Category: Random Relative Project

Good Ol’ Days

Posted on by Kathleen

Since we’re all friends here, we won’t discuss what I did last night. Just know that I deeply am sorry for the constant changing of my mind. The Random Relative Project™ is still happening, but in a different way. I just couldn’t get it out of my mind last night. Here I was doing all this work on sourcing these random people in my tree and adding them to my website. Then the thought showed up, the one that clung on for dear life and wouldn’t go away. In fact, it won’t go away now, when I’m desperately hungry for a sandwich. So I need to get this out quick so I can make a date with my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

So the thought was, “What if these people turn out to be the wrong people?” “What if I spend all this time adding them and sourcing them, and they don’t even belong in my tree?” Yikes. That’s a scary one. One I’m sure I thought of before, but said I’d come to that when I got there. Then more thoughts came, “You assigned them numbers. If you assign them numbers and they aren’t part of the family what will happen to that number?” “Will you keep a list of numbers to recycle?” Oy oy oy with the poodles!

So yes, I will keep on with my Random Relative Project™ in a very unofficial just looking through the census manner. I’d like to at least verify where these folks are in case they are family, and then in case they aren’t maybe they live nearby the real family. The official numbers will have to come from my “Official Family File” though. The one where nothing enters it without a source attached. Of course,  there isn’t much movement on that one except adding in my cousin’s information right now.

I came across this gem today. Poor Nathan Ellis is only 60 years old (Well he was in 1850), and he’s already being considered put out to pasture.  I am positive that sooner, rather than later I am pushing myself to this end. Of course it’ll be another 10 years before anyone can embarrass me on a census. So there’s still hope. Don’t ask me who belongs where in that household. I couldn’t tell ya. I only had Jeremiah, a wife Anna (not Nancy) and a son Washington (he’s next door). So everyone else is up in the air.  Who said genealogy was relaxing anyway? Oh that was me. ^.^

Madness Monday: Back Away…

Posted on by Kathleen

Sometimes, you just need to back away from your family file. Well I do at least. I found myself this week re-thinking EVERYTHING that involved my research and my blog. I’ve already done the irreversible step of clearing out my Mom’s side of the tree on my website. Which I’ll never regret, because keeping it around was just wrong when I wasn’t sure of the validity of it all.

I’ve read enough on blogs in the last month or so to make me sweat about all things I think I know. It’s been a crazy, educational couple of months. In the end, I deleted everything but my Original Family File and then I made a copy of my Random Number RootsMagic file and plopped it into Family Tree Maker. No more files for me. These three are it. The Original file is now relegated to back up status, even though I back up the other two regularly.

So here I sit, with a clean start on both my website and my family file. Technically I’m not starting completely over though. I still have all those names in my file to contend with. I just won’t add them to the website unless I have them thoroughly and well sourced. Which brings me to my next decision.

I went through all the trouble of having to clean out my website database. This is so my Ref ID #’s on the website and in FTM/RootsMagic will be the same. I couldn’t change an already existing ID # in the website, which I understand completely. So I’m starting over with that in every since of the word. The decision I made though, is I’m going to go ahead and add my Random Relative Project relatives as I finish them. If I don’t feel comfortable adding them to the site yet on what I have, I won’t. Since I know so much more about things on the TNG software though, it doesn’t make sense to save them for later when it’s just as easy to add them now, and then link them in when I get there. It doesn’t harm anything really.

So that’s where I’m at. By the way, I put eighty million categories on this post because they all fit, and I’m obsessed with categories. Maybe I just need to put up a Kathleen is Category Crazy category for days like today… or maybe I just need to leave it as Family File Hijinks and Madness Monday. Here I go again. 🙂

Madness Monday is a daily blogging theme I got from GeneaBloggers. To participate in Madness Monday simply create a post with the main focus being an ancestor who may have suffered from some form of mental illness or an ancestor who drives you “mad” because you have trouble locating them or locating more information about them.