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.