Background There comes a point when just having a shoebox under your bed with all your important documents and files is no longer viable.1 This is especially true if you have some kind of hobby, like genealogy, which tends to explode in the amount papers you need to keep track of. At this point, I’ve filled two folders with about 100 documents worth of family history research and I don’t expect that to stop anytime soon.
My great-grandfather was Karl Butz and there was very little I knew about his father, Karl Heinrich Butz other than that he lived with his son in Böhmen and died there. All my mother could tell me is that he was apparently from Krefeld in north-west Germany. I found a clipping from a newspaper in the town that he died, which confirmed this and gave me a rough birth date.
It's only version 0.1! There haven’t been any posts about genealogy yet and that’s not because I’ve just picked this up, but because it’s a hobby that tends to be more sporadic for me. There will be a separate post to introduce my research and what my focus is at the moment, but in summary, I have a fairly good family tree already and currently my work is mainly around documenting individuals with hard evidence1.