Like most people, I guess, I started building my family tree upwards from myself then my parents and then grandparents etc.
I had varying amounts of sucess with diferent branches but managed to get back to the Mid 16th century on two or three of them.
I then started filling in brothers and sisters and their children and then moved on to adding aunts and uncles and nephews and neices, and then great aunts and uncles and their descendents.
With Genes reunited becoming more and more populatedand useful Ive started to make contact with some very very distant cousins i.e 7th cousins twice removed. They have supplied me details of how they are descended from our common ancestor. Being that far back some of my forebears have several hundred descendents and the dilema I'm now in is whether to add them to the tree or not. I know I could ask for gedcom files and simply merge the bits of their tree that I require but even that is going to take some 'human' processing time.
If each of my direct ancestors had only 100 descendents the tree is going to eventualy have over 20,000 names
At that sort of size I know its going to be impossible to print of an all relatives diagram.
So realisticaly how far is it practical to go back adding distant cousins?
ID:1275
* How Far do you go ?
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David_Lewis
- Famous
- Posts: 116
- Joined: 01 May 2005 18:29
- Family Historian: V5
How Far do you go ?
David
An interesting ? and I haven't got an answer for you either.
As you can see I'm a Newbie and this is my first post.
Question
I'm researching my fathers paternal and maternal lines as well as my mothers pat and mat.
Do I input these as four seperate files or as one file and hope FH can 'sort' them and print the trees that I want.
I don't really want to make a mistake right at the very beginning.
H
An interesting ? and I haven't got an answer for you either.
As you can see I'm a Newbie and this is my first post.
Question
I'm researching my fathers paternal and maternal lines as well as my mothers pat and mat.
Do I input these as four seperate files or as one file and hope FH can 'sort' them and print the trees that I want.
I don't really want to make a mistake right at the very beginning.
H
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nsw
How Far do you go ?
Howard: Create one file, Family Historian can report on any particular 'sub-tree' very easily.
David: I have found that there are certain branches of my tree that interest me more, e.g my Hough ancestors in Middlewich or my Scott ancestors in London. For them I may well include information on the extended family, cousins, etc. Its not a scientific approach but then there are no fixed rules and you should do whatever you feel like doing. I am always reluctant to add other researchers' information without plenty of evidence to back it up. Someone contacted me last year who had problems (now fixed) with Gedcom Census crashing, (this is a utility I developed) and it turned out this was because he had over 30,000 people in his GEDCOM file!
Personally I think I would prefer to research a smaller number of ancestors and relatives and find out more about their lives, e.g. school records, military records, parish chest information, etc. than just to collect their names and life events like a train spotter collects numbers!
David: I have found that there are certain branches of my tree that interest me more, e.g my Hough ancestors in Middlewich or my Scott ancestors in London. For them I may well include information on the extended family, cousins, etc. Its not a scientific approach but then there are no fixed rules and you should do whatever you feel like doing. I am always reluctant to add other researchers' information without plenty of evidence to back it up. Someone contacted me last year who had problems (now fixed) with Gedcom Census crashing, (this is a utility I developed) and it turned out this was because he had over 30,000 people in his GEDCOM file!
Personally I think I would prefer to research a smaller number of ancestors and relatives and find out more about their lives, e.g. school records, military records, parish chest information, etc. than just to collect their names and life events like a train spotter collects numbers!
How Far do you go ?
David
I think this is all down to personal preference. My own interests are in going back as far as possible on every direct line I can; I know this becomes totally impossible as the number of ancestors doubles with each generation, but you can get most back to the early 19th century with the BMD records and now with all the census from 1851 to 1901 being searchable on line. Even though I am looking for direct ancestors I also keep data I find on their siblings and maybe one generation of their siblings children as this may help me later find my ancestors when the widowed granny moves in with one of them in a census.
I tend not to look forwards for further descendants of my ancestors siblings, however if I cross paths with someone researching the same line I will normally add the individuals that link me to them. Then when I discuss our mutual ancestors I know where they fit. I correspond with a lady in the USA who is my wifes seventh or eighth cousin about three times removed (maybe a generation missing in one of our researches) and another lady in Canada who is my fourth cousin twice removed. With the lady in the USA I was able to provide her with another six generations back for her research, while the lady in Canada gave me five generations in my line. I feel this balances out in the long run, sometimes I give help and sometimes I get it. So to me it is worth including these distant cousins as they may turn up something else in a few years or I might find something new to give them. If I merge in someone elses data I keep everything including their relatives that are no relation to me whatsoever, I can easily exclude those I dont want from reports and they dont show up in ancestor diagrams.
I know others like to follow just a few or even one of their lines back and then get bigger and bigger trees going forwards discovering new living relatives who they can share their findings with and meet at family conventions where they can roll out a huge tree along a whole wall and meet cousins they never knew they had. I think this is particularly true of people who do one name studies.
In the end it really depends what you want to get from your research, whether you want to grow it forwards, backwards or both and how many lines you want to follow. Its all personal preference and there is no right or wrong way.
I think this is all down to personal preference. My own interests are in going back as far as possible on every direct line I can; I know this becomes totally impossible as the number of ancestors doubles with each generation, but you can get most back to the early 19th century with the BMD records and now with all the census from 1851 to 1901 being searchable on line. Even though I am looking for direct ancestors I also keep data I find on their siblings and maybe one generation of their siblings children as this may help me later find my ancestors when the widowed granny moves in with one of them in a census.
I tend not to look forwards for further descendants of my ancestors siblings, however if I cross paths with someone researching the same line I will normally add the individuals that link me to them. Then when I discuss our mutual ancestors I know where they fit. I correspond with a lady in the USA who is my wifes seventh or eighth cousin about three times removed (maybe a generation missing in one of our researches) and another lady in Canada who is my fourth cousin twice removed. With the lady in the USA I was able to provide her with another six generations back for her research, while the lady in Canada gave me five generations in my line. I feel this balances out in the long run, sometimes I give help and sometimes I get it. So to me it is worth including these distant cousins as they may turn up something else in a few years or I might find something new to give them. If I merge in someone elses data I keep everything including their relatives that are no relation to me whatsoever, I can easily exclude those I dont want from reports and they dont show up in ancestor diagrams.
I know others like to follow just a few or even one of their lines back and then get bigger and bigger trees going forwards discovering new living relatives who they can share their findings with and meet at family conventions where they can roll out a huge tree along a whole wall and meet cousins they never knew they had. I think this is particularly true of people who do one name studies.
In the end it really depends what you want to get from your research, whether you want to grow it forwards, backwards or both and how many lines you want to follow. Its all personal preference and there is no right or wrong way.
How Far do you go ?
Nick posted his reply while I was still writing mine so I hadnt seen it until after posting mine. While I commented about adding more data as I get it, I totally agree with Nicks comments about verifying data received from others. I find it very hard to get some people to tell you their sources, in which case anything they tell you is more a pointer of where to research rather than positive proof in itself.