Jill's Jigsaw

Mr GeniAus and I are hoarders. Back in 2014 I even started writing about my efforts to offload stuff  in Diary of a decrapifier.

When we moved house two years ago we thought that we had tossed out a lot of stuff prior to the big move but we didn't! Two years down the track we still have a garage that is full of cartons and  odd bits of furniture. Over the past few days we have stepped up our efforts to claim the garage for our cars.

As well as attending to the big stuff I have been looking at my tech gear. We took a hammer to our museum of laptops' harddrives earlier in the year. Gone tonight are a few old thumb drives of 128 and 256 megabytes together with old cables, adaptors and chargers. I am now looking at old external hard drives (and taking a trip down memory lane) and copying files I want to keep (nearly everything) onto my 8TB external Hard Drive. This has taken me ages as I look at the websites I built in the late nineties and early this century.

One gem I found was Jill's Jigsaw, my first family history related site that I built around 2000 using Adobe Dreamweaver. I had a narrative page each for some of my earliest ancestors and spreadsheets that listed all ancestors and their families. I kept this up until I created the GeniAus family site using TNG in 2009. It is so much easier to look after my current site than Jill's Jigsaw.

It was gratifying to find that all of the links on the site still worked when I fired it up in Chrome.

Do you still have a copy of your first attempt at an online tree?

Requiem for a Blog

From time to time I get an idea for a blog name so I go over to Blogger and set up a blog with that name in case I decide to use it in the future. On other occasions I have started a blog as a result of a particular idea, blogged enthusiastically for a year or two and then given up. Whenever I give a workshop on setting up a Blogger blog I give a practical demonstration on how to do so.

When I checked this morning I had twenty blogs on the Blogger platform. I haven't checked my two Wordpress accounts yet!

As I have been trying to tidy up or decrapify my life in both the physical and online world I decided that some blogs had to go. I exercised the Delete Blog key six times.

Please join me in saying farewell to these six blogs.

Plugging Away

I have previously blogged about I am decrapifying my life, this also applies to my family history files and tree.

In a recent GeniAus Hangout on Air someone suggested writing down the steps one is taking while Revisiting Recording and Revising one's research.

I have previously mentioned that I think this is an ongoing evaluative process that never stops but I realise that, although I am continually  Revisiting Recording and Revising some of the people in my database may have been missed.

These are the actions I am taking to ensure that I eventually cover all people in my database, it may take some time!

Common errors I have found so far are many hundreds of instances of sources recorded as notes, many unsourced assertions, some wrong genders or no gender and quite a few typos. There are a few duplicate people but not as many as I thought I might have. Until the new version 6 I could not add witnesses to events into Family Historian so Witness Recording is an important part of the Revision.

I am forcing myself to be consistent, I am recording the same type of information for the indivisuals in my database in the same format  in the same fields. Over the years I have used several genealogy databases and just transferred my gedcoms from one to another. Inconsistency has been a result of both this and my past practices.

The Jobs

* Revisit and Revise my Place List in FH that was a bit of a mess. I feel pleased that I sorted this before attacking the people in my database.

* Revisit all of our direct ancestors in my FH database and revise their entries.

* Sort the entries in my FH database by "Last Updated" and revisit and review these systematically (in Alphabetical order) . The earliest are 14/8/2010. Once I revisit and review these I will then work through other dates systematically. I will examine each of these entries putting more effort into those who are direct ancestors of Mr GeniAus and I. Once I catch up with the backlog I can continue this process.

* Go through all of my physical family history folders and extract the BDM certificate copies and transcriptions I hold. After going through these with a fine tooth comb (reviewing) and extracting and recording as much information as I can into my FH database I will scan them then file them all by individual's Surname/Given Names in archival quality sleeves in an archival quality binder.

* Examine all of the papers in my physical family history folders, scan them and file into my digital folders, extract and record as much information as I can into my FH database.

* Periodically update my website to reflect the changes I have made in Family Historian. (There have been at least half a dozen updates so far this month.)

Ancestry Antics

Since I bloggred on Wednesday about decrapifying the hints on my Ancestry Private tree I have managaed to  prune down 45 pages of hints to just two.

In a reply to a comment on a post somewhere I said that I only had a pruned down tree on Ancestry and that was enough for me but a girl can change her mind - can't she? Having checked out those (mostly irrelevant) hints I took the easy way out, deleted my tree and replaced it with a newer bigger model. It took less than 3 minutes to accomplish this.

I guess Ancestry will serve out all those bad hints again but there will be some gems amongst the dross and I have a whole lot more "Cousin Bait" out there.

OMG - the new tree has only been uploaded for about ten minutes and there are 112 hints (different from the old ones). Here we go again!!

112 new hints

Green Leaves

Decrapifying is my present household activity. I am trying to clean up and clear out some of the stuff we have accululated in over 40 years of marriage so that, in the not too distant future, we can relocate to a more modest residence.

Of course I can't do this all the time so I am doing some decrapifying in my genealogy space. I have been a member of Ancestry since the olden days and I can't remember when they introduced those shaky green leaves but I know that I have never taken any notice of them. So my first decrapyfying geneatask has been to get rid of those leaves - an interesting exercise.

The leaves seem to multiply overnight so that I am making very slow progress.
 So many of the hints are for events that are already in my Ancestry private tree (a pruned down version of http://www.geniaus.net). Dera Ancestry, I'd rather have fewer hints that lead me to new information.

 I can't understand why Ancestry throws up hints from foreign countries for people who were totally BMDed in Australia or England.

 Over the years I have generously shared gedcom files with other people. I get all excited when a green leaf leads me to an ancestor on a shared tree and then get annoyed (with myself for  prior sharing) when I find my info posted on someone's public tree. I keep my info up to date and correct my errors when I find them - these people don't!

 I was pleased when one genie I contacted after being directed to her tree removed the misinformation there but she told me she had copied it from another tree........Deep breath.

  In spite of my frustrations I have found some good leads to check out. Probably 1/25 of the leaves bear fruit for me. So I will attack my next 35 pages of hints tonight.  I wonder how many I'll have in the morning.