What is the most effective/productive method in growing family tree?

Question

In what order might it be best to work in?  I seem to be all over the place when building and researching our tree.  

Do you find it best to build by branch, by level of ancestry or any other method experienced members find productive?   

~ Thank you!

Answer 1

I gave to admit that I have no system. I just work at random as and when I find useful information. But I do tend to follow a line as far as I can and then come back to it later.

The difficult bit is when you try to come forward again from an ancestor. That is far more difficult than working backwards.

Comments

I have just recently heard people mentioning working forwards.  I would not have thought to do it that way.  Not that I'd have the option.  I must go backwards to find who they are.  

I think I need a system.  Or it would be a big help if I could keep all my sources in one place.  Does anyone know how to do that (online), when the sources are from several different places?  

Thanx!

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I've never tried to do it online. My Family Historian program provides for storage and linking of sources. Every so often I update it on Ancestry. I'm slowly working through adding it to WT.

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When I started out, I thought I'd NEVER get into collecting all the descendants of an ancestor. It took maybe a year before I launched such a project :-)

And sometimes you just have to follow all the siblings in a batch in order to find out where the widowed parent ended his or her days.

Actually the hard decision to make is where to stop.

Answer 2

Well, the research does tend to get all over the place - and the thext files I keep when working get VERY messy. They're still worthwhile and necessary. But you do need something tree-shaped to order your findings and know where you are. WikiTree is not bad for that. I mostly use the basic family tree to see where I have gaps, and also use the descendent lists quite a lot.

Building by branch and building by level of ancestry are both good methods. I should think most people combine them, depending on where we are successful with our findings at a given moment, running up a branch when we have found a thread to follow - and when that runs out, checking for the lowest yet unexplored branching point to continue with. It's always a good idea to work with another branch for a while, when you get stuck in one. And then come back.

Working by location may also be useful. I have a few branches that start quite far apart in my tree, but when I get way back, I discover that they're from the same area. In those cases I am working on two different branches because they're in the same source.

Comments

I see.  Thus far I tend to do what you describe in the second paragraph.  

But when I find a source (no matter were it belongs), I feel if I don't attach it at that moment, it's a waste of time and energy.  Because I don't have a single location to store my sources, I'll have to search all over to find it.  

So as a result.  I'm not even completing 1 profile at a time, let alone 1 branch or level. 

Martin and Eva, Thanx for the input! 

 

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Well, by now I'm going over my tree for something like the third time, still adding a bit around the edges - so it is easier to be systematic.

What I said about working by location is very much akin to working by source, isn't it? At least sources for me are by location, but I guess it depends on what kind of sources you have.

I don't think it's necessary for WikiTree to complete a profile all at once. I find that working up a branch for the first time it is usually easy to find births, which gives parents, then births of parents, which gives their parents and so on. Can be much harder to find out what happened to people at the end of their lives. Again, it depends on what kind of sources you have.

One thing with WikiTree is that I don't like entering people as Unknown. I tend to write the notes about them in the nearest relative until I have a last name at birth for them.

And I often make a list of children in the profile of the mother (to keep birth records in, for one thing) instead of entering each child immediately. That way I get an overview of what remains to be done. So here I keep the sources near to where I'm going to need them later.

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I think I follow.

And to answer your question about source/location method.  Yes, they are similar.  Though without the location the source could belong anywhere, I guess.

Answer 3

While there is probably no right answer, you might want to consider personal preference and the maturity of your family tree.

For example, if you have a good start on your family tree (in terms of number of direct ancestors), you might find it efficient to conduct multiple searches within a specific source.   More specifically, search for multiple birth records within a geographic area source database, WW I/II draft registration cards for males within a certain age range, naturalization records for relatives in a particular geographic area, etc.

Admittedly, from time to time, random searching to maximize the information you find is always energizing too - good luck!

Comments

Very helpful, Thanx!

Answer 4

Currently working down from my patrilineal ancestor and I find it is often easiest to work on a complete immediate family group (i.e. one set of parents and their children) since their names will very often appear together (parents named on BMD, siblings as witnesses to marriages, or as informants on death records) and these records often give clues to where a person moved to. I try to get BMD for every family member and if I find info on people outside the immediate family (in-laws, grandchildren) I leave myself 'breadcrumbs' for future research but try not to get sidetracked from the one family. Once the family is as complete as I can manage I repeat with the next family. When I look at the descendant view (and having set unmarried and no children indicators as appropriate) I have a very good idea which family groups are 'done' and which individual still need to have their families built.

Comments

Just to expand on and illustrate what I said above... First I worked up my direct ancestors leaving 'breadcrumbs' - as an example, here are the descendants of my earliest known (so far) Matrilineal Ancestor Aaltje Peters - if you look at any of those descendants profiles (for example Beertje Engeltjes) you should find what I call 'breadcrumbs' identifying the most basic BMD of any known children which will be the subject of later research (and which can also help people with merging/linking existing profiles).

This is the same approach that I first used with my Patrilineal Ancestor, Jan Gerrits, looking at his descendants, you can see that I have gone back and just kept working on following my 'breadcrumbs' trying to flush out entire families - at a glance you should also probably get a sense of which families I still need to work on, such as the families of the children of Adriaantje Ton and Johannes Cooyman.

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I see.

Very good, thank you!