As I was going through some older messages which I never answered on my Ancestry.com account, I came across one message that asked why a name was missing from one family group on one of my Ancestry.com family trees.
- "I notice that you have not included ____ as a child of this couple (see 1860 Census). Is there a reason?
- "Sorry for taking so long to reply. I'm catching up on a few older
messages. I really appreciate all the work you do on the genealogy.
There is no reason. Although my trees might give the impression that they are thorough because I add sources and photos, they really aren't anywhere near complete. I don't really have a complete file anywhere. It is more like a bunch of trees in progress. Thanks for pointing out ____. When people like you point out things it sometimes gives me motivation to do a little work on a certain family and sometimes leads to fun discoveries.
I usually try to make sure I get data I have typed into FamilySearch Family Tree little by little and in the process I sometimes learn new things. Back when I started I began to put everything in PAF. I know there are syncing programs that work with online and offline. I have used Ancestral Quest 12 and RootsMagic with new.FamilySearch. Most recently I have considered getting Family Tree Maker for Mac 2 and using my Ancestry.com McCormick Family Tree as a starting point to pull all my research of interest back into one master tree. That is another project though so I am putting it off currently. My old PAF/Ancestral Quest and RootsMagic files are so huge with so many thousands of people that are only in there because of the times I imported whole files from RootsWeb.com... Cleaning those up isn't even something I want to do because of how out of hand they are.
I know you didn't ask for this big of a reply. Thanks for humoring me.
