Our "living" history

Let me start off by saying once again, I'm a woman with more interests than time. It's frustrating because there are just SO many things I want to do and I have to remind myself to be realistic and recognize that there is simply no way to delve into everything all at once.

So, my method instead is to try to keep some semblance of order in the things that must be done on the homefront and content myself by immersing myself in the non-essentials on a sort of  "hobby-of-the-moment" basis. It means shelving some things I love doing, in favor of others. However, thankfully, because I do love all my "hobbies" they do roll back around in time.

And, of course, family history research is one of these.

So, lately in anticipation of getting back DNA results for my hubby and daughter I've dusted off the genealogy research. It's been awhile, so my files were definitely in need of some housekeeping. While waiting on the results, I decided to post a "direct ancestry" tree online for my husband, just as I'd done for myself when I had my DNA analyzed. (By "direct ancestry" what I mean is that the tree does not branch out for aunts/uncles/cousins. It is primarily a chain of ancestors.)

I'm just not sure how detailed I want to get with these online trees for a couple of reasons. First, these aren't really "working" trees. Instead, their purpose is to make it easier for others in the DNA program at Ancestry.com to locate me (whether we are related or researching the same line/s). But not only that, making these trees more elaborate also means more to maintain. Plus they would be parallel to my main tree which seem silly and redundant.

I manage my main tree with Family Tree Maker locally and then I periodically export that file as a gedcom to WorldConnect tree at Rootsweb (at Ancestry.com) It's a super easy process --new files overwrite older ones and other than replacing the file from time-to-time, there's really virtually no other work for me.

Speaking of which, I updated our family file today. You can find it here:

It's gonna need a few more tweaks because for some reason, whenever I upload a new file, I always start to notice little details that need attention. Not only that, today I learned out how to locate all the "post-ems" that viewers have added to my file. Some of them are so old, and I feel terrible that I haven't seen them earlier. It just never occurred to me to try to find a way to view them all at once rather than have them pop up in those rare moments when I was viewing my gedcom online. So added to my ongoing, never-ending list of tasks to work on while genealogy happens to be the favored hobby is going through these "post-em" replies and seeing what other researchers have brought to my attention and possibly take action.

My blog post title says it all -- our family history is "living" in that it is constantly changing and being clarified, corrected and improved.