OneNote - SkyDrive, Mobile and More

Three weeks ago I wrote about how I discovered OneNote. I can say that I use it daily either at work or for personal use and keep finding more ways to incorporate it in my daily life.

Now if I could just access these great OneNote notes from anywhere.....

SmartPhones

I was excited when I read that there was an iPhone app for OneNote. While it is very cool to be able to access all my OneNote notebooks I thought of another use. Cemeteries!

The iPhone OneNote app allows you to create pages in a notebook and take a photo. You can then add notes, such as plot numbers, observations about other families that may be buried in the area, etc.

Another thing I like to do is walk around the town or neighborhood my ancestors lived in, again OneNote on my iPhone would allow me to take photos of the houses or stores and make my notes.

SkyDrive

Since using my iPhone to do a lot of entry or editing is not desirable I shared my OneNote notebooks on Windows Live SkyDrive. If you do not have a Hotmail account, SkyDrive is how Microsoft allows users to create and share documents.

Now I can update my records from any computer I sign onto. I can also designate who I might want to share them with and whether they can edit them. This allows me to work with another person to document a cemetery or plan a family gathering.

More OneNote Ideas

I have been toyed with creating templates in OneNote. I found that OneNote does not have as much flexibility as Word, but I have created a few for various cemeteries and families.

Another cool tool is the ability to do voice recordings in a OneNote notebook. At work we record meetings but I have another project in mind.

I have an idea for a UTube video so as an excercise I am going to create a OneNote notebook with picutres of my grandfather's house as it looked when I was a child. I am then going to add pictures to show how my cousin has tranformed it into a home for his family.

OneNote and Me

OneNote has unexpectedly become a part of my genealogy life. Whether I am cruising FindaGrave or leaving messages on Rootsweb I find myself making notes.  Yesterday I requested a Memorial on FindAGrave be transferred to me. Today I received an Email from the gentleman saying he would transfer it after he had a chance to photograph it!  Since I have been known to write to the same person or institution more than once I made an entry in my Maish-Horton/Cemeteries Notebook.

My next blog posting will cover finding all those electronic documents that are filed on my computer, but I forgot that I had! Another OneNote Project.....

Take Care,
Pattie

OneNote, FindAGrave and Debby

Living in Florida is wonderful even when it rains and rains and rains. 

Tropical Storm Debby decided to stall over the Gulf of Mexico last weekend and provided Florida with a little rain. Ok, a lot of rain. My pond rose over 18 inches in 24 hours - that is a lot of rain.

So with it raining outside I decided to revisit some cemetery pages I had scanned during my last visit to the Family History Center in Salt Lake City. Over the years I have done a lot of research on some distant cousins of my husband's great great grandparents from Juneau County Wisconsin. The cemetery books for the county were at the library so I scanned every page that held a possible relative. The rain gave me a great reason to sit on the couch and figure out if all those Howlands and Delaps were related to the Horton line I was researching.

Find A Grave

I started my search with FindAGrave.com to see who may or may not be listed. I was quite happy to find that a volunteer named Kari had created memorials for many of 'my people'. I started checking them off and sending messages with additonal information for the memorials. Soon Kari and I were emailing each other and she transferred the memorials to me.

For the rest of the weekend I was happily highlighting and checking off folks from my cemetery pages. I also found that unfortunately I missed a few people. I should have scanned the whole book!

Newspaper Archive

My next stop was NewspaperArchive.com to see if I could find some obituaries or news articles to help me verify some relationships. During my research on FindAGrave I found some of the DeLap's spelled the name DeLapp.

As I was browsing and finding interesting newspaper articles I started to become frustrated. I had paper and tabs open all over and nothing was organized!

A Little Background

I work in the software / IT industry. Back in the early 1980's I was the 'youngster' at work. Now in 2012 I am almost old enough to be the grandmother of the developers at work. While I do feel 'out of it' at times there is a HUGE upside. They keep me up to date Social Media and Productivity Tools.

This has meant that I embraced and used Twitter, QR codes, Blogs and Facebook in my daily life and my genealogy research before a lot of my peers.  Currently I am learning to embrace OneNote. My understanding is that it is used in college to take notes and organize papers and projects. At work we use it to track our customer projects notes and meetings.

Mmmmm maybe I could use OneNote to organize all this information on the DeLaps and Howlands!

OneNote

OneNote is part of the Microsoft Home and Student Suite that also includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This is one of the most affordable bundles Microsoft offers and usually goes on sale in August (just in time for school).

After reading the introduction page and studying the examples in OneNote it became clear how I could organize my past and current research on the DeLap family.

As you can see below I create a NoteBook named DeLap and then across the top I have tabs representing each type of research I need to organize.







Within the Cemetery Records tab I have created a page named for each member of the DeLap family on that page for easy reference.

Everything was coming together, except I had found newspaper articles that I needed to do some research on. How was I going to handle them?



Clipping Tool

I found another really cool feature in OneNote. While you are browsing the Internet all you have to do is press the Windows Key and S on your computer and a clipping tool appears that allows you to frame the part of the page you want to add to OneNote.

As you can see below it also provides the URL and a timestamp. All the clippings go to an "UnFiled" note page that you can then move to the appropriate Notebook.

Conclusion

While I still have a lot to learn about OneNote I am very happy that Tropical Storm Debby gave me the time and patience to work with OneNote.

If you want to know more about OneNote here is a link to some videos on YouTube.

A similar app to OneNote that is free is Evernote. I really do not know the pros and cons of each, but if you do not have OneNote you might want to check out Evernote.

Take Care,
Pattie

My pond - Morning of June 25