For the past few months, I have been slowly whittling away at the green leaves on my Ancestry family tree – Heartland_Genealogy. When I look at the pedigree view, it looks pretty good since almost all of the leaves are gone.
I have to admit that the initial pedigree view is somewhat deceiving since expanding the pedigree on almost any branch will produce green leaves.
This morning, I made the mistake of looking at the ‘View People with Hints’ page and discovered that I have lots of work yet to do.
Yes, that is over FIFTEEN THOUSAND records to look at and see if they fit someone in my tree.
That’s a lot of records to look at!
Some might assume that I’m just a collector of names when they look at the summary for my tree. After all, I have over 9000 names and only a little over 1500 records. However, those stats are deceiving!
Some in the genealogy community have stated that they don’t worry about the green leaves and continue following my previous research pattern. However, I have found these hints to actually be helpful since they
- force me to review my data
- allow me to update citations to current standards
- allow me to download and attach the images
- attach documentation to my Ancestry tree
For years, I was using my computer program — Master Genealogist — to record the events and sources for those 9000 people. About 2 years ago, I switched to Roots Magic, continuing the process of recording events in the lives of my ancestors and their descendants and then documenting the source of the information. My sources are not up to the standards of Evidence Explained. Nor do I have images attached to anything entered before 2014.
Even though my Ancestry data is daunting, my RootsMagic data provides a better picture of my status. I do try and cite the source of my data!
Getting these two trees in sync in one of my Christmas wishes since RootsMagic is working on the ability to sync with Ancestry.
My other Christmas wish is that I will be able to update my web site with my RootsMagic data. My website was created with SecondSite from my Master Genealogy data. John Cardinal, creator of SecondSite is working on replacement software that hopefully will be able to accomplish this task. I anxiously am waiting for an announcement that the new software, GedSite, has been released.
The numbers on Ancestry may look overwhelming, but knowing they will lead to new information and help me improve my current documentation, I will keep working to reduce that number.