Genealogy Chat

I am seriously considering removing the bulk of my tree from this site. Over the last twenty years I have traced most of my great great great grandparents and a similar number of my wife’s. Some lines go further back than that. The majority of these are well documented from several sources so I am reasonably confident of their accuracy. In the same time period I have also garnered a large number of other people, either related or by marriage who I have added to the tree – I have some 17000 on this site and about 31000 in my master file. I hasten to add that I do not consider myself a name collector, much of the information is from people who I would consider reputable genealogal researchers. In many cases I have found intermarriages between distant cousins, and interestingly I have two instances of my wife’s and my ancestors in the same village. This is important to me because we have a genetic defect in the family.
Essentially I believe that because so many people have helped me, I have an obligation to do the same. Needless to say I get a lot of enquiries on this site and attempt to respond to all of them (it would average 5 a day). In all cases where there is a match I ask for an email address and produce a file of the relevant line. I also give them the link to myself which can be quite complicated if there are several marriages involved. Sometimes the file is only five or six names, the largest was sixteen pages (and it could have been 40 if I hadn’t pruned it. Of late I have noticed an increase in the number of people who don’t even bother to say thank you – they have reduced me to the point where I think I can save myself a lot of time and effort by not providing this service.
Do others think the same way?

Peter

I understand the point you are making, but I'm not sure why you are asking other people about pruning your tree.............surely that must be your decision.

Reg

I've got under 2000 on this site though I could add many more thousands if I could be bothered.
However this site I see as being for sharing and I can't see the point in adding any more medieval ancestors on here. I'm getting mainly Hot Matched to William the Conqueror etc at the moment.

This site doesn't allow the complicated distant cousin relationships needed for medieval genealogy anyway.

So long as you have all the information offline then I imagine life would be a lot easier for you if you didn't get so many contacts. If one appeared who needed a particular line then you could always send it to them as a file by e-mail.

Sue

N

When you have done a lot of Family History in one particular area you are bound to have collected a lot of information about the area or the people. You can collect quite a bit of expertise in an area by way of books and families so I also get some correspondence about particular names for particular places. Where I can help I do so whether it is through Militia Lists or my Village books or my CD's but fortunately for me I do not get that many queries where it has become unmanageable.

I would personally find several thousand on Genes to be unmanageable, so I only have less than 200 on this site. I am lucky in that those that I have helped have responded with thanks, though I could not always say the same for many people on Genes, where a note left, meant to help, on Tips Board, often goes either unoticed or just that people take the note and run, and cannot be bothered with the thanks.

I belong to many Family History Societies and I find this so much more rewarding for me.

Janet North London Borders