The answer is not a simple one and it depends on what your goals are.
If you want to share your family history with your extended family, you can create a scrapbook with documents such as birth and death certificates, published obituaries, and family pictures. You can add paragraphs describing the significance of the documents and identifying the people in the pictures. Save your scrapbook in a three-ring binder.
If you want to tell some of the history of your family, you can start writing – either by hand or on a computer – beginning with the oldest person you’ve identified. It might start something like this:
Calvin Jones, the son of Spike Jones and Mary Hardy, was born on 3 August 1845 in Columbia, Mississippi. He volunteered for the Confederate Army on 3 February 1862 …. [and keep going!]
Add details about his marriage, his children and his death, being sure to identify the child that you are descended from.
If you want to eliminate some of the paper you have, you could choose a family tree software package for your computer. They cost about $40 and allow you to record the details of your ancestors’ lives. I would discourage you from posting your family details directly onto Ancestry.com. Many people want to get their information back and there’s no easy way to do that.
Finally, if you feel the need to hang on to every piece of paper you’ve found, then you must create a filing system – and obtain the filing cabinets – that will organize your family into file folders by branches and then by couples. Label each file folder by couple names ( JONES, Calvin and Susannah) to bring some order to your collection.
~ Carol Cooke Darrow, CG, teaches a free Beginning Genealogy class on the 2nd Saturday each month and a WriteNOW family writing group on the 2nd Sunday of each month at the downtown Denver Public Library.