26 Sept 2010

The Joys of Housekeeping

I'm still trying to sort out my family tree, making sure that I've everything correct as best I can. Whilst I'm doing this it means that I'm not going any further back but it will mean that when I do go back it will be correct!

I've also just had a new laptop (Dell Studio). Went halves with Rob for Christmas; thank god he didn't make me wait until Christmas to use it! I've spent the last couple of day's re-installing all my genealogy software onto this machine and un-installing it from Rob's machine ... I think he's happy to have it back. This has also slowed down my progress.

What I have done though is create a new private tree on Ancestry.co.uk with the correct Tree on it and invited family members to come and have a look at that, so far only my dad has responded .... knew they didn't give two hoots!!

I did this mainly because I used Family Tree Maker (FTM) as my software. It has an integrated search with Ancestry but I don't particularly like the interface on the Websearch option in FTM. I personally find it much easier to find the records in a web browser, make sure they are correct and attach them to my Ancestry tree. I then go into FTM and I know exactly which record it is to add. However this does increase the time it takes me to source my tree.

There are two consequences to doing it this way;

(1) I have to go through the sources on Ancestry tree manually and attach the associated media and delete the sources that Ancestry will put on itself (i.e. census / BMD references) when importing from a .GED file.

(2) I can ensure that the sources on my FTM software have the correct image attached to them. This is one of my little bugbears of Ancestry, you have to check that the image attached to the source is the image it should be. This is more visible when looking at BMD images as if they haven't been indexed properly you get an image showing "JONES David" when what you want is the image showing "JONES Eric"..it gets quite tedious quite quickly!

At the end of the day I know that doing it this way is time consuming but it will be right, and it will save me having to go back through everything all over again. It does make me wonder though how many incorrect leaps of faith I made when I first started this?