Report Finds Marriage Mishaps in Your Family Tree

Anytime you do a lot of work on your family tree, it's a smart idea to let Family Tree Analyzer have a look at it. This free software seems to offer me a new way to dissect my GEDCOM file each time I use it. And I've been doing a lot of work on my tree recently.

Last week I finished perfecting the citations in my family tree for these sources:

• 1851 England Census
• 1861 Census of Canada
• 1861 England Census
• 1871 England Census
• 1880 U.S. Federal Census
• 1881 England Census
• 1891 England Census
• 1900 U.S. Federal Census
• 1901 England Census
• 1905 New York State Census
• 1910 U.S. Federal Census
• 1911 England Census
• 1915 New York State Census
• 1920 U.S. Federal Census
• 1925 New York State Census

That adds up to 944 citations shared among family members found on the same census. Before I fixed them, a few sources had more than 700 citations each due to a catastrophic sync failure with my tree on Ancestry.com. I've given up trying to sync, but by next year I'll upload a clean version of my tree using a new tree name. I won't sync with it once it's uploaded.

Time for a Quick Check-Up

After all that editing, I wanted to see what Family Tree Analyzer (FTA) thinks of my latest GEDCOM file.

My GEDCOM Stats in FTAnalyzer had a strange line item telling me my family tree had some errors.

When you open your GEDCOM in FTA, you get a summary screen filled with basic facts about your tree. This time, I spotted something unusual. FTA said I had 4 lone individuals listed as single families. I needed to find them and see what was going on.

I found them by doing something I hadn't tried before. Usually I click FTA's Main Lists tab which opens to the Individuals tab. This lists everyone in your tree. But this time I clicked the Families tab next to the Individuals tab. I scrolled way to the right and found a column called Family Size. I sorted the data in that column from A to Z, putting all the families with a size of 1 at the top of the list. To my surprise, there were 41 families of 1.

5 Types of "Marriage Problems"

I opened my Family Tree Maker file and found each person from the FTA list, one-by-one. These "families of 1" fell into the following categories:

1. An unwed parent whose child's name you know from their birth record. In these cases, there's nothing you need to do. It really is a single-person family with a child.
2. Someone you meant to delete from the file but overlooked. Before you delete them, delete any of their citations or images. And detach them from an Unknown Spouse* if necessary.
3. Someone whose parents you deleted because you don't want to trace their family. (That's my in-law rule in action.) You may need to detach them from unknown parents. Otherwise leave them be.
4. Someone with a marriage date but no spouse. Take the time to search for the source of this incomplete fact and add their spouse. I've found Italian birth records with a marriage date, but no spouse's name!
5. A complete mystery, unattached to anyone, who you may as well delete.

*Unknown Spouse—As I worked through the list of 41 people, I found that many had an Unknown Spouse attached to them. Even babies who died young had these mysterious spouses. To see the unknown spouse in Family Tree Maker, go to a person's detail page. Then click Relationships rather than Facts or Timeline. If there is a partial marriage fact, delete it. Then detach the individual from their unknown spouse. Now the phantom spouse is gone from your file.

How many of these lurkers are hiding in your family tree? Here's how to find and eliminate them.

When I finished dealing with the 41 people with a family size of 1, I exported a new GEDCOM. Then I opened it in Family Tree Analyzer. Now I have 9 people with a family size of 1 because I made the decision to keep each of them. (Almost all are single parents.) The initial message from FTA saying I had 4 lone individuals listed as single families is gone.

This week I'll tackle my 1930, 1940, and 1950 U.S. Federal Census citations. Then I want to jump straight to the passenger lists of people coming through Ellis Island. Most of the immigrants in my family tree arrived in New York, so this is an important source to whip into shape. Then I'll continue working through my sources in alphabetical order.

After that, I have to deal with my countless Italian document citations. That's fine—I've wanted to work on those for a long time.

How Healthy is Your Family Tree?

If you've been working on your family tree for a while, you've no doubt gotten better at it with practice. That means your earliest work isn't as good as it should be. In my case, I know that censuses and ship manifests for my closest relatives are what I added first. And I'm fixing them as I work my way through my citations.

How did you begin your family tree? Were you searching for certain types of documents  first, like me? Did you begin with an inherited tree that someone else created? Take a look at the different reports FTA can offer you, such as:

• One Report, Endless Possibilities for Improving Your Family Tree
• Let Family Tree Analyzer Find Your Duplicates Duplicates
• 4 Problems You Can Fix with Family Tree Analyzer

Take the Time to Improve the Sources in Your Family Tree

Last week I had to swear off synchronizing my Family Tree Maker file with my tree on Ancestry. (See "A Major Family Tree Change to Fix an Ongoing Problem.") Too many failed syncs made it impossible to go on. In facts, those failed syncs did more damage to my desktop tree than I knew. I'm determined to see this as an opportunity to improve my family tree.

During my corporate life, I always hated when a boss would call a pain-in-the-butt project an "opportunity." An opportunity to improve our website. An opportunity to improve our support for the sales team. It wasn't an opportunity for workers like me who had countless hours of grunt work ahead of us. You can't sugar-coat that burden.

Yet here I am calling this problem an opportunity to improve the source citations in my family tree.

Failed syncs of my Family Tree Maker file left me with tons of splintered and unlinked source citations.

There were 2 things I now know happened to my desktop tree with each failed sync:

1. My tree no longer recognized some addresses. This was plain to see and easy enough to fix. I viewed each bad address in the Places tab of Family Tree Maker and made a few clicks. If you use FTM, see the company's instructions for standardizing locations.
2. My tree split my shared source citations into a bunch of identical citations. That's because an Ancestry tree sees each citation differently than FTM. Many citations weren't linked to anyone at all. These may be leftovers from people I deleted without first deleting their citations. Thousands of duplicate citations were increasing my tree's file size dramatically.

I've had a project on my radar to update citations for documents found on the Italian Antenati portal. The links in my old citations don't work anymore because of a huge change to the Antenati website. Spelling out the town, year, and document number would make each record findable—even if that website changes the links again. But it's a huge task.

Develop a Format and Stick to It

When I saw the mess my U.S., Canada, and U.K. source citations were in, I knew what I had to do. It was time to improve my oldest citations and make them match my current style.

For example, I'm looking at the 1920 U.S. Federal Census document image for my husband's ancestor. These days I like to add a ton of detail to the document image's description. But this early find says only:

lines 48-50; Honolulu City, Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii, enumeration district 45, sheet 11B; image 22 of 138
https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/6061/4442141_01017/114577201

That's pretty helpful, but my newer format is better. The citation should say this:

lines 48-50; 1920 United States Federal Census; Hawaii Territory > Honolulu > Honolulu > District 0045; Honolulu City, Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii, enumeration district 45, sheet 11B; image 22 of 138

https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/114577201:6061

Source Citation:
Year: 1920; Census Place: Honolulu, Honolulu, Hawaii Territory; Roll: T625_2036; Page: 11B; Enumeration District: 45

Source Information:
Ancestry.com. 1920 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Images reproduced by FamilySearch.

Original data: Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920. (NARA microfilm publication T625, 2076 rolls). Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29. National Archives, Washington, D.C.

To be clear, I'm putting that extra long citation into the properties of a document image. When I drag the image into FTM, all that info comes along for the ride. Then I use everything from the URL down to populate the source citation for this document's facts. Let me dissect that format so you can follow my logic.

• lines 48-50 — This tells me and anyone who sees my copy of this document on Ancestry where to look on the page. This goes for ship manifests, too.
• 1920 United States Federal Census — This is the name of the record collection that has this document.
• Hawaii Territory > Honolulu > Honolulu > District 0045 — When you look at the document on Ancestry, this is the detail shown at the top of the screen.
• Honolulu City, Honolulu, Oahu, Hawaii, enumeration district 45, sheet 11B — These details can help locate this document on or off Ancestry.
• image 22 of 138 — This tells you exactly which image to go to in the collection on Ancestry.
• https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/114577201:6061 — The URL points to this record (not the document image) on Ancestry. This URL also contains the Source Citation and Source Information I add beneath the URL. I used to link to the image on Ancestry.com. But it's more useful to link to the record page.

This style includes enough detail so anyone can find the image—even without a link or an Ancestry account. And I attach the image to the Media tab of the citation itself. That's something I didn't know was possible until a few years ago.

Once I finish a citation, I copy and paste it to each family member in the census. And I can delete the duplicate copies each failed sync generated.

How to Check All Your Source Citations

I started this process by looking at the Sources tab in Family Tree Maker. There's a long list of all my sources on the left, in alpha-numeric order. Each one contains lots and lots of citations I can improve and share with each family member. In the end I'll have a neat, perfect list of citations with no duplicates.

As long as there's a mess to clean up, why not make the source citations in my family tree live up to my standards?

Each time I delete a ton of duplicate or unlinked citations, my tree's file size gets smaller. Amazingly, my FTM file went from 4 gigabytes on my failing laptop to 360 megabytes on my new computer. I'm still in shock.

I look forward to uploading my improved, streamlined GEDCOM file to Geneanet.org. I'll overwrite the version that's there, rather than synchronize it. I want anyone who sees that tree to find usable links to every bit of evidence I have for a person.

Once I finish my long list of U.S., Canada, and U.K. citations, I'll figure out how to tackle those obsolete Antenati citations.

Even if you haven't suffered damage to your family tree, revisiting your earliest citations is worthwhile. Have a look at them and see how many you're happy with. Bringing them all up to your standard will fortify your family tree.

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