Ahh, I opened a can of worms

Way back in January, when I slapped myself on the back and said good job about getting Nate’s side of my ancestry tree basically done. Yes, 4 months ago, I made a mistake. Hehe.

It had been awhile since I had looked at my side of the tree (because I was capturing data from Nate’s side). So, I did what any unsuspecting person would do . . . I got onto Ancestry and ‘walked’ my side of the tree. Bad idea . . . Apparently this triggered Ancestry’s search engine to realize that I was working on those areas. This of course is a good thing, if you are focusing on a small number of people. However, my side of the tree goes back over 10 generations in a lot of areas and in a few cases all the way to the pilgrims/quakers/first settlers of America. I have a lot of people on my side. What happended next is I got swamped with all the new ‘connections’ and hints that Ancestry decided would help me with my research.

So, since January, I’ve been trying to dig out from under the thousands of entries in my rss feed. Just so everyone knows, after 1000 entries in Google reader it stops counting and just says (1000+). A number of them were duplicate entries from a member who has a lot of the same people as me in their tree. I get a hit for every person, photo, story that matches. So those could be done analyzed all at the same time. I also found some major errors in a couple places (like finding out someone I thought was a bio mom was actually a second or third wife and I needed to research the actual mother instead). Overall, I’ve gained a ton of new data and sources for my side of the tree and connections. So it wasn’t wasted effort. In the middle of everything, I’ve also gotten some new hits on Nate’s side. Which is good, it means my maintenance system is working. 🙂

All this to say that I’ve mostly dug out from under the pile of hits that I unknowingly triggered and I think I’m ready to start working on my side the way I was planning to in January. When I’m using the rss feed, I’m at the whim of the hint and have to follow the tree of the person that matched me. That’s great for getting some info, but I like to be much more methodical (who would have guessed?). I like to work on a single person and immediate family and ensure I have links between the generations. I also like to fill out siblings (aunts and uncles) if I have them, because that is the best way to find other’s working on my same line.

Diltz/Henry lines . . . here I come.