Please give me the "The Tree" response
Every so often someone on my paternal side asks, when am I going to give them "the tree". Maybe I should print a book, or give them my work to put in thier book. If they publish it, I'd like recognition for my efforts. In general I request individuals ask a specific question, and try to answer it.
Often I assume what they mean is the responsibility I inherited, to keep my paternal grandfather's document up to date, and share it. My paternal grandfather had documented his mother's ancesters that came to United States, and some of thier descendants. In addition to a few pages of narratives, There was an index, and pages of genealogical data (descendants, birth days, death days, spouses, thier birth days, death days, and a few marriage dates. One of the good thing about this tabular format, is the blanks really pop out.) He even wrote a supplement about 10 years later of changes to make to the original document. For an extra merge challenge there was some information from his paternal side. ;) To put it in perspective this tree is about 80 families, 200 decendants, and 100 spouses. He did all of this on a typewriter!
At times this document follows families in generational order based on birth order within a family. At a quick glance you can be forgiven for thinking this is true for the whole thing. I always found it difficult to bounce between pages of the parents and the children. Recently I printed a copy and started marking it up for not only for flipping back and forth, but also for going to the GRAMPS textual descendant report using the Aboville System of numbering. What a mess. While I started with attempting to fix the digitization of the index, I ended up writing a whole new spreadsheet, and putting my thoughts behind the change in the original document. Documenting how to move between these and other systems seems useful. I waffle as to best chunk the data to keep it managable. Keeping it all up to date seems impractical.
My first attempt at web publishing my ancestors was at https:www.paffendorf.sj.ca.us/Family . The family kindly gave me updates, which I entered into the computer (unfortunately without citations at that time). I then heard about this bad informations as people told me repeatedly that Ancestry.com said it was so, and took it as truth. Those web pages have not been modified since.
Clearly I did not publish the expansion of the tree with people getting married and having children to respect people's privacy - there is a real concern that to prove you are you by mention of parents or grandparents. Even so there are those in the family who do not want thier information disemenated even within the family. So generally I make up a descendant tree of a branch and give a copy to whoever helped me fill it in, and then refer people. Of course I don't give out contact information without asking first. I may be a bit sensitive on this one as a woman, but it does come up.
It's a good thing I had a printout of the changes for backup. This becomes a theme. A computer dies, the backup is on obsolete or degraded media, and the new computer runs different software that is similar to but not quite the same as the last. The tree part is getting more similar, but sources, citations and media are still being fought over.
I received a request to connect relatives on both coasts using https://www.familysearch.org during covid. When covid started all I had was my phone. I started taking genealogy technical notes in https://genealogyofkaren.blogspot.com/ as I started not only on the world tree but yet another private tree using new software, GRAMPS, on yet another computer. (Let's face it, I did not want to work on genealogy for a while after dad died. ) I curently have over 1300 people, 500 familes, 600 sources, and 1100 citations in my working database. (I am assuming the interested audience does not care about my maternal family, my dad's maternal family, my paternal grandfather's paternal family. Of course you may be in some other part of the family or just a fellow hobbyist.) Subsequently I did get a mac and manage to get Reunion to take data from my last failed computer. The last two iterations I have been trying to cite sources and verify information by other than word of mouth. Familysearch was highly amusing as I built some of "the tree" based on census records. In any case I have multiple computers, assorted software, multiple databases, assorted archives. It's a bit of a mess with lots of overlapping but not matching information. I stated looking at merge tools, or even AI for comparing. ... but I digress.
Familysearch is a version of the tree, that is accessible to anybody who has a computer or phone. Note the service agreement does say you give up any right to the information you put there. Also to protect privacy, the shared information is for dead people - Do not enter information about live people. This kicked off an effort to find death dates for people in grandpa's report. Some people I did not find. Some people I have not gotten around to looking for. I have been trying to keep a report without citations, but it is another thing to keep up to date, and merge back in. This is a slew of changes to the report. Just recently MyHeritage.com (yes, another tree varient, the one familytreeDNA is now using) just had a Valentines Day special. I found 50+ marriage dates (or maybe only years) to add. Even the parts of the tree with a stable membership often have information to be added or correected.
When I first started, I was just trying to capture the facts (of names and dates) in family tree software - that used to be once but is expanding. At some point I gave in to trying to capture sources and citations, at least doubling the amount of work associated with an event. Since my last job, I have started using google's suite of tools to capture projects I am working on. So now I hope someone else is backing up the cloud. I can let google worry about authenticating. I can share with specific people: They can see the most recent version and comment. In any case it lets me capture what I am trying to do, how far I've gotten, and other things to do. Recently I have started writing reports on families and referincing them in that index spreadsheet I mentioned earlier. 5 down; 75 to go? but no, some folks have procreated, and what about those inlaws?
As I write this, it becomes obvious I take a computer, tablet or even a smart phone for granted. With a browser like safari or chrome, it is possible to follow the link to the blog mentioned in this entry. (Yes, this is circular. I was going to print it and was goint to send it to some folks) I mentioned a whole slew of websites that require an account, which may require an email or a phone number (be consistent). This got slippery fast. ...
If you want to see work I have shared with everybody, use familysearch, which has phone apps. If you want to see some of my work that I share with a limited audience, use google drive.
- The tree has many versions.
- The tree is constantly being updated not only with the addition of spouses and children, but information about people in the tree, and maybe researching another generation of ancestors...
- I am more likely to publish other aspects of my genealogy efforts, like digitizing archives.
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