Monday, January 2, 2012

My Family Tree

Šternberg Family Tree by m-louis
Šternberg Family Tree, a photo by m-louis on Flickr.

A new year and another fresh start on my genealogy. It's been neglected for a while since I have been traveling and battling mice (a story for another day) but today I packed up my laptop, my flashdrives, my binders and files and drove out to Dad's place. We copied over my complete files - out of my Legacy program into his PAF program and set these up on both his desktop and laptop. After walking through a few screens of data, we got him set up on FamilySearch and went over how to search, find and add names with sources into his tree here. Then after a few tries, we finally got onto Ancestry.com and I showed him some original source records I've connected to his family names that he can browse later. All of that and it is very clear that my records are a MESS! Duplicates, incomplete and incorrect information, different information in the three different trees and no idea which one is the most accurate -- a big mess. So once again I need to reassess, start the cleanup and get moving forward again. I know my paper records are in better shape so I need to pull the files and clear up the confusion as best I can.

It was good to see that Dad is keen to be involved but I'm afraid I may have just overwhelmed him. I'll let him play around for a bit and make another trip over to plan out what our next steps should be. Wish me luck!