Wow, could I write about mistakes! I am sure I have made more than my share of mistakes as I have been learning how to accurately create my family tree. I am trying to add my family on several sites in order to connect with other people who might be researching the same lines. Learning each of the sites is a lesson in patience and perseverence itself.
I began with Ancestry. I like Ancestry a lot, it has been the easiest to use and the tree works the best for me. Each of us are different in how we process information. The lay out of the tree, the way it expands, the search capability all seem the easiest for me to navigate. I have to be careful on this site not to assume other trees are correct. I like that you get other trees in the hints. I am always careful now to check their tree and see if they have a source I don’t have. When I first started I didn’t do that and found later those could easily send me on a wrong branch. Live and learn, right.
I think the next site I started to use was Family Search. I really don’t like the tree on this site. It’s ok for direct lines but if you want to see entire families not so much. The individual person pages are awesome. There is so much information packed in each person’s page, it’s incredible. The difficulty is making sure there aren’t duplicates of each person. I started with my parents and have slowly been going up the tree. The farther up I go the more duplicates I find. I think everyone begins like I do, Most don’t bother to add siblings. So, if the grandparents had eight children each child is added with their own parents even though those parents are actually the same people. I am trying to combine family members. To do this you need to merge the individual profiles. Merging profiles was a steep learning curve for me. I screwed this up so many times! I probably made a number of people angry. It was all meant to improve the profiles and unite the family members but it was bumpy at first. I found a group on Facebook who were extremely helpful in answering all my questions about how to merge, add sources, create citations etc. I also found a number of YouTube videos about using the site. Now it is one of my favorite go to sites. The sources I find on that site are invaluable.
WikiTree is a third site I use. It has been one of the least intuitive sites for me to use. I don’t add to this site as much as the others but I feel what is on the site is most likely to be more accurate. WikiTree like Family Search is a one world tree. Eventually it connects with other people who have been building on the site. I like all the different apps connected with the site for printing trees and the ability to connect with others through DNA and the chance to see your connection to other people. I joined a German group on the site, they have many different groups, but honestly I haven’t really figured out how to fully use it yet. Here is one of the types of charts you can create. The colors aren’t quite right on this one, it’s supposed to be by country but it seems to have picked a few states and made them individual countries. I like you can put as much as you want or as little as you want on the chart. I added marriage dates, places, birth and death on these. You can also add photos.
I also use My Heritage and Find My Tree to a small extent. Find My Tree should help me connect with my own ancestors in the UK and My Heritage has more DNA connections for my husbands Icelandic roots. I like the privacy on My Heritage. I have added three of my sisters as members to this tree and they can get updates by email for different birthdays in the family, and let me know when they see something is off. I know I haven’t completely conquered either of those sites yet.
On all of the sites I have found photos and connections to relatives I wouldn’t have known about without beginning trees. Mistakes have been made and corrected and probably some still need correcting but the journey is worth while.
Here is to more mistakes and corrections as I continue to build our tree. May you make a few less mistakes than I do.
My Tree in the Forest 