Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

 

How do you take a 35,000+ name family tree and merge it with another one of the same size, then edit it down to less than five thousand names? That's what I had planned spending the rest of this weekend doing—but believe me, it wasn't what I had in mind when I first got the idea to sign up for WikiTree.

Yes, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had been exploring the profiles posted on that universal tree, mainly to examine resources that other researchers had discovered on my family's hard-to-find ancestors. I'm not above being nosy when it comes to well-conceived proof arguments or even the serendipitous footnote.

It was while puzzling over my mother-in-law's matriline that I spotted a note on WikiTree regarding lack of any participants sharing their mtDNA results for that particular ancestor. "There's something I can share," I thought, and decided right then to sign up. I believe in collaboration and in giving back to the genealogy community, and this was the perfect open door.

After reading all the important statements and signing up to be a "member" (WikiTree is free, but does have standards), I got down to the business of uploading my tree. Only problem: WikiTree has a limit of how large a tree can be uploaded via GEDCOM. Depending on when my search engine drops me into the history of volumes of internal conversation on this touchy topic, the number of profiles permitted can be up to five thousand, or down to a much more modest amount. And the drawback is totally understandable: it's hard to police a community tree when there are far more new members doing data dumps than WikiTree volunteers checking for unsourced information.

There is, however, one problem not addressed in the conversation about unsourced material: as I understand it, no matter how well-documented my source tree might be (mine is on Ancestry.com), taking it through the GEDCOM process may automatically remove some of the hard-won documented details I might have added into the original tree. Though facts, notes, and sources are usually retained through the conversion process if text-based, media may be lost in the transition.

Of course, I say this after spending an afternoon and evening collapsing two different trees into one stripped-down pedigree in preparation to convert it to the necessary GEDCOM. Now what? Perhaps the participants in that WikiTree conversation were right: far better to just hand-enter each record one ancestor at a time. A better idea, perhaps—until one realizes the reality of my actually getting around to doing that becomes a rapidly-shrinking "maybe."