My Genealogy Journey Thus Far

I’ve been interested in genealogy for decades.  I worked a bit with genealogy “on paper”, but really got started in earnest when I found genealogy software for my personal computers.  I am almost certain that I had some type of GEDCOM software for our Atari 1040 in the late 1980s, although the name and details escape me (maybe Broderbund?)!   I had an early version of Family Tree Maker (Version 2) in the early 1990s.  I moved around from Family Tree Maker to RootsMagic in 2003, then got a Mac in 2006 and purchased Reunion. In 2011, after Ancestry.com released Family Tree Maker for Mac, I jumped right on board, because the idea of being able to interface directly with my online Ancestry tree was quite appealing.  But Ancestry stopped developing it, and I pouted and went back to Reunion for awhile, until Mackiev picked up the development for Family Tree Maker  (FTM) again, and I jumped back in!  Thus, after much trial and error with many different genealogy software packages, I have settled on Family Tree Maker for Mac.  I keep MacFamilyTree on my Mac, and import GEDCOMs to it from time to time, because it manages some of the crazy interrelationships better for reporting than Family Tree Maker does.  I also keep a copy of RootsMagic around for various sundry reports and processes, but FTM is my master software official tree.  How I use some other family tree software is a matter for another post!

All of this swapping around of family tree building software meant that I exported my tree from one, and imported into another many times over the course of 2 decades.  This in itself created a lot of “junk” that I really didn’t bother cleaning up systematically.  Oh yeah, I’d be working on a particular ancestor, and tidy up that particular profile, but this was really only a slight improvement, and became a proverbial drop in the bucket as my tree started expanding.

I have become the “unofficial official” genealogist (or maybe “official unofficial” – I can’t quite make up my mind here) for my family, my Scots-Italian husband’s family (which seeing as how he’s first generation Scottish, this means mostly his Italian family) and my ex-husband’s German family (also first generation American, so all in Germany). Since my children need all of those ancestors and relations, we share one big tree.

Because my tree building originally focused primarily on Ancestry.com, FTMs ability to “match” people with FamilySearch.org data was mostly a “shrug” for me until I started trying to match DNA Matches from Ancestry, myHeritage, FTDNA, etc.  I was on a hunt to find out about some elusive ancestors, and hoped that DNA matches would help me fill in the gaps.  I had a lazy, rudimentary way of trying to confirm that a person was indeed related all the way up the tree by checking for sources on Ancestry.com, MyHeritage, and FamilySearch for example, to see if there were source materials to connect a family up the line, and if so, I “merged” the people in from FamilySearch, or Ancestry since it was fast.  I only merged in the actual people in my match’s tree.  I.e., if a family had 12 children, I did not merge them all in – I only brought in the family member in the DNA Match’s tree, in an attempt to prevent a huge bloat in “people” who were 7th cousins. Even with this small, targeted merging of people, I quickly jumped from under 10,000 people in our tree, to over 23,000.   Of those 23,000+, 2100 are my husband’s Italian family, 900 are my ex-husband’s German family and the rest are <gulp> MY family. [Editor’s note: as of 5 Jan 2025 there are over 30,000 people in the tree, and I still haven’t actually finished the cleanup entirely, because I got distracted.  See ✅ How Wikitree changed my FTM processes to see how I ended up redoing some of my do-over to make my Wikitree work easier! 

The Messy Mess

Because I had used so many different software programs in the past, I had GEDCOMs imported and exported from various software programs, adding of people from Ancestry.com, and merging data from FamilySearch.org.  While I realized that this was bringing a large number of source citations and other duplicate and largely unnecessary information into my tree (which I’ll go into in a separate post on cleaning up source citations), I really didn’t do any cleanup as I was doing this in the early days.  I tried to keep my “direct line” ancestors clean and tidy, but really just “dumped” information into my DNA Match lines.  Thus, while in reality the number of people isn’t a problem, there is a lot of chaff in the form of duplicate source citations, unknown places, duplicate photos, and duplicate facts.  I’ve learned how to avoid most of these now, but because I had bad habits early on, it wasn’t a pretty sight.  Here was my tree before I started my “Go-Over”.

One might look at those stats and say “well, that doesn’t look so bad”.  I mean really, if they were all valid, useful source citations, for example, having a ratio of 3.6 citations per person sounds pretty good, right?  As you will see as we progress through this process, there were SO MANY wrong and sadly useless citations (sorry – but for my purposes they certainly were useless citations when FamilySearch merged in over 70 citations for the spouse of a 4th cousin 3 times removed).  I’ll show you not only how I ultimately got this under control on the “importing” side, and thus will not be in this sad situation again in the future, but also how I quite painstakingly moved through the old citations in a way that made sense to me.

I do not intend to just “halt” all new work on my family tree.  This “Go-Over” process is time consuming and sometimes even tedious.  The tedium is alleviated sometimes in the doing.  For example, I will get a bit sidetracked by a particular person in the tree who interests me, or has a source that is a book, and I’ll take time to read part/all of it.  I will hear from a DNA match or other relation who wants to know more about a particular ancestor/family member, and I’ll take some time to work on that part of the tree, possibly even adding new people and information from the information received from this work.  In other words, at the beginning of this procedure I have 23,000 people in my tree.  I will surely find some duplicates and drop the number of folks, but I fully expect that by the time this process is over, I will have MORE than 23,000 people as I continue to work on new information, new DNA matches, new discoveries along the way!  I’ll just make sure that the new people and information added matches my stated goals for my “clean” tree. [Editor’s Note:  as the new year of 2025 dawnedm there were over 32000 people in my tree).

My Process for my Go-Over

I will not go through every step from the Genealogy Do Over process.  Go buy that workbook and do it yourself!  However, I will go through these steps that made sense for me:

• Document the tools I use for research
• Decide on the goals for my Go-Over, and in general for my genealogy thoroughness
• Develop a to-do list template that made sense for my stated goals
• Break the project into small steps based on family lines (I chose to focus on my Great-Grandparents, giving me 8 distinct groups of people to work with).
  • Add my to-do list templates to every relevant person in my tree
  • consolidate and organize source citations for each person
  • eliminate duplicate facts for each person
• Clean up Place Names
• Rename media and remove duplicate media

Here’s the Table of Contents so far!  Every post with a ✅ at the beginning is complete “for now”.  Just like our family trees, the process seems to grow and change pretty fast!

• ✅ A Genealogy Do-Over/Go-Over Tale
• ✅ My Genealogy Tools
• ✅ Genealogy Goals for the Go-Over and Beyond
• ✅ Defining Important Tasks for the Go-Over
• ✅ Family Tree Maker Backup and Database Maintenance Procedures
• ✅ Exporting the first branch for my Go-Over
• ✅ Defining and Cleaning Place Names in Family Tree Maker
• ✅ Defining and Cleaning Media – General
• ✅ Cleaning Sources – General
• Cleaning Sources – Census Records
• Cleaning Sources – Find a Grave
• Cleaning Facts
• Cleaning Place Names in Family Tree Maker
• ✅ Merging your next branch into your new tree – Family Tree Maker 2019
• ✅ How Wikitree changed my FTM processes

Happy tree climbing!