About all Those Other Trees

 

In genealogy, we start climbing our family tree from a singular position: we start with ourself. Adding two parents, then four grandparents, then eight greats, well, we eventually realize that family tree is going to overwhelm us. Sure, we mitigate that "overwhelm" state by ditching those old-fashioned paper pedigree charts for a digital version, whether online or on our own desktop device, but we are ever expanding upward and outward.

Before that moment when we truly spiral out of control, perhaps that scenario means posting the family tree in more than one location. After all, when I talked all those relatives into taking DNA tests, I had to post a family tree where that relative's test was taken—so now I have trees at Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, 23andMe, and the soon-to-be-migrated Family Tree DNA. And oh, don't forget the biggest, free-est granddaddy of them all: FamilySearch.org. Of course I couldn't attend RootsTech without participating in  "Relatives at RootsTech"—so now I have a tree on that website, as well.

Why stop there? When I wanted to message someone who posted a tree on Geni.com matching my orphan photograph album subjects in Ireland, I gained permission granted to talk to other subscribers by posting a tree of my own there. Likewise, falling in love with the careful documentation shared by some Carter researchers on WikiTree, I began building a tree there.

Sigh. And to think I hardly can keep up with my one main online tree, let alone the tree I built for my in-laws. It's time to revamp my research schedule to work in time to revisit all these trees scattered throughout the digisphere. Like so much digital litter flung far throughout the ether, these unfinished fragments of family trees need more attention.

One thought is to set up a routine governed by and partnered with my Twelve Most Wanted: select an ancestor to research each month, but within that same month, make sure that that ancestor's entries are updated at each of the various tree sites where I'm now participating. After all, when I joined WikiTree, I could hardly upload my thirty-thousand-plus family tree digitally to that site—at the time, they limited such uploads to less than five thousand names—so there is already lots of work to finish there. Re-pacing myself and taking this task one baby step at a time might better ensure that the job actually gets done.

Perhaps you are not one to scatter yourself too thin among the myriad online tree-building websites like I am. Or perhaps you do have your family tree posted at several sites in that never-ending quest to find more cousins. In true genealogical guinea pig mode, I am examining my options in real time right now, and am curious how others handle this ever-expanding opportunity to reach out and post family trees. Bottom line for right now: finding a manageable way to keep all those trees satisfactorily updated in a systematic manner. And that may just be the key to opening up the answer: doing what needs to be done systematically.