Hello! It's been awhile since I posted here, I've been engrossed in my Vincent research and meeting new cousins! The tip I want to share today has to do with research. As I've been amassing data on this family, I've found that I needed someplace to organize it all but I didn't want to put my theories into my personal genealogy software just yet, since they are only unproven theories, and because what if tomorrow all the un-filed photographs, folders, documents, and stacks of books that have built up on my desk were to suddenly collapse and crush me? I wouldn't want my survivors looking at that software and being led down the wrong genealogical path. (I think about stuff like that)
My solution was Ancestry Family Trees. I created a Vincent tree and unlike my other trees on Ancestry, I made this one private since it contains large amounts of unproven information. The benefit of this is twofold -- firstly, everything is organized in one place and secondly, Ancestry looks at my tree and sends me hints. Including birth and death certificates, census records, marriage records, military records, photos, fellow researcher's trees, and family stories so far. As new databases are added to the site, Ancestry will automatically search them for my persons of interest. I can tweak the tree, adding and changing names to see if more tips pop up, and then change it back. The tree needn't be detailed; names, approximate dates and a location if you have one will do. And I can delete the tree at any time or make it public.
It's made documenting this family and storing what I find much easier and quicker than searching Ancestry's mountain of databases manually, though I wouldn't rely on it entirely since oddball spellings do pop up.
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