Setting Up Your FHnotebook: Notebooks

Before you can use your Family History Notebook account to store pieces of your family story, you’ll need to set up some notebooks in your account. Notebooks act as containers for the records, photos, videos, audio recordings, and tasks you put in FHnotebook. Each notebook has a name, so they’re easy to use for organizing your research.

To create a notebook in your FHnotebook account, start by clicking the “Organization” button along the bottom of the FHnotebook frame. The button looks like this:

After you click that button, two new buttons will appear. Because we’re working on adding notebooks, click the “Add New Notebook” button. It looks like this:

After that you’re taken to a notebook details screen. This is the screen you’ll see any time you create or edit a notebook. You can add the notebook name, write notes about the notebook’s contents, share the notebook, and comment on the notebook, all from the notebook details screen.

To start my FHnotebook, I created a notebook for my maiden surname, Gilbert. You can organize your FHnotebook by surname, country of origin, century, decade, or any other system that makes sense to you.

After you type in the name of the notebook (everything else is optional), click the “Save” button in the lower right corner of the details screen.

Your notebook will appear in the “Research Notebooks” view of your FHnotebook account. Anytime you create a notebook, it will show up here. Anytime you add something to FHnotebook, you can assign it into a notebook from its details screen. You simply click “How to Organize This” and pick a notebook:

If you organize a notebook inside of another notebook, the inside notebook will become a section. For example, if I make a notebook for my Grandpa Gilbert and then put it in my Gilbert notebook, the inside of my Gilbert notebook will look something like this:

My Grandpa Gilbert section can hold all the same things as a notebook: records, videos, photos, audio interviews, notes, and more. You can add as many layers of notebooks and sections as you need to keep your family story straight. In my next post, I’ll explain categories and how they can help you keep track of research that blurs the line between notebooks.

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