What's the point?

Some of you have 50,000+ names. I suspect the only data you can find
is about families of recent vintage since you probably have exhausted
all the available facts and sources for early (pre-1600) data.

My gggrand had 16 children, my ggrand had 12 and my grand had 11. So
what am I proving by chasing 39 lines?

Why should I care about the lines of the 15,11 and 10 men who are not
my ancestors except for helping others? Of coure they could do for
their line what I have done.

I undestand the interest and fascination of completeness of records,
but even with only 8,000 people it becomes an impossible task
(assuming we do do more than eat, breathe and work on genealogy).

Of course I am not suggesting that we delete all our work. But why not
put it in semi-retirement and concentrate on our direct line and their ancestors including in-laws? If another reseacher needs info on
Charlemagne's third grandson, it can always be found in the
semi-retirement folder.

Then there is hard copy printout with pages reducing exponentially.
And I'm still a hard copy man.

Am I really missing something here?

Hugh

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On Mon, 30 Mar 2020 20:28:04 GMT, Eagle@bellsouth.net (J. Hugh
Sullivan) wrote:

I undestand the interest and fascination of completeness of records,
but even with only 8,000 people it becomes an impossible task
(assuming we do do more than eat, breathe and work on genealogy).

Of course I am not suggesting that we delete all our work. But why not
put it in semi-retirement and concentrate on our direct line and their >ancestors including in-laws? If another reseacher needs info on
Charlemagne's third grandson, it can always be found in the
semi-retirement folder.

But when your direct line ends in the proverbial brick wall one
alternative is to go cousin hunting and that is what I do.

And using RootsMagic i correlate it with FamilySearch so that anything
new I discover might be of use to someone else who is more closely
related.


--
Steve Hayes
Web: http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/
http://hayesgreene.blogspot.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afgen/

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On 30/03/20 21:28, J. Hugh Sullivan wrote:

What's the point?

One of my problems has been Kaye ancestors. The root of that was John
Kaye who, in the 2nd half of the C14th had 6 legitimate sons and another illegitimate who was acknowledged and seems to have been treated as an
accepted family member. He lived about 10 miles away. By the time the
PRs open up there were numerous lines already in existence in the
relevant parishes. Mix in a bit of sub-standard recording and loss of
pages in the C17th & early C18th and I end up with a lot of brick walls
in the form of Kaye brides. I'm making slow work of trying to work
forwards to try to tackle some of this from the other end.

Ian

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On Mon, 30 Mar 2020 20:28:04 GMT, Eagle@bellsouth.net (J. Hugh
Sullivan) wrote:

What's the point?

Some of you have 50,000+ names. I suspect the only data you can find
is about families of recent vintage since you probably have exhausted
all the available facts and sources for early (pre-1600) data.

My gggrand had 16 children, my ggrand had 12 and my grand had 11. So
what am I proving by chasing 39 lines?

Why should I care about the lines of the 15,11 and 10 men who are not
my ancestors except for helping others? Of coure they could do for
their line what I have done.

I undestand the interest and fascination of completeness of records,
but even with only 8,000 people it becomes an impossible task
(assuming we do do more than eat, breathe and work on genealogy).

Of course I am not suggesting that we delete all our work. But why not
put it in semi-retirement and concentrate on our direct line and their >ancestors including in-laws? If another reseacher needs info on
Charlemagne's third grandson, it can always be found in the
semi-retirement folder.

Then there is hard copy printout with pages reducing exponentially.
And I'm still a hard copy man.

Am I really missing something here?

Hugh

Well, there are probably as many different "reasons" as there are
people with thousands of names. My reasons for at last count 35,878:
1. I attampt to catalog "all" the descendants of my earliest known
Hoffpauir.
2. I keep "everything" in one database, My direct ancestors (both
paternal and maternal) and all the descendants from #1.
3. I keep surnames I find that "might" connect to the trees I'm
growing.... untill I give up and delete them
4. I keep my wife's ancestors, as far back as we can verify them.

I could have put my wife's ancestors in a separate database, but then
I'd probably never have learned we are actually 7th cousins.

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On Tue, 31 Mar 2020 21:37:52 -0500, Charlie Hoffpauir
<invalid@invalid.com> wrote:

Well, there are probably as many different "reasons" as there are
people with thousands of names. My reasons for at last count 35,878:
1. I attampt to catalog "all" the descendants of my earliest known
Hoffpauir.
2. I keep "everything" in one database, My direct ancestors (both
paternal and maternal) and all the descendants from #1.
3. I keep surnames I find that "might" connect to the trees I'm
growing.... untill I give up and delete them
4. I keep my wife's ancestors, as far back as we can verify them.

I could have put my wife's ancestors in a separate database, but then
I'd probably never have learned we are actually 7th cousins.

Sounds like you, Steve and Ian are all on the same page - and that is
the way I currently do it.

I just thought that no one was was finding new stuff on 30,000+ people
before 1700 so why not reduce our data bases for speed and probably
accuracy.

Hugh

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