Back in the mid 1990s I started my family history research by visiting the East Sussex County Records Office in Lewes; drawing on the knowledge and help on Rootsweb mailing lists and using the oh so helpful set of discs of the 1881 census produced by Family Search. Internet searching was limited to free resources and over a dial up connection.
I recorded my research on sheets of paper for each ancestor and stored them alphabetically in four coloured folders, one for each of my great grandparents. As time moved on I recorded the information on Family Group sheets downloaded from Ancestry.
In the early years of 2000 I started recording my ancestors in the popular PAF programme and progressed to Family Tree Maker in 2011. So much easier to quickly find ancestors, run reports etc but I still kept paper copies (belt and braces!!).
In 2015 I found a blog that was encouraging people to do a "Go Over" with different topics for each of 13 weeks. It sounded a good plan at the time as I had notebooks of notes, stray bits of paper, emails, copies of online trees, old postcards and maps.
It seemed sensible to start a new tree in a new programme, Family Historian, and research each ancestor and at the same time carefully file all bits of information in the right file and then check back in the old programme to make sure the research was complete. Thus "Go-Over" became "Do-Over".
Here we are in 2020 and I am finishing the last of the transfers but along the way I have acquired many people on different branches and twigs. My folders are now organised from me back through my direct line ancestors, right back into the 1600s but the odd folders of notes and jotting are still there!! One day.........
At the end of last year I did an Ancestry DNA test and now I am busy learning all the tools for researching shared matches and how they link into my tree.