Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every now and then on a small topic that pops into my head. This one is a good adage to apply to your genealogy research.
When in doubt, leave it out
If you want to build a reliable tree, you need to be very careful about what you add to it. If you’re not sure that an ancestor you’ve come across in your research is your ancestor, don’t add that person to your tree until you’ve done more research to verify that this is your person. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the clue; you can park it somewhere. I use follow-up folders organized by surname in Apple Notes to store that information. (I am in the process of switching over to Apple Notes from Evernote for my research log and follow up folders.)
This applies to sources, as well as people. I don’t add any fact to my tree that I can’t back up with a source. And I want to make sure it’s a reliable source before I add it to the tree.
As someone who created a very unreliable tree in the beginning, I think it’s worthwhile to take a slow and meticulous approach to make sure that my tree is rock solid.
Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash
Why are you abandoning Evernote? Is it because of their recent price hike?
Yes, that’s exactly why. I promise a blog post about it!
I ditched. They were bugging me about changing my subscription and increasing then subscription price. In the process I tried to download an update and the update deleted all my data. I went to Evernote.
Did you ditch Evernote, Jerry? If so, what did you switch to?
I have been using Microsoft OneNote for awhile and I am happy enough with it. I have been a Windows and Microsoft user from the corporate world forever, so this is the path of least resistance for me. Also, we have a multi-user MS Office 365 for home which includes OneNote. So it’s not free per se, but it is available at no additional cost as it is included in Office 365, which I use for Word and Excel.
I looked at Evernote a while back but it would have been an additional cost in my specific situation. It seemed to be very similar to OneNote. I also sat in on a genealogy-focused Evernote presentation a while back and it seemed I could do, or was doing, what the presenter was showing in Evernote. This not a knock on Evernote, but I could not find that one compelling feature that would convince me to switch back then.
Back when I started using Evernote, OneNote wasn’t available for the Mac. And Evernote was free. (It technically still is, but the Evernote free version is very limited.) From what I hear, Evernote and OneNote are very similar.
How about, “When in doubt, leave a note”, I wished that rhymed. This may apply to conflicting information more than completely undocumented people. I tend to work in Family Tree Maker, Ancestry (synced to FTM), FamilySearch Tree, and WikiTree. Each place has a way to add comments and/or tag relationship as uncertain to let yourself or other researchers know what is uncertain and why. I have started using these fields much more liberally as I become more experienced.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I suspect you’re trusting yourself more than I am to notice those uncertain tags! I need to look to see whether Reunion has that feature.
Instead of leaving out an uncertain name, event, or fact for my tree, I use words like “maybe,” “probably,” and even “fishy” and “probably NOT.” I NEED those possibilities to be on display whenever I look at the family, but I want to be clear that I’m uncertain. For example, a cousin might tell me, “I think there was another daughter, maybe named Mary.” That’s very useful information if true, so I put “maybe Mary” into the name field of an additional child. When the only source I have gives a birth date that seems wrong, I put it into the birth date field and put “fishy date-born too early for mother” into the birth place field, maybe with a place name.
The memo field would work as well for events, except that my own Family View compresses the memo field too much to be very visible. I want the uncertainty to jump out at me more than that. Also, the memo field doesn’t appear in all reports.
Using the place field for a comment louses things up for people who try to use strict place name standards in their trees…but I already disapprove of the industry’s standards for place names anyway. (Implying the words “township” and “county” instead of stating them can create ambiguities of hundreds of miles. Example: Warren County, Ohio, is more than 100 miles from Warrren, Ohio.)
Yes, these methods mess up the appearance when I generate a narrative report, but at least they express my uncertainty in a way that might help other researchers.
Sorry for the long comment!
Marian, I always love it when you leave a long comment! Thanks for sharing your perspective, which makes sense. For me, personally, I’m still not adding anyone to the tree, but I do use the Notes field occasionally for these question marks and I have follow-up folders in Evernote.
I would love to see your set up in Apple Notes. I am also moving from Evernote using a mixture of Notion and Apple Notes. I like Apple Notes for its simplicity but find Notion a bit overwhelming.