Five Things You Can Do This Weekend to Clean Up Your Family Tree | Ancestry

hi everyone Cristian here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist today we are talking about cleaning up your family tree now we've talked about this in the past we've talked about data error reports we talked a couple weeks ago about spring cleaning this is just kind of a continuation of that theme I wanted to give you just some ideas of some things you could just really quickly do when you have a few minutes to just clean up your tree one of the things I've discovered is that a lot of us and I fall guilty to this too a lot of us get into ruts where we always do the same thing we come to our tree we click on the leaf we whatever whatever your same thing is so we're always looking at our tree the same way well the problem with that is is that sometimes when you look at your tree in a different way you see things you wouldn't have seen otherwise and so I'm not just talking here about cleaning up your tree in like in the essence of oh you've got mistakes I'm talking about cleaning it up in in the view of looking at it a different way so that you can keep it healthy so that you can make sure that you've got accurate information so that you can make sure you're getting the most out of the tools so that you can make sure that you know what to work on next but you're not building up brick walls for yourself because of some of the things that you fall into the habit of doing and so that's the that's the point of today's presentation is just to talk to you about different ways to look at your tree so that so that it can be healthy a healthy well growing family tree okay we are going to talk about your online tree as well as family tree maker I focus specifically on family tree maker because that is the tree software that ancestry.com uses and it's the one that interfaces with with the online tree if you're using another offline desktop software for your family history most other things I'm going to suggest will work for you as well so let's go ahead and dive in let's talk about this first thing the first thing that you can do is print a copy of your family tree I know we love this idea of being all digital and a lot of us myself included just cling to that like we don't want anymore paper we don't want anymore files we don't want anymore binders and bookshelves full of things and that's great I'm a big fan of that but every once in a while I would encourage you to print a copy of your family tree because it's a different way to look at your tree and it's a way that you might see things that you didn't see otherwise so let me just show you on ancestry where you can do that when you're in ancestry.com you have a publish button here and you can click that and you can create a family tree starting with any person in your tree and you can tell it how many generations you want to include so for example let's see if I can pull up here's a sample of a tree this is a tree I did it's called a bowtie tree and so this is my grandparents my dad's parents here in the middle and this is my grandfather side of the family to the left and my grandmother side of the family to the right and it's starting with them it's one two three four five six generations so this goes back to my fifth great-grandparents on each side of my this particular side of my family so in my case I would need to do two of these one for these grandparents and one for my mom's parents and so um then I can just print this out on a printer of my own right and I'm not looking I mean like if you wanted to have us us print ancestry.com front out for you that's fine too and it will be you know giant and and frame up frame a bowl right but we're just talking about trying to get a working view of your tree in a different view and so this allows you to just print it and then you can take a look at these I could zoom in here right and you can do this on your screen and you can do this on your tree right but the difference is again what sometimes when you're looking at something on a screen you don't notice something and and yet when you're looking at it on paper you do I do this a lot of times I do some of the blog editing for ancestry here and sometimes people send me a copy of their blog post and I'll read it on my computer screen and I'll miss half the errors but if I print it out and actually read it on paper sometimes I catch a little bit more something about that tactical connection tactile connection and anyway so you can do it on your screen but I'm my encouragement is to print it out so there's something in front of you so that you can look at it that also means that as you find things or if you find things you're not having to flip back and forth through screens if I have this piece of paper in front of me and I noticed oh look here I have I'm missing a picture for this great-grandfather I think I have one I need to go add that I don't have to toggle back and forth between screens because I'm looking at this on the paper in front of me then I can just go into my tree and do that so lots of different ways you can do that but the publish button on ancestry will help you do it from your tree in family tree maker you also have a publish feature there that you can use so you can go in directly and print things out from there as well but the idea is to print a copy of your family tree look for obvious errors in time and place particularly the further back you go just pay attention to things like you know was somebody born and died in England and yet their child was born in North Carolina that might be a problem right um was this woman born a century after her child you look for those kinds of obvious errors maybe you just made a mistake maybe you copied the wrong information I'm notorious for transposing dates you know instead of putting in 1783 I'll put in 1873 just look for some of those obvious things in that printed copy of your tree look for missing information one of the benefits of printing out a family tree is that you can really clearly see where your holes are where those big gaps are and sometimes you have that information you just haven't entered it into your tree or maybe you have entered it into your tree but you haven't connected people correctly like maybe you unlinked a father and a son and now it looks like that whole branch of the tree is empty when it's not the people are in your tree you just need to reconnect those people so and prayer down a tree it's just again another way to look at your tree to look for some of those obvious errors the second thing I would recommend or the second suggestion for you this weekend is to review your list of all people in your online tree you have a list of all people if I come over here to the search box on the top right hand side I can go to my last viewed person go to the home person or the bottom option there is my list of all people or of course I can just type directly in here and it will bring up you know lists of people from my tree but I want to go to this list of all people that's going to take me to exactly what it says a list of all people in my tree it's an alphabetical list and if you have you know if you only have a couple hundred people in your tree it's going to be really easy even if you only have a couple thousand people in your tree it's gonna be really easy to just go through this list paid by page by page looking for again some of those obvious errors if you have a lot of people in your chori if you have a very very large tree in my case I've got 63,000 people here maybe you want to pick a particular surname you can type that into the search box over here and it will then just show you just the people with that particular last name now I chose this last name because um here is an obvious error in my tree there's actually a couple of them here that I want to point out so you're going to be looking for weird characters that you've got in name fields so one of the things that we sometimes see people do is they'll put like an asterisk in a last name field to denote that that's their direct line ancestor or in this case here I've got quotation marks around this person's name I'm assuming that's because it's a nickname not her actual name the problem with weird characters and by weird I just mean anything other than an alpha character the problem with those characters is that's going to mess up your hinting and your searching any time and their characters in those fields those characters the computer sometimes other things for example an asterisk on ancestry.com is actually a wild-card as is a question mark and so those two characters in particular are really going to mess up your searches so if you're doing an automatic search from the profile page of this person any of those extra characters are going to cause some problems so you're gonna want to clean those up there are a few characters that are allowable and acceptable one is you'll notice here I've got this is a series of five underscores I did that because I don't know the first name of this person so I know that there is a person in this family probably even has a gender assigned to them I probably even maybe know a spouse or children or children but I didn't know the first name and so I've just put in five underscores in that first name field so that so that it's a quick flag to me particularly in a situation like this where I can say oh you know what I have some research to do I need to go find the first name of that person you also start to see things like initials I have a lot of family especially in the south where they either went by their initials or where the census taker only recorded their initials and that's fine because that's you know I entered what I found but this is just a visual flag to me looking at my data this way that oh look I probably have some additional research that I can do here on this family I need to go do that see if I can find out what their actual names are rather than just their initials now of course I know some people only have initials I just I discovered that one of the things I learned this year is that sometimes people only have initials and maybe if that's the case I'd make a note on this person so that I didn't keep trying to redo research but the other thing you can quickly tell from this kind of you if I just scroll down the page a little bit as you can see where you are missing information very quickly I can see here that I've got a birth place but no birth date same with a couple of these here I've got no birth information at all and no death information at all here I've got about dates and before dates and after dates where apparently there is more research to so rather than following shakey leaves or trying to keep pushing back on a particular branch of the family where I've hit a brick wall again viewing my data in this way gives me some places where I still have some work to do and so it can help direct my work my research time a little bit better when I say oh look you know what I have this after 1904 his death date I need to go find a death date for this person so that's going to be in your list of all people in your online tree you're going to find it under the search box here the tree search box it's the bottom option there when you're viewing your tree in family tree maker everybody just has this little pop-out index here and I can size this index however I want it I can size the information in here and so I can skim through this tree index this way and I can change the view of this I can change it to be and how I sort it I can also change what I show in this I can show just a birthdate or just a marriage date or just a death date in this case I've got there life span showing where it shows a birth and death date or a year anyway and in this index view and again it's a really easy way to just quickly skim through this and see you know here I've got a woman who was born in 1912 with no death date she could still be alive but probably not so I need to go look for that here's an 1898 birth date with no death date again just quickly skimming through that list helps some of those more obvious things I need to work on pop out at me so you're looking for those incomplete dates and missing information that's going to direct your research a little bit maybe get you back into a particular family that you've been away from for awhile and who knows new information comes online at ancestry.com at a rate of about a million records a day and so what might have not been there six months or a year or a week ago that information could be available online to you now or you might need to you know do a google search and look up the local archive or library and make some phone calls err or plan a visit for this summer okay step number three is to check your tree for duplicates we all have them they all happen for a various number of reasons as a matter of fact I've done an entire video on how to check for duplicates and how they happen and how to prevent them from happening or at least minimize the occurrence but I'm going to encourage you to do that now you can do that in your online tree again from this list of people if you only have a few people in your tree you know less than a few thousand not going to be terribly time-consuming you just skim through this list here I've got for example two abigail shipments right in a row one's born in 1817 one's born in 1816 but ones living in Pennsylvania and ones living in Tennessee so I'm fairly certain those are not the same person okay it's really easy just to skim through this list and see if I have duplicates or apparent duplicates here's the guy born in New Jersey with no birthdate here's another Abraham Shipman born in New Jersey maybe I want to go check this guy out and see if he's the same person so lots of easy ways to just skim through that list so that you can make some of those quick decisions now in family tree maker of course it's easier software by its nature is a little bit more robust than online programs so as much as I love my online tree I as large as my tree is in particular I couldn't do without family tree maker and so in family tree maker there's actually a find duplicate people option under the edit button where it will actually do a an automatic check in your database and then present you with a list of people it thinks might be duplicates and then you can run through that list and either say yes they are and it will merge them or no they're not and it will leave them as two separate people now one of the cautions in automation one of the things is and one of the challenges we have is that the more automated things become the less we pay attention that's just kind of a human nature thing and so just because it says that they're duplicate people does not mean that they are it's just presenting you with possibilities and so you need to know enough about your family in order to make an intelligent decision about whether those people are the same person before you merge them if you're not sure don't do it okay and just save it for another time but this fine duplicate people is a really quick automated way in Family Tree Maker to check for some of those more obvious duplicates that sometimes occur and like I said I've done a whole video on that you can find it on our YouTube channel walk you through or I walk you through a little bit more about why that happens how to prevent it from happening or keep it from happening and how to run some of those checks so you can use that list of people people online or use the find duplicate people under the edit button in Family Tree Maker okay number four and again remember these are just suggestions for things that you can do or ways that you can look at your tree in a different way and I found that when I look at it in a different way there are often things I can do to clean it up now this is an exclusively Family Tree Maker tip and that is to run the data error report I've also done an entire video on this report it is a report in Family Tree Maker so if I come here to my publish button it's going to load a family tree for me that's not what I wanted I want to come in here to the person report and there is what we call our data error report now what that data error report does is it can create any number of it can check for any number of errors and there are several of them I would encourage you to just pick one so for example anybody whose birth date is after their father's death date and I want it to check everybody in my whole tree to see if there's anybody anywhere in my tree that has a birth date after their father's actually it's more than a year after their father's death date and it's going to take a little while you can see it's running over here on the bottom right hand side it's going to check my whole tree for for this obvious error and you're actually going to see that it's going to come up with some so I have some work that I need to do in my tree it looks like um but it's an automated way to check for this for those kinds of errors now I'll show it to you as soon as it's finished running but let me just give you a couple of tips about this and it checks for those obvious errors but I would encourage you strongly to only run the report for one error at a time against your whole tree so rather than running the report for all 23 or 27 however many errors there are rather than running a report for all errors run a report for one error at a time remember we're just looking for quick easy things we can do or different ways to look at our tree that can help us clean up some of this stuff so if I come back over here still running this report doesn't surprise me my my database is huge and so sometimes if I run a database against the entire our run a report against the entire database it takes a quite a bit of time we'll get back to this I'll show it to you before we finish if it's done running so run those data error reports there are things like children born before their mother couples who were younger than 13 when they got married lots of different options and them in that data error report different kinds of things you can check for and what I found is that I'll print that list out or or print it to a PDF and I'll start going through it and I'll start with the first person and when I go to clean up the error that leads me into more research and so sometimes I'll only get one or two of those people in my tree cleaned up at a time because again that's directing my research and so that's there we go okay and so that's good right but what it means is that I can still run this report even though you know I'm a fairly conscientious genealogist and you'll see here I still have a page page and a half of errors of this particular error where the birth date of the child occurred more than a year after the father died and it's not because you know I don't want to clean them up it's just because you know I may start here Isaac Burleson born in 1811 I may go to him in my tree and you know look at the information about him and realize I have some more research to do or I need to go double-check those sources that I have for what notes do I have on this person you know what research have I done where did this information come from I can't just change a date unless I know what to change it to and so I'm not going to go through and just remove these dates I'm going to go through one person at a time and clean them up and so that takes a little bit of time and so but but again when you focus on one error at a time this is a quick easy thing you can do right I'm gonna go check out Isaac Burleson this weekend and clean up that family and the data error report gives you another way to look at that data so that you can do that clean up okay my fifth and final tip for you today actually has to do with one of the bloggers in our jenny ology community his name is Randy Seaver he runs a blog called Jennea musings you can find it at jinnia musings calm and every Saturday he posts what he calls Saturday night genealogy fun or SMGs and that's how it's tagged that's how those blog posts are tagged on his blog and one of the things that I've discovered participating in Randy's little challenges is that he often times gives me again a new way to look at my data and when I do that I see sometimes errors that I haven't seen before or holes that I haven't seen before or things that I need to clean up or more information that I need to gather so let me just give you an example of a couple of his Saturday night genealogy fun challenges that I've participated in this last month he did one called how many surnames in your database where you used whatever software you use for your tree and you go through and you do a report about how many times each individual surname shows up in your database okay so for example he has forty two thousand seven hundred and twenty people in his database those forty two thousand seven hundred and twenty people make up five thousand nine hundred and sixty-seven surnames and so then he went through and created this report and was able to again look at his data in a little bit different way I did that and actually found that I had some surnames that I had spelt that I had Smith spelled or that I hadn't standardized I had a couple where I had inaccurate information in that starting field or a weird character in that surname field so again it just helped me kind of clean some of those up so that was that one he also did one earlier this year called your surname line with the longest stay in a specific locality where you got to go through and see you know do you have people who have always lived in the same place in your tree again and again just a different way to look at your data and sometimes it surfaces some interesting information and then this one I love and I'm not just because he based it off of a blog post I wrote but also because I participate in this actual exercise about once a year and he entitled it what's your ancestor score and but he talked about how you check 10 generations of your family tree and see how many of those people you know and so you know you have two parents and four grandparents and eight great-grandparents and 16 great-great grandparents and of course you know that number doubles with every generation and so then you go through your tree and you figure out how many of those people you've identified in each generation and that gives you kind of a score for you know how how does your family tree is a lot of people will come along and say oh my family trees all done and the reality is it's they've traced one line back but what about the other you know 8 10 16 32 4 you know whatever 64 lines in your family history and so it's just again a different way to look at your data so that you can maybe come up with some new avenues to research some new locations to research and you know oftentimes you'll find some things to clean up along the way well I hope this has given you some ideas I certainly don't expect you to do all of these things I don't expect that all of these things will resonate with all of you but hopefully this has been time well-spent and you have had some sparks of ideas of some things that you could do this weekend and I just want to tell you that I know that you just take one of these suggestions and try it this opportunity to look at your family history data in a different way well very often lead you to new avenues to research and help you clean up that family tree until next time this is Krista Cowen have fun climbing your family tree

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 52,641

Rating: 4.8731709 out of 5

Keywords: ancestry.com, ancestry, family tree, family history, genealogy, Barefoot Genealogist, FTM, Family Tree Maker, FTM2012, FTM2014, TBG

Id: FlAvutSHbRg

Length: 24min 39sec (1479 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 25 2014