So, you’ve accumulated numerous letters, photocopies, certificates, photographs, notes, forms, etc. about your family. Congratulations. You are well on your way at this genealogy thing. However, you will often need to re-retrieve a particular document. You need a filing system tailored to the way you think and work. There are many ways to set this up. Here are a few suggestions:
Alphabetical by each person’s name
Chronological
Family Groups (e.g. all families per great grandparent) – generational within each surname
Record type (e.g. birth certificates, obituaries, census forms, church records, etc.)
Some code that is meaningful to you
Source Document name
Digitize/image everything with a pre-determined naming scheme and keep a separate index
When a given item has more than one person on it, depending on your filing system, you may need to make copies of the original and file each of the copies.