A recording of this talk was aired on 3rd March 2021
Phil Isherwood started by saying he has nothing to do with Evernote except as a subscriber and although he is sold on Evernote himself, he suggests you do your own research to find what suits you.
He began by explaining how he had organised his research before Evernote with files, notebooks, CDs, books, journals, maps, photographs, certificates etc. The items had grown and grown over the years with no index, parallel filing systems and little that could be accessed when he was not at home. It was getting challenging and he thought there had to be a better way to organise his research.
Phil showed a list of over 10 apps and tools that allow file sharing across multiple platforms and then did his research. He suggested, that you may already have OneNote as it comes with MS Office and you might like to give that a try. However, Evernote has a free basic membership which could be a better option if you decided to continue with Evernote and upgrade to their Premium subscription as you would not need to add all your data again. He said there is a Business account too but he thought the average genealogist would not need to upgrade to that and it is a lot more expensive.
Last year Evernote upgraded their system and unfortunately dropped many features that users had found useful. Due to popular demand from the Evernote user’s community, they now have two versions the upgraded Evernote 10 to which they are adding back in the ‘lost’ features and Evernote Legacy with all the old features. Phil currently runs both versions, he said for him the word search function on Legacy across all his data had been the most important feature and whilst it does not pick up absolutely everything it is far superior to other system he has tried. It even picks up names on Maps.
Phil displayed a live version of Evernote and explained its functions. He suggested getting Kerry Scott’s book How to use Evernote for Genealogy. Although, it can be expensive and difficult to find it is available and reasonably priced on Kindle.
Notebooks are folders holding your Notes. Stacks are a collection of one or more Notebooks. Tags you create, as many as you want, so that you can find your notes easily. You can work on multiple notes at the same time and share entire folders with other Evernote users.
Phil showed how, when he was trying to fathom out a conundrum researching a lady, he was able to place all pieces of information for her in one file. That included certificates, census pages, pages of registers, notes from books, newspapers, maps etc. He showed how he could highlight the area where the person is mentioned. A time and effort saving tool especially with poorly written old handwriting crammed together on parish registers and census pages which is bad enough for the naked eye and hence no text software would be able to pick it up.
Phil also uses it to store notes from conferences and courses and can easily find the item again with either the tag or the text search function.
Phil ended by showing how few items, documents, books etc. he now needs to keep to hand. Although, Evernote covers most things you could possibly need to help you organise your research you would still need independent tree-maker software as Evernote does not have that function.
Phil is on Twitter and Facebook and is an avid Blogger https://familyhistory.car.blog/