Genealogy/Family Tree software

[Martin Brown]

Ideally find someone in the family who is interested in it and get them a copy of the latest version of Family Tree Maker with a free 30 day Ancestry subscription. If the paper version is any good you can strip mine the Ancestry database to confirm what is written down. Be sure to follow the instructions to cancel your free trial carefully.

I'd be very suspicious of anything claiming to go back past the 1600's unless the name was very very unusual. It gets incredibly difficult when the records are handwritten in Latin and origin is "out of county".

I reckon Legacy on Windows is pretty good as free software goes. Options online here:

Whatever you use make sure it can import/export GEDCOM.

Possible but a lot easier into a database intended to cope with multiple spouses and quirky unmarried couples and couplings.

+1

Also check your data against IGI and/or Ancestry as you do data entry - nothing worse than adding loads of duff relations to a database.

[Bob Eager]

Wikitree requires registration only for reasons of privacy.

As for the "help", that is completely optional.

[Bill]

I am especially wary of the privacy element because of other family members.

For example, a recent birth was not put in the Telegraph because a member of the family is paranoid about full names and dates of birth being accessible in the public domain. In my own case, I logged in to Twitter, apparently successfully, after several years of ignoring it, only to find that I had assumed the identity of someone in California. It wasn't easy to reach a human in the Twitter organisation to retrieve my identity. I have no idea whether this was malicious or just that Twitter's database was broken. Worrying either way.

The video interview full of woffle with the two fat ladies on Wikitree's homepage put me off, but I have registered to give it a go.

[mail-veil]

You will find plenty of duff data in both Ancestry where uploaded trees are frequently copied by other interested parties without any checking so just propagate errors. Beware the "granny hunters" whose primary purpose seems to be filling a pedigree chart with names and dates with little care for accuracy or connected social history. Even transcribed official documents contain errors and step back one - census enumerators were past masters at that when transcribing from the Schedules to the enumerator's books. Also, transcriptions of early BMD indexes which could be excruciatingly difficult to read are to be treated with suspicion. In both of these document types that initial transcription cannot be directly checked as the sources no longer exist.

Of course the IGI is fraught with problems especially where the information is submitted rather than transcribed; this can be checked against the Batch Number. If an event it identified by just a year rather than a full date and place it will usually be a guess rather than from primary source documents. One of the problems is that trees that are uploaded may contain the word "about" in front of a year; the IGI strips the "about" off.

Regardless of where information comes from you must always check it against primary source information. If it has been transcribed by anyone the risk of errors is there.

All that said, it can be a most rewarding hobby!

Mike

[Halmyre]

If you're using Ancestry, be prepared to think out of the box when searchin g. Some of the transcription is ludicrously inaccurate - I believe optical character recognition software was used for a lot of it, with manual input to cover the bits where the OCR gave up. You can alert Ancestry to any erro rs, but all they do is add a note to the transcribed data - they don't upda te the search indexes. Considering the price they charge, it's taking the p iss a bit.

[Huge]

My Mother, who is a keen genealogist (and teaches a class on the subject) says to trust nothing unless you've corroborating evidence and preferably sight of the source material. And family oral history is worse than useless. (There was a story that my great-grandfather & his wife caught the flu, she died, but they didn't tell him for fear of upsetting him, he felt better and went into her room and there she wasn't and dropped dead on the spot. In actual fact, they died eight years apart...)

[mail-veil]

Ancestry do add submitted corrections to searches but they appear in search results as the original so it appears initially as if they have done nothing until you click to view the item then the change becomes evident.

They do not replace the original which is quite correct as submitted changes might be for reasons other than Transcription Error. They might be because of prior knowledge such as an Emumerator's error or even because a householder made a mistake on a census schedule. So Ancestry are doing it right. It might be better if they also showed correction in initial search results but that would greatly complicate query reports. This would become worse if there were multiple notifications on one record. So even if something that you think looks wrong appears in search results do look at them; you might get a nice surprise!

If you think about the Ancestry annual charge in terms of the alternative cost of travelling to archives then it is cheap.

Mike

[stuart noble]

And it might be free at your local library. It is in ours but they don't publicise the fact because the staff can't deal with customer queries.

[Bob Eager]

Create a Wikitree account and have a look. There are multiple levels of privacy, and anyone still alive has their details locked by default.

[John J Armstrong]

Agreed. And it needn't take that long, depending of course on how good you are at typing. I'm no great shakes, but I found it quite quick, and I enjoyed the sense of achievement when I saw my tree (work-in-progress!) on screen.

[Allan]

+1