Category: Family File Cleanup Project

For the last few weeks I’ve planned to have genealogy weekends. I would spend as much time as I could working on my blogiversary goal. Of course that means that each weekend I made those plans, other things came up and required my attention.

I’m going to try again this weekend. Even if I’m only able to get a few hours in, I’ll call it a success! I’m being really casual about this goal, because I know that even if I don’t finish the exact goal I’ll have made a huge amount of progress. The goal of entering and verifying the next two of my 3rd Great Grandparents isn’t an especially hard one. I’m not going to the lengths of fully researching these individuals. I’m adding them in, based on our passed down family tree, and then I’m verifying the sources I’d already had in my old file for them. In the case of my Kentucky family, I’m even able to use Ancestry.com’s Kentucky indexes to add in birth dates and marriage dates for couples I didn’t previously have them for. This is presenting me with a much cleaner, more accurate file. With the way I’m doing this, I’m able to find small errors and correct them very easily. When I think that this tree was compiled without the help of the internet, it blows my mind! To imagine the hard work and amount of correspondence that had to have gone into it.

So essentially, even though that next set of 3rd great grandparents doesn’t look like much in the view above.

This is what I’m actually filling in. It feels like an insurmountable task right now. I’m still filling in Bartholomew Taylor’s descendants! That’s why I’m being so casual. We’ll see how far I get, and then I’ll make a new goal once this one expires! I’ve also made the decision that might seal my fate. I originally didn’t plan to go any further back than Bartholomew. He’s the one who moved from Maryland to Kentucky. I thought that would be a good stopping point. The more I thought about it though, the more it feel like an excuse not to to a harder section of the tree.

That means I have a lot more Taylors to add still. I’m going to need more Diet Dr. Pepper. Oy vey!

While taking a brief break from my new goal, I was organizing some of my Love family. I was also trying to get some of the database section updated. Unfortunately there were two problems with that.

1. The website be broke man!#@?

Yes, I actually leave notes like that for myself. Apparently, even when I don’t code on the website, I still break it. The only thing I can imagine is one of the core updates was incompatible with my custom template. If I had played closer attention after each update, I might have been able to pinpoint it. Now, I just know it won’t let me go into the Edit screen. That’s kind of a huge problem. So this week, I’ll probably work as much as I can on fixing that.

2. I still have a numbering system problem. Doh.

I’ve mentioned before that I was having a bit of an issue with my family files. For awhile, I thought it wouldn’t be that bad after all, and then I went to sync up the Alexanders you see listed above (linked to the Loves), and they weren’t in RootsMagic at all. Completely absent.

Yeah that’s a problem.

I realized that the backup I restored to was obviously a little out of date. This was the latest backup I had, so I guess that’s better than nothing! The only thing is I don’t understand the extent of my issue. The only missing people that I can tell are the ones you see listed above.  I searched in FTM 2012 for the Person IDs preceding the Alexanders and no one was assigned to them. It makes absolutely no sense. I kept track of who I had to re-add to RootsMagic and what their numbers were and what I changed them to. I don’t know what else I can do besides keep an eye on the issue. Most likely though, anyone who is missing is either in the Taylors or the Loves.

Now that I think of it, I better add the range of numbers I searched in FTM2012 so I don’t have to search those again later when I devote more time to that problem! In the mean time, I’ll just continue chugging along on the new goal!

P.S. This is the reason I need to make sure my numbers match:

It could get pretty confusing, pretty fast if the numbers stopped matching up!

As I continue to work on my long enduring family file cleanup, I find small ways to amuse myself. Also, I rewrote that sentence three times. Once in my head, twice by typing. Anyway, today I was really amused as I was adding more census information into Family Tree Maker 2012. I’m making a really big effort to make all my sources Evidence Explained Style. Though I’m not exactly keeping a ruler around to slap my own knuckles. I’ve been basically looking up each source in my copy of the book, then emulating how I think the source will come out. I’ve also tried to make sure I use the pre-made templates in the software, so that my source citation will be as close as possible.

With the cryptic, rambling explanation out of the way, I’ll show you the source of my amusement today. P.S. I rewrote that sentence twice.

What you see above is a screenshot of my working file. I was working on the husband of one of my Taylor ancestors. I had added his 1940 census information and proceeded to the source screen to add his citation into the bunch. I doubt you can really see without looking at the full size picture, but the sheer amount of multiple entries had me laughing to myself! For some reason, seeing all those legitimate entries for the same census districts cracked me up! That is just the 1940 census. By 1940 my Taylors had already started to disband a little bit. However, every single Bracken County entry above is a Taylor connection. Then when you take a look at Johnsville specifically, there are 13 different families within the first 10 pages of that district.

On a somewhat similar note, I love the look of all those uniform source citations! It really helps my OCD calm down a little bit!

I’m not completely scrapping the website redesign. However, I’m not sure how I’m going to proceed. I feel like I might have overwhelmed myself by trying to write a tutorial for something that I didn’t feel comfortable “teaching”. So the design is going to happen, the only thing I’m not sure of is how I’m going to finish up my redesigning my chaos series. To be honest, the TNG portion of it is already just about done anyway. I think when people ask me about my custom design, they don’t realize how custom it actually is. While yes, I can just tweak a template to make it look like my own, I much prefer to start with the blank slate and really make it my own. Not everyone is comfortable doing that, which is fine, I just don’t know if I feel comfortable teaching my method anymore. If you hadn’t noticed, I have a bit of a confidence problem!

I am exactly one month away from my three year blogiversary!  So most of my energy for genealogy is spent on working on my newest, short term goal! There are a ton of Taylors to get through yet, but I’m working steadily on them. Hopefully, when March 13th comes around I’ll be able to say I’ve been successful! Funny enough the Taylor family I’m currently working with actually lived right near where my Grandma’s second husband Wayne, was born and raised. After they got married, Wayne purchased his childhood home and they moved there. Actually I’m only 80% sure of the childhood home part. I’m sure that’s what someone told me though. It could just be the town, not the house.

I thought it was really crazy to find them here, but then when I looked at a map, it wasn’t that out of the sphere of possibility.

When I actually looked at the wider picture, I realized that the huge city of Cincinnati was actually what spurred my family to spread out. What I’ve learned about the migration of my family was that as it got to be the 1920s and 1930s, the world was changing. Cars were being mass produced, which means people could go longer distances quicker and easier. No doubt a lot of the farm kids decided to try their hand at the big city. I’ve found a lot of the younger sons would move to the city and find jobs working for schools, electric companies, and other “city jobs”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still finding farmers, plenty of farmers. It is pretty interesting when I see how many farmers were in the family. It makes me want to take property records and color in all the farm land my family owned and see how colorful a map can get! That could be a fun project some day.