Hey Kathy and welcome to Genieoggltree. I may have to look it up myself.
A friendly warning. Every day I learn something new and I too was excited, there is a tree which looks professionaly done which dates back to 1213. But I won't try any further merging at this point. It's very tempting, believe me, it would double the size of my tree. However, the issue that we all have with these trees is:
1.) wheres the proof? if just one of your connections that you merged is wrong, your tree could collapse like a house of cards. After all the work, to me, that would be demoralizing.
2.)Have you looked at the individual fcats listed for a particular individual(Righht Click on Name then View/Edit Details) in your tree? Merging creates duplicates and triplicates and quads and we could go on.
Sure, FTM makes it easy to grow your tree through the use of the "Leaf Hints", but once you start really researching and digging into the data to document your people, the parts of data become more important than the whole of the appearance and depth of your tree.
I know its not as exciting as revealing a possible new branch to your tree, the urge to keep searching is great. But, do yourself a favor, take a week, pick a husband, wife and one of their children and prove they existed., prove they lived here, prove they were born there, prove they got married, etc. and then mannualy enter the data into FTM. Don't use merge. Learn the software, run reports on those people, see the fruits of your labor. I think you'll get a better feel for how important supporting data is to the stability and validity of your tree.
After the week, now go back and look again at a number of individuals in ayour tree. You'll now see all the issues created by the merging you did earlier on public trees.
I'm not saying don't use the merge feature at all, its great for census records, vital statistics and everything else. Its just not ready to be used with public trees.
Anyways, Happy Trails, Good Luck and do more chatting with those advanced users. They know the pitfalls and dangers. I'm not one of those experts, just an intermediatee who has seen the light on Public Trees, AND...Paid the price for using them.
As some famous historical character once said.."I have not yet begun to document!"
A friendly warning. Every day I learn something new and I too was excited, there is a tree which looks professionaly done which dates back to 1213. But I won't try any further merging at this point. It's very tempting, believe me, it would double the size of my tree. However, the issue that we all have with these trees is:
1.) wheres the proof? if just one of your connections that you merged is wrong, your tree could collapse like a house of cards. After all the work, to me, that would be demoralizing.
2.)Have you looked at the individual fcats listed for a particular individual(Righht Click on Name then View/Edit Details) in your tree? Merging creates duplicates and triplicates and quads and we could go on.
Sure, FTM makes it easy to grow your tree through the use of the "Leaf Hints", but once you start really researching and digging into the data to document your people, the parts of data become more important than the whole of the appearance and depth of your tree.
I know its not as exciting as revealing a possible new branch to your tree, the urge to keep searching is great. But, do yourself a favor, take a week, pick a husband, wife and one of their children and prove they existed., prove they lived here, prove they were born there, prove they got married, etc. and then mannualy enter the data into FTM. Don't use merge. Learn the software, run reports on those people, see the fruits of your labor. I think you'll get a better feel for how important supporting data is to the stability and validity of your tree.
After the week, now go back and look again at a number of individuals in ayour tree. You'll now see all the issues created by the merging you did earlier on public trees.
I'm not saying don't use the merge feature at all, its great for census records, vital statistics and everything else. Its just not ready to be used with public trees.
Anyways, Happy Trails, Good Luck and do more chatting with those advanced users. They know the pitfalls and dangers. I'm not one of those experts, just an intermediatee who has seen the light on Public Trees, AND...Paid the price for using them.
As some famous historical character once said.."I have not yet begun to document!"