How Many Family Files?
Feb 5th, 2008 by kenopoly
OK, I love pondering strange questions here! Today, I want to investigate how many family tree files one should have.
So, first off, I would ask how many family trees do you have on your computer? My first guess would be 4. One for each of your grandparents. That’s the way I started off when I first started researching. That way if someone asks about just the Forbes research, I can reference that tree. Same with my other 3 lines. Some may argue that just one is enough. You can extract information about Forbes ancestors from within that tree into a separate gedcom file. So, how do you all feel? How does everyone else (and I respect the wisdom of my fellow genea-bloggers) do their family trees?
In case you are wondering, this post is a result of my cleaning up some of my genealogy research on my computer. Other than the 3000+ files I have to sort through, I still have 23 family tree files! Six of those were called the same thing! How can that be? Maybe that is where I lose a lot of my information. I really am not sure which file I am entering my info into.
For the record, as of this moment I have only one family tree file. It is called Ken’s Documented Research (2008) and it only has 254 individuals right now. That is because I am starting completely over right now. If I don’t have bona fide proof of a relationship I am not including that person. I may have a file that will list possibilities but I want my family tree file to be one that I know is right!
So, has anyone else ever had this dilemna? Share with me (and my readers) how you solved your problems!
Have a great day everyone!
I have 3 main genealogy files. One for all of my husbands lines, one for my maternal line and one for paternal. I have a dozen small files that either came from someone else or that I started because I thought a line might connect to one of mine but haven’t yet made the connection. I did end up with duplicate files at one time and entered some new stuff into one and other stuff into the other. I renamed them so I’d know which is the up to date file. I kept the other one to check when I can;t find something I know I should have.
I only have one file for all of my own family that I have entered. I have other files relating to those families but which I’ve chosen not to be part of my main database. I have other files for work I’ve done for others.
The main reason I have one file is that I quickly discovered that I would have lines in the county where my families settled that connected with one another on both sides of the family. I just don’t see a need for multiple databases for my own research. I do export subsets regularly so those could easily be loaded if I really wanted to do so.