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There are at least two different kinds of genealogy task. One is recording conclusions of existing research and another is doing new research. A kind of mixed

by dzdt 5y ago

There are at least two different kinds of genealogy task. One is recording conclusions of existing research and another is doing new research. A kind of mixed task is recording both conclusions and evidence from ongoing research. I haven't seen any tool that does a really good job for organizing new research. For that task you want collections of source material, notes, and speculations which may be tied to an individual, a family, a location, a surname, or other ad-hoc organization schemes. Existing software is universally bad at the "here's some pieces I'm trying to sort out" research tasks. The organization with research is less based on individuals and their relationships and more on source documents and their contents and associations and interpretations.

jayknight 5y ago
And in the realm of online family tree services, there are two approaches. One is you build your own tree, but with the help of other people's trees and other records. That's what ancestry is. The other type is the single universal tree that is built collaboratively. That's what wikitree is, and familysearch also has that as a component. For what I've done, wikitree is a great match, but where things are messed up by people being sloppy, it can be pretty hard to straighten it all out.
Erik816 5y ago
The best way I have been able to do this is to write a book as I am doing my research. I organize an outline for the ancestors, fill in the details I can find as paragraphs, and pretty much have a footnote (or sometimes two) with every sentence with a source. For a particularly tricky ancestor, it will start as just a list of sources or leads in roughly chronological order. I work through and try to form these sources into narrative paragraphs as I piece together what is accurate, how they are connected to children/parents/spouses/etc. In some cases, I disprove other people's unsupported theories, and in some cases I present a case for my own conclusions, noting any ambiguity or uncertainty. I then update my primary tree (on Ancestry.com) with the results of my research, and link or upload the most important original documents there. At some point, I'll upload PDFs of the chapters to the relevant people's pages. Is there software that could organize this all and make it easier? I'm not totally sure, but I'd be open to considering it.

by dzdt 5y ago

jayknight 5y ago

And in the realm of online family tree services, there are two approaches. One is you build your own tree, but with the help of other people's trees and other records. That's what ancestry is. The other type is the single universal tree that is built collaboratively. That's what wikitree is, and familysearch also has that as a component. For what I've done, wikitree is a great match, but where things are messed up by people being sloppy, it can be pretty hard to straighten it all out.

Erik816 5y ago

The best way I have been able to do this is to write a book as I am doing my research. I organize an outline for the ancestors, fill in the details I can find as paragraphs, and pretty much have a footnote (or sometimes two) with every sentence with a source. For a particularly tricky ancestor, it will start as just a list of sources or leads in roughly chronological order. I work through and try to form these sources into narrative paragraphs as I piece together what is accurate, how they are connected to children/parents/spouses/etc. In some cases, I disprove other people's unsupported theories, and in some cases I present a case for my own conclusions, noting any ambiguity or uncertainty. I then update my primary tree (on Ancestry.com) with the results of my research, and link or upload the most important original documents there. At some point, I'll upload PDFs of the chapters to the relevant people's pages. Is there software that could organize this all and make it easier? I'm not totally sure, but I'd be open to considering it.