A Major Family Tree Change to Fix an Ongoing Problem

After 2 gigantic genealogy headaches, I've decided to quit stressing and change course. Genealogy Headache #1 is about this blog.

Trying to Cater to Everyone

A day or two before last week's article, I changed the blog's design. Why? Because it wasn't working well on mobile devices. The moment I published, I knew I had a big problem. The new design was missing important elements that I needed back.

Immediately after publishing (6 a.m. New York time), I searched for a new design. I made changes on the fly, possibly disrupting my readers. I do apologize for that. Since then I've been working my way through my 543 blog articles to make all the images work well on mobile devices. They're all finished now.

It's all been a nightmare, during which I had to settle into a new computer. And that brings me to Genealogy Headache #2.

Hitting the Limits of Technology

Last March I bought a new laptop because my 5-year-old one was threatening to die. But the new one turned out to be under-powered. It was OK (not great) for most things. But it was the worst for running Family Tree Maker. This month I stopped making excuses for its bad behavior. I demoted it to my "travel laptop" and bought a high-powered tower computer.

It took hours to get situated—transferring files, re-installing some programs, adjusting preferences. Once it was all ready, I ran Family Tree Maker and made a couple of changes. It behaved wonderfully. I closed it and the automatic backup happened in a fifth of the time it used to take. Finally I was ready to try to sync my file with my Ancestry tree.

Each step of the sync process was going amazingly fast! I was holding my breath in anticipation. And then…it failed. Worse, it told me my file was corrupt and not repairable. That meant I'd have to download my tree from Ancestry, fix it in Family Tree Maker, and try again.

This happened to me about 3 years ago (according to my old blog articles). Downloading the tree from Ancestry undid all my carefully crafted source citations. I don't want to do that again! I've put up with all this because only Ancestry lets you change your tree offline and synchronize it online. Plus, Ancestry has the best user interface for displaying a tree. Hands down.

Another Approach to Sharing a Family Tree

The reason I'm so keen to share my constantly-updated family tree is distant cousins. My tree is a treasure for anyone with ancestors from my ancestors' towns in Italy. My tree on Ancestry has 57,096 people. At least 53,000 are from a small area of Italy, and they date back to the late 1600s.

Now I've got a new idea. I'll let my Ancestry tree and DNA tests continue to attract distant cousins. But what if I put my tree on another website and swap out the old GEDCOM for a new one every few months? Forget all that stress from failed syncs!

Problem: How to display my family tree without letting anyone change it AND update the entire file anytime I like.

After weighing the options, I'm going with Geneanet.org. With a free membership, I can upload a GEDCOM, and after I've made a lot of updates, I can re-upload a GEDCOM. I'm not uploading documents, but I've got them all here. If someone contacts me about their branch, I'm more than happy to share every bit of my research.

I chose Geneanet based on these important features:

1. No one else can edit my tree! That's paramount.
2. I don't have to build my tree on their site; I can upload a GEDCOM.
3. I can upload a new GEDCOM later and overwrite the current family tree.
4. I can share my updated tree with whomever I want.

Geneanet happens to be free, but that wasn't a top priority. You can pay a very reasonable price for a premium subscription, but I don't need what it offers.

Now I can go hog-wild editing my Family Tree Maker file without worrying about the next failed sync. I'm sure many of you are happy with your methods. Perhaps:

• your family tree is small enough that an Ancestry sync never fails
• you'd rather die than pay Ancestry a dollar when FamilySearch is free
• you don't want to share anything online because "that's how they get ya!"
• you don't mind letting any jamoke with web access rewrite your research.

I'm going to enjoy using Family Tree Maker with my new computer's speed. I'll keep on adding everyone from my ancestral towns who fits. I'll ignore my tree on Ancestry until someone writes to me and wants to know more. And hopefully Google will stop emailing me about my blog's mobile issues.

While I didn't upload my documents to Geneanet, I'm thrilled to see it makes all my sources available as proof.

And speaking of technology gone wrong:

• Prepare Your Family Tree for Your Computer's Demise
• Moving Your Family Tree to a New Computer
• How to Back Up Your Family Tree Files Automatically

Pluck the Stragglers Out of Your Family Tree

I love when someone finds their family in my online tree and contacts me. Last week I heard from a new-found 4th cousin.

More often our connection is distant—cobbled together through the relatives of in-laws. I had this type of connection last week, too. A woman found her grandmother in my tree and wanted to know what else I could tell her.

I told her everything came from the 1920 census and a few New York City death certificates. But I had nothing else to offer.

In fact, as I wrote in my reply, she shouldn't be in my family tree at all. I explained that her grandmother's sister married a man named Celentano. That man's uncle married my grandmother's 1st cousin, Consiglia Sarracino.

I knew from the names Celentano and Sarracino that this was some of my earliest family tree research. When I started, I followed every possible thread for my American cousins.

I used censuses to stretch out the Celentano family as far as I could. And then I built out the families of the people who married into the family. That's how her grandmother wound up in my tree.

Enforcing the In-Law Rule

It wasn't until much later in my genealogy life that I created an in-law rule:

I will not add anything to an in-law's profile beyond their facts and their parents' facts UNLESS my cousin asks me to research that family.^*

^*This rule does not apply to my Italian research where entire towns are inter-related.

Establish a rule to keep your family tree on the path you want.

How many other far-flung in-law branches are still in my family tree? How can I find them in my enormous file?

I explored Family Tree Analyzer software for a while, but it wasn't a shortcut. Maybe there is no shortcut.

Stragglers in my tree would come from my parents' and grandparents' generations. Those are the people I would have found in my early census searches.

Most of my close cousins are from my maternal grandmother's family. In my earliest days, I would have spent time on the families of Grandma's aunts and uncles, the Saviano family.

This is a manageable group to work with. Grandma had only 3 Saviano aunts or uncles who lived long enough to marry and have children.

Uncle Semplicio

As a little girl, my mom was afraid of her great uncle Semplicio. He was an older man with one eye. He literally lived in a closet next to her apartment for a while.

Long ago I met someone online with a connection to Semplicio's wife Giovina. With his encouragement, I built an enormous tree for Zia Giovina. Once I decided to follow my in-law rule, I cut out every relative but Zia Giovina's parents.

Looking in Family Tree Maker, I see families for 3 of Semplicio and Giovina's children. I can view each family to see if I need to delete anyone. Nope. Everyone was following the in-law rule.

Aunt Filomena

My grandmother's aunt is an example of going out of my way to document an in-law. But I want it this way. One of her grandsons is very interested in our family history, and he helped me with it.

Plus, Filomena's husband came from a town very close to Filomena's Italian hometown. There may be a family tie somewhere in their past!

Uncle Raffaele

Uncle Raffaele died long before I was born, but his wife Lucia was sometimes at family gatherings. My brother and I knew her and Aunt Filomena as "Zee Loo Gee" (Zia Lucia) and "Zee Vulla Men" (Zia Filomena). We never saw Zee Vulla Men without Zee Loo Gee.

I have extended families for Raffaele and Lucia's children in my family tree. Clicking through to view them all, I found only one in-law family I should delete. I do want to preserve the research, but not in my main tree. I'll follow my own advice and export this group of people to a new tree before deleting them from mine. (See "How to Export and Delete Branches from Your Family Tree.")

Exporting the 46-person branch was easy, but it didn't seem to capture the media files. I'll do that myself. My document tracker file will help me see which media files belong to this batch of people.

Deleting the branch was tricky. There wasn't one ancestor whose descendants capture the whole group. Instead, I worked my way through the families, noting all their media files. Then I viewed a family tree chart for each group and deleted them from my family tree.

I made sure all the right media files were no longer in my main tree, and I exported a new GEDCOM from Family Tree Maker. A GEDCOM is a text file that follows a standard format that any family tree software can understand. I opened the GEDCOM with Family Tree Analyzer to see if I missed anyone. Would FTA find unrelated people from this branch still in my family tree?

If your family tree is big, Family Tree Analyzer can narrow it down to certain types of names for you.

Here's how to check:

• Launch Family Tree Analyzer and open your latest GEDCOM.
• Go to the Main Lists tab to see everyone in your tree on the Individuals tab.
• To exclude close family and true cousins from this search:
  • Scroll to the right to find the Relation to Root column.
  • Click the arrow button at the top of the column to open a small window.
  • Unclick Select All, then click to select only the blank field at the top of the list.
  • Click the Filter button to close the small window.
• Scroll all the way left to find the Surname column.
• Click the arrow button at the top of the column and choose Sort A to Z.
• Browse the shorter list for the last names you don't want to find.

Success! I didn't find anyone who wasn't supposed to be there. Now I can backup and save my Family Tree Maker file.

But I'm not really done, of course. I have some cousins through my paternal grandmother, and her mother had a bunch of brothers. I can run through this same process with that branch and a few others.

Should You Do This, Too?

The main reasons for going through this export/delete process are:

• to stop misleading people into thinking you're their blood relative
• to stop spending time on branches that aren't the focus of your family tree
• to conserve computer resources.

Plus, I don't like it when I see a name in my tree index and think, "Who on earth is that?"

How to Tell if a Hint is Any Good

I never cared about Ancestry hints. That why I have them turned off when I'm working on my tree in Family Tree Maker. But last year I helped out another genealogist by adding to a few research trees she had on Ancestry. That's when I saw the value of hints.

They're a real time-saver! Say you're piecing together the life of someone you don't know. If they have a bunch of documents in their hints, that's where I'd want to look first.

But you never want to accept hints blindly and add them to your family tree. Think of them as nothing more than a possible match. They could be wrong, you know. Each one is there for you to check out.

It's your job to examine each hint and figure out if it matches your family.

A Well-Timed Hint

I grew up with about ten 1st and 2nd cousins on my mom's side of the family. One of these cousins recently asked for access to my online Ancestry tree. I warned her that:

• My tree is freakishly big because I'm connecting entire Italian towns. See How Do You Define Your Ultimate Genealogy Goal?
• I had absolutely nothing on her father Larry's family.

Larry died shortly after my 1st child was born in 1989. It came as a shock to me, and a terrible loss. In recent years I've tried to learn about his family, but I never had enough details to get anywhere.

When I viewed my tree online to see what my cousin was about to see, I found something new. There were a couple of green Potential Father and Potential Mother hints for Larry. In fact, there were 9 hints for him. The first was the 1950 census I'd been unable to find on my own.

Sometimes I laugh at potential parent suggestions. But this time, the hints were gold.

Now that I had confirmation for a handful of Larry's facts, I started looking into his father. I soon found an unsourced family tree that had several generations of Larry's family. But was this information right?

Is This Hint Any Good?

Larry's grandparents came from Italy. That meant I could verify those unsourced names and dates. I used the online Italian vital records website, Antenati, and searched the right town.

I confirmed and added to the family's names and dates. I got the correct spelling for the family name. (See Look Past the Misspellings to Find Your Ancestors.) Plus I found many more names and dates specific to Larry's paternal line. I wouldn't have trusted any of these names or facts from a hint or a tree without seeing the documents for myself.

How to Harvest a Hint

After many years of ignoring hints, I'm now open to exploring them. When you have a lack of information, as I did for Larry's family, the right hints can push you onto the right path. But you must confirm that it's the right path by doing the research for yourself.

When you look at a hint:

1. Make sure it doesn't contradict something you know for sure. Is the person born in a state or country that's impossible for your person? Are they the wrong age by a long-shot?
2. Examine all the documents and see if any don't fit with the others. The one hint that referred to Larry as a lawyer was absolutely not my cousin. I know what he did for a living. Take a look at 3 Ways to Tell If That Hint is No Good.
3. See which documents your favorite website offers you for this person. This gives you more data points to compare. Some documents may not fit in, especially when compared to those that do.

Documents are critical. ("Pics or it didn't happen!") You need to see and verify the facts for yourself. That's why you must fully research hints that come from unsourced family trees.

It's up to you to confirm whether a hint is putting you on the right path. And if it is, the race is on!

My cousin was hoping to tie a particular last name to her family. When I found her grandparents' NYC marriage certificate, I had the answer. The bride's mother had the last name we were looking for.

That's a perfect example of a fact I wouldn't believe or accept without seeing the document for myself.

I hope you find hints that set you on the right research path. Just remember, they may be way off base.