The numbers FTM (and your computing power) can handle aside, it can of course become humanly unmanageable after a point. There are almost certain going to be common but unrelated surnames occurring in more than one branch, and it can become confusing if they are all listed together!
If you're in touch with other members of the extended family, and would like to invite them into your Ancestry tree (either as guests or helpers with full editing rights), you may not wish them to have access to more than one or two branches. That means separate trees.
Splitting a tree later is not a good idea. I've just tried exporting different branches and creating trees for each from the exported files, which come out as backup files one has to "restore". There's a glitch in the Export/Restore process if you sensibly specify that the Export/Backup should only contain items associated with the selected people - ie, you don't want all the unrelated media etc. Restoring then promptly drops the Description field from FTM, affecting the Birth, Death, Marriage, Residence record types and a few others. The data itself is there - but you can't get at it to edit it, and can't add any more. Alternative methods of splitting are somewhat tedious and liable to cause simple errors. I'm hoping Ancestry will fix this glitch soon, but its obviously unwise to plan on splitting again later on ...
If you're in touch with other members of the extended family, and would like to invite them into your Ancestry tree (either as guests or helpers with full editing rights), you may not wish them to have access to more than one or two branches. That means separate trees.
Splitting a tree later is not a good idea. I've just tried exporting different branches and creating trees for each from the exported files, which come out as backup files one has to "restore". There's a glitch in the Export/Restore process if you sensibly specify that the Export/Backup should only contain items associated with the selected people - ie, you don't want all the unrelated media etc. Restoring then promptly drops the Description field from FTM, affecting the Birth, Death, Marriage, Residence record types and a few others. The data itself is there - but you can't get at it to edit it, and can't add any more. Alternative methods of splitting are somewhat tedious and liable to cause simple errors. I'm hoping Ancestry will fix this glitch soon, but its obviously unwise to plan on splitting again later on ...