In Praise of Hopscotching Around Your Tree
"Hopscotching" might not even be a proper verb. For those of you who have forgotten what hopscotch is: all it takes is a stick or piece of chalk to draw a pattern in the dirt or sidewalk. Then you hop through the pattern. Google says: "The goal of hopscotch is to be the first player to successfully hop and jump across the hopscotch board (1-10 squares"—and then a bunch of rules.
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| "Hope & Megan" CC BY-NC 2.0 |
The picture above is closer to what I recall. I remember my kids playing it on the driveway. Recently I've been doing something similar in my Ancestry.com® online trees, using "Pro Tools" which costs me $10 per month. Besides the excellent capacity to see the DNA matches of my matches, Pro Tools can also sort their matches, which often gives me wonderful clues about where they fit into my tree.
Sometimes I just want work that requires less brain power and also improves the quality of my tree. For various reasons, I recently had to recreate a tree from a GEDCOM, which brought over some old errors I had since fixed, and missed connected records more recently added. Pro tools shows that as of today:
Since it used to be in the thousands, 400 duplicates is a victory. In the past few weeks, I've also been taking the time to remove old bogus links or citations, and doing some basic record linking, to get the overall quality of the tree up as the duplicates get closer to zero. Then I can go to work on the other errors also.
Other Ways to Improve Your Tree
In Ancestry.com at least, you have always had access to a list of all people in your tree, but that does not always point you to duplicates. What if you have a found a woman with her family before marriage, using her birth surname, and later also found her with a husband, using his surname. Pro Tools also finds people who were named differently in different records, perhaps using a first name, later using initials or the middle name, or even nickname. Merging these profiles into one, unites all the records and paints a fuller picture of the identity of each person as they moved through life. And that is our goal; building the identity of our ancestors, not just their names, dates and places. We want their stories.
If you have good genealogy software where your main tree resides, it often has excellent ways to find and merge duplicate profiles. Of course if we are careful as we enter the data in the first place, there is nothing to clean up. But many of us began while not knowing best practices, and did not realize until later that there was a mess. Tools to help make the cleanup work more fun are worth a few dollars per month while you use them.
I would love to hear readers' suggestions of other ways to play and work on your database, whether using genealogy software, or other platforms such as FamilySearch or MyHeritage. Please write a paragraph or two and send to m.strickland@skcgs.org.
Rabbit Holes Can be Fun
The best thing about hopscotching through the tree is sometimes finding a "rabbit hole" to dive into. Look at who I found the other night:
Honestly, could you have resisted a name like Minerva Jane Waggle? You can see by the "how you are related" line that this really was just for fun, but wow, did she have an interesting life, and the research was fascinating! What's the most interesting 'rabbit hole' discovery you've made while hopscotching through your tree?" Write us!
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