Two workers pruning street trees in London during World War I,  released by the Imperial War Museum on the  IWM Non Commercial Licence . I have been pruning lately; not outside, where as I write it is still cold, windy and a week ago, slushing.  At first, it was exciting to whack people right out of my Ancestry.com main DNA tree, because some ancient "ancestors" had no sources, and conflicting or nonsense "facts." Delete, delete, delete. But sometimes while falling asleep, I wondered if the name itself is a clue I should have left in the tree.  A recent interview with Roberta Estes * quotes her: "E very connection has the potential to be incorrect.  I’d much rather saw a branch off than continue to bark up the wrong tree. "   I find that statement reassuring.  When I resume researching the pruned line, I'll find evidence unavailable when I was a beginner. Back then, I blindly trusted other people's trees. I thought that they had done thei...

"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.  "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 rec...