I use or might want to use or write about.
EXAMPLE 9: SHARING NOTES OR NOTEBOOKS
EVERNOTE allows sharing separate notes or entire
notebooks by just highlighting the notes or notebooks,
right-clicking, selecting Share, and giving the
information on who you are sharing with. You can
share in such a way that the other person or persons
can only see the notes or you can allow them to be
able to edit the note or notebooks themselves.
You decide what is appropriate in each case. For
two people working on the same family history shared
notebook you would probably want each to be able to
edit notes in it. Everyone you share with sees
all changes made to the notes, but only those you have
allowed to edit can change the notes.
EXAMPLE 10: WRITING ARTICLES
I have written this entire article in EVERNOTE and
frequently write things that way. With this
approach I have all earlier versions of my article
series available to examine and copy the format.
I seldom use LIBRE-OFFICE or WORD or other text
editors to write articles now, since EVERNOTE has all
the basic text commands that I need and makes it easy
to keep track of what I am doing. I make up
agendas and press releases for our UVTAGG (Utah Valley
Technology and Genealogy Group) this way.
EVERNOTE also has the feature that whatever you write
is saved immediately, so I never have to worry about
whether I have saved the latest version. You can
edit any note at any time, as well, so you always have
the latest available. For the paid versions they
even keep track of all earlier versions of notes you
have written, so even if you delete a note, you can go
to the website and retrieve earlier versions of it.
CONCLUSIONS
I hope you see that EVERNOTE has many uses in family
history. If you use it, you have already, or
probably will, find additional uses of it
yourself. There are websites and professional
genealogists who have written helps and articles about
EVERNOTE and more add-ons are being written all the
time. If you come up with some good uses of it
in family history, please let me know, since they will
probably be worth noting and passing on in later
classes and articles.