Beautiful sunrise off the coast of Cancun (taken by NikiMarie in Jan 2014)
This is kind of along the idea of the genealogy do-over that is going on over at geneabloggers (the site is down at the moment by the way).
I use two programs to keep track of my family tree: Ancestry.com and RootsMagic. My RootsMagic tree is the one I consider to be correct. When I have verified enough information, I add that person to my tree. Sometimes I do add people even though I’ve only found them listed as a parent on a death certificate but that gives me a research goal to work with (plus I make a note that I have only found them on a death certificate).
Now my Ancestry.com tree is what I call a clue tree – items aren’t verified on there. I do have a public tree now (for AncestryDNA items) and there are a LOT of unverified ancestors on there. So I do have some work to do.
This has been a rather ongoing project – something I started before taking my BU course. I went through and scanned every paper copy document I had and filed them in my computer (I use Dropbox and Backblaze as backups) so my file cabinet now matches my computer. Well, more or less. I don’t print off online sources that I find and file them in my file cabinet, I just save that in a folder on my computer. After every document was scanned in and correctly labeled, I went through and RE-CITED every document in my program (because I now know how to do it correctly.
That took A. LONG. TIME. However, it’s finished (or well, the documents I currently have in my program are finished – just ignore the growing paper file next to my desk…) and now everything in there is cited correctly. Now I’m going through and seeing if I have facts for people that don’t have a source connected to it. Normally this happens because I simply forgot to tag the source to the fact so it’s usually a quick fix. But sometimes, it takes me a bit to figure out where I got that bit of information from and yes, some items have been deleted.
Once this is complete, then I can go through and compare each person to what I have on Ancestry.com to see what I need to add. It’ll be a long process, but at least my research will be up to date and ready for a more focused research plan this year!
That is another goal this year – focus my research on specific people in a specific line. I have genealogy ADD too often! I see a name and quickly decide to follow that for a bit until it leads to another name where I follow that for a bit, etc. etc.
Anyone else going for a fresh start to their genealogy research this year? Or even going to give the genealogy do-over a try?