Family Historian User Group

This is just a question of curiosity really. I am aware that some people prefer to do a minimal paternal linear research whilst others like me tend to fan out in all directions.

My question is how far do people tend to branch away from people that are related to them.

I have lots of family in Cornwall villages and I have got to a situation that when ever I find the spouse of a direct family member I research their ancestry too keeping on fanning out their siblings parents and offspring. Of course I come to a situation that people become related in other ways through the families intermarrying.

Does anyone else tend to just keep going like this eventually mapping half a village or do most other people conduct research so that the majority of individuals have an entry in how related.

[question] just curious to know...

ID:6961

I have quite a large family hedge (36.000+ and growing), and research as fully as possible, all individuals that I come across. If I hadn't done this, I would never have found out that my Father is very very distantly related to my mother.

I tend to fan out indefinitely.
It is a bit like a drug - you find one family relationship, and that reveals others, and so it goes on, unravelling more and more mysteries...
You simply have to make your own decision of where to stop.

Like the other responses as and when I find someone I add them and then research their line and tie it all together.

I do 'fan out in all directions', as you put it, so that I investigate all branches of my family, but in the main I restrict my research to blood relatives and their spouses. I find that this gives me more than enough to do without investigating the families of all the spouses.

In other words to answer the last part of your question, yes, the majority of individuals have an entry in the how related ('Relationship to Root') column in the records window or in the box at the top left of the Focus window. This includes my husband's blood relatives and their spouses.

I have also researched my son-in-law's family. His blood relatives and their spouses do not have an entry in the 'Relationship' column/box if I am set as the file root, but they do if I set one of my grandchildren as the file root.

Since my early known ancestor was b. in 1586 d. 1655 and had 14 children between two wives, I now have almost 40,000 in my database. They mostly tended to have VERY large families for several generations. Early on they also frequently married into the same families so that did some expansion also.

When I find information on the 'married into the family person's parents' I do add that to the database. I also mention the country of origin of the 'married into' person's parents if that is known.  Just a matter of interest and a way to do further research if I choose to do so later.

I guess any of us who have been bitten by the genealogy bug will admit that IT NEVER ENDS. Just hope that FH is up to whatever number I come up with!

I recently discovered that a distant blood relative had married three times. I suspected that the three wives were sisters so I had to investigate their families to try to prove it. That added quite a few more people to the database.

Sometimes someone who is not a blood relative 'takes my fancy' - often because of an unusual name - and then I follow them up.

Maggie

I'm currently reviewing everything I had previously collected. Because of bad recording practice when I was first starting out, I installed FH 5.0 on the new machine and decided to start all over. My principle at the moment is to follow the records, and add names as they are revealed to me in the review. (I am cheating a little bit, e.g. not marking people with a living flag when I know they are deceased but haven't entered the evidence yet, but for the most part, I'm trying to play stupid and look at everything as if I were looking at it for the first time.) But since I use the "cluster" or "fan" principle (Friends, Associates, Neighbors), there will be Associated Persons in the file.

One way I try to keep things under control is to have one default project for my husband's families' main lines, and separate projects for other families where I still need to work out all the relations. For instance, there's a multiple-great-grandmother whose third marriage is to a man in a family with a lot of repeated names. While I am working out exactly which records belong to her third husband and not his son or grandfather, or if I have a find-them-in-the-census puzzle where I need to record neighbors, I often keep those other families in a separate project in FH.

With this fresh start, I am trying to resolve more of the research problems by keeping track of evidence and making notes in Scrivener before the information gets entered in FH.

One of the things I'm doing with this round of data entry may seem a bit strange, but it has proven helpful. I created a custom attribute called WHO which I use to hold identifying information (often from newspaper articles) that may not fit neatly into the ordinary FH attributes. For instance, the wedding notice for one set of my husband's great-grandparents identified the groom as "the well-known barber". Or I may use it to put "the son of [parents' names]" as a quick identifier when I don't necessarily want to add that whole family to the main file right away.

I tend to only research 'blood relations', because, as has been said, when they had 9, 10, or 11 children back in the day, and those children had a number of children, it goes on and on. Having said that, I have on occasion researched families of spouses, purely because they pop up in censuses, etc. I do, however, have separate projects for myself and my wife. These are then merged for our children.
In the end it is purely a matter of choice.
Roger