The Road to Perfect Filing is Full of Holes

A Riddle : What has four holes in Switzerland, three holes in the United States and two holes in Britain?

Answer: A hole punch. 

It all started with scraps of paper and names written on the backs of envelopes. I kept them in a shoe box. Later, as a teenager I wrote these few details I had on my forebears neatly into a notebook. Alas, I am a sporadic organizer and the pages were soon filled with doodles and nameless telephone numbers. Back then I saw these scribbles as prompts, I never imagined one day I would have forgotten what my hieroglyphics meant.

Fast forward to the 1980s; my collection of random family facts, both for my own and my husband’s ancestors, were outgrowing the shoebox. I repurposed my university folders (American English binders, but that’s another story,) to hold those diverse “documents’ , roughly by family name, each one punched with my trusty British two hole punch. I needed more folders, and as we were living in Switzerland at the time where the folders have four rings, I also bought a newfangled four hole punch. The four holes did not line up with the two holes on the already punched pages. Anyone who has ever put a sheet of paper in a ring folder knows that eventually some of those holes mysteriously tear through to the edge of the sheet. The problem is infinitely worse when you have 6 holes. My poor documents looked like Swiss cheese.

,By the 1990s we were living in the US and I had no choice but to get American folders, oops, sorry, binders, for my ever expanding piles of research, and, yet another hole punch, this time with three holes. And yes again, you’ve guessed it, the three holes did not line up with any of the holes on the British or Swiss punched pages. Some of those papers, which had migrated several times, now had perforated edges. 

A few years ago when my mother in law went into residential care we cleared out her home in England. In the attic, under the eaves were fifty, full, file boxes. It was a massive job to sort through them and it sent me home with a determination to streamline my own stacks of folders, binders and files. The new, organized me has bought matching 2 1/2 inch and 3 inch American ring binders. I have ruthlessly disposed of my crumbling European folders. Holey pages, however, are not the only problem. European A4 paper is larger than American letter paper so sheets that were already in American size binders were frilly and chewed around the outside edges. I have resorted to the guillotine, my A4 pages cruelly reduced to measure 8.5 x 11 inch.

There is satisfaction in this work, but sadness also. By definition a genealogist is a gatherer and, no, I haven’t been able to throw away my sheets of mismatched, unused papers and, naturally, I still have a shoebox full of hole punches.

xx