by Philip Spivey
If you’re like me, a desk filled with scratch pads, spiral notebooks and information scrawled on bits of paper is a familiar sight. Let’s face it, we are constantly jotting things down in our search for ancestors. It might be a footnote reference or index listing we hope will lead us to an important document. Maybe it is a “to do list” or reminder note.
A few years ago, I took a careful look at all the piles of paper I was accumulating and noticed four things:
- I was getting dangerously close to qualifying for an episode of “Hoarders.”
- Much of that information hadn’t been looked at in years.
- I’d be hard pressed to find anything in that mess.
- Almost all of it was information I only needed temporarily to accomplish a task.
Why in the world was I accumulating all this stuff when it was mostly just temporary data? I could probably throw it away and not really miss it. So, how can I keep this from happening and avoid killing trees? With a little homework, I found a simple solution, Rocketbook!
Rocketbook is a powerful tool with several great features, and I’ll tell you about them here. For me though, I didn’t need “powerful,” I needed simple. Rocketbook is essentially an erasable notebook. You can write down whatever you want just like any other notebook. When you’ve used that information and don’t need it anymore, just wipe it away with a damp cloth that’s included. It can be the day’s completed to do list or something you have been mulling over for months.
This handy book comes in various sizes. I prefer the “Executive.” It is 6 in by 9 in, so It’s easy to carry around and use at a meeting, conference, library, or archive. Bigger ones are available if you are far more expressive than I am. You can also get pens in different colors. I’ve had the same package of pens for years, so it isn’t something you have to constantly replace.
For the more ambitious, Rocketbook has a free app. If you have written something brilliant or even just keepable, you can scan it with your phone and save it to a wide range of places. It can be emailed, sent to Dropbox, stored in OneDrive, filed in Evernote or many other places. There is even an OCR function that will convert your handwritten notes into text.
With Rocketbook, we no longer need to kill a tree to build our family trees. Give it a try!
