Creating a Tree for RootsTech Relatives

I have about 1,102 relatives through my RootsTech Relatives page. When it was under 300, I decided to start a tree of my relatives. I went to the end of my list, because people with much more than me, were reporting that you only see the first 300, so I wanted some of the more distanced branches. Currently, my closest match is a 4^th cousin and my farthest is a 8^th cousin.

In my tree, I want to keep it simple and quick. Thus I started a Family Tree Maker tree,  I created a custom fact, FSID that I will manually input, I customized the input screen and placed the new field directly beneath the name.  I only input their name, FSID, birth and death year. I can find more about them by clicking on their name, however, this is a simple and quick tree, that I can reference later and with the FSID, I will be able to find them again, unless between now and when I research someone has merged this ID with another. Then I have the birth and death date, the child and parent info, to find the link again. I am not too worried about not finding this “hint” again.

I could entered them as they appear in my list or I can entered them based on a common ancestor.

Thus to record my new relative, I clicked the down arrow on the far right of my match, to bring up the relationship link. I click on that link to bring up our relationship. Thus I started my new tree with me, my father, and paternal grandmother up my common ancestor. Then back down to my match. For the unknown Deceased and Living, I kept the male surname of Provot, thus it became Deceased Provot and Living Provot, both with unknown gender. Finally with my match, I keyed in their actual user name, a lot of times, it is a real name, as in this case and their gender is known as female. However, I am unsure if this is a maiden or married name at this time. I type in the word “Match” into the FSID field. Then I created a special filter for all those who are my matches and I color coded them Green. This way I can quickly just view how many matches I have inputted and when in normal view I can see them by their color code.

If the last know person in my relative’s line was a female, I will click on their name to bring up the FamilySearch page for this individual. I will see who they married and input the Deceased and/or Living and then their spouses last name. However, I have run across multiple marriages and in those cases, I leave it just Deceased or just Living. These are just hints and holding places for when I am ready to research this line in the future, after RootsTech and after this feature is no longer enable. My goal is to input as many relatives as I can, as long as the feature is turned on.

I have found some problems in these lineages. For example, my 3^rd great grandmother was married to the wrong man. Even though, my 2^nd great mother was showing up as her child, her siblings were not showing up under this bogus marriage.  This family unit was originally created by FamilySearch. Many errors I find are created by FamilySearch who are using records found and most likely are not relatives who know the family or have done extensive research on the family. I did fix the problem, and this cleared the match out of my list.

Another problem I found are lines going through step parents. My mother was raised by her step-father and in fact didn’t know until she was 18 that this man wasn’t her biological father. Even though my tree shows who her biological father is, her step-father is married to her mother and also shows on her tree. She has two half-sisters and I want to keep that family tie. RootsTech Relatives have many branches to my step-grandfather’s ancestors. I was able to detach my mother from her step-father who legally adopted her, so that I would not see these matches. I also found some remote relatives who descend through these various step parent relationships and for these I have skipped. It can get complicated trying to fix these relationships. They show up because they are listed a child of the step-parent along with their biological parent. I am not against step relationships, however with the limit of 300 relatives, I want to display those who are biologically my relatives first. I want to use this file to help me sort through my DNA matches.

I have found children born after their mother’s death and some born 9 months after their father’s death. I would not easily have seen these, if I didn’t actually key them into my software. I have kept those for now, only because the date I am seeing might not actually be a death date but rather a date after an event, such as death: after 1900, however it will just show 1900 on the relationship screen.

Overall, with all the con’s, I think the pro’s outweigh them, and I will continue inputting all this information, because any “hint” is better than no hint at all. I have entered 221 relative lines thus far, and look forward to developing a research plan on how to handle this tree once RootsTech is over.

Good luck in your research.

Reviewing my Genealogy Projects or Goals for 2022

Well it’s been a full month into 2022 and I decided to review my goals. I realized that I need to put myself on a schedule to accomplish my goals. I don’t want my goals to overwhelm me and prevent me from getting anything done.

In the past, I found that scheduling genealogy was the easiest way for me to accomplish my goals.

My goals consists of writing for my genealogy blogs, I also want to clean up my paper files, especially those I inherited from my aunt, I am creating some trees from a couple of genealogy family history books that I hope will help with my DNA matches and with my own family tree, plus I need to sort through numerous slide boxes that I inherited from my parents. I also started a new project helping my sister-in-law with her mother’s maiden name family history. Someone started this back in the 1980’s and it hasn’t been updated since. She is planning on a family reunion and wants to present a book for family members.

I have a lot of projects and limited time to achieve them. Like all of us, time in finite but my projects seem infinite. So instead of be crippled by the thought of all these projects, I have decided to come up with a plan or guide to get these items done.

For my blog writing, I have decided to participate in Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors in 52 weeks. In the past I have made a feeble attempt at this, however, this year I have decided to do better. Notice I say DO not Try, I am going to DO IT! Anyway, since the prompts come out on Monday, I am going to dedicate Monday to writing the blog.

Next, I have created two trees based on printed family histories. One is for my maternal grandmother’s maiden name, Hiltz or Hilts. This branch seems to fall apart after my 3rd great grandfather. I am speculating that the primary couple of this book is really my ancestor, so I want to create the tree and then see if I can place my matches onto this tree.  I also started a tree on the Boone Family, you know the Daniel Boone family. I have many matches with Daniel Boone’s ancestors and I have two book sources to create this tree. Because I don’t really want to work on both at the same time, I have decided to start with the Hiltz/Hilts family because I have already done 232 of the 319 pages in the book. Thus I will work on this project on Tuesday. I will then work on the Boone family, once I am done with the Hiltz/Hilts book.

My Sister-in-law has been helping me with her family tree. We are working off the printed pages from the previous person and researching for more complete information, expanding branches. She is my other set of eyes and helps me avoid some silly input mistakes. I have decided to designate Wednesday for her Steffes Family. 

Thursday will be my going through my Aunt’s binders. A lot of this is from a project we worked on for her maiden name. While looking at my tree, I realized that I really didn’t do any source citations on where I found this information. So I am reviewing what we had, updating my citations, adding new information, scanning what I need to get rid of all this paper. I am keeping some paper stuff, such as pictures and some obituaries that I am not finding online. This is slow going. I had originally thought I could get through one binder a month; she has about twelve fat binders. However, I am only on the first binder and I realize this is unrealistic. I need to get through this project, so I am not going to allow this to get me off track. Any binders that I get through will be good. 

Finally, those darn slides, 48 boxes of those darn slides. I plan on reviewing one box at a time. I purchased a slide projector to see the slides. I want to keep those with family in them. Being the youngest, I don’t have a lot of pictures of my family. I was hoping to create stacks to designate those I could send out to a third party to scan for me. However, I do have a personal scanner and could do it myself. I am no fence on which way to proceed. I might have to see how long it will take me to get through a box. I thought I would do one per week, but I think I was being ambitious. I won’t know until I do at least one box of slides. For now, I have decided Friday can be my slide day. 

This leaves me Saturday and Sunday as my free days. I don’t really do Genealogy every day of the week. My retired hubby would not let me get away with that. However, when I get a day or two, I can let the day of the week help me guide me into which project I want to work on. My mood might be a bigger contributing factor in my decision.

How do you work on your genealogy? Do you need a schedule like me or do you just do whatever? It doesn't matter how you do it, just DO IT!