Starting Over

For about the past ten years, my genealogy research has pretty much stalemated. This summer, I decided to pursue a project that I had started over Christmas vacation – the digitizing of my genealogy files. This long, slow project is also giving me screen time to explore. During that exploration time, I stumbled across the concept of a ‘genealogy do-over’. Intrigued but not really wanting to start over, I signed up for cycle 3 of ‘Genealogy Do-Over’ on Facebook.

One of the rationales behind a ‘do-over’ is that many genealogies contain data that was imported from other researchers without documentation to support the lineage. I have to admit that unfortunately, I did import another researchers tree in my early years. I learned from that mistake and have been careful about importing data since. This argument along with the valid point that some data may be in a genealogy file that doesn’t have sufficient documentation have caused me to seriously consider an actual do-over. However, the following aspects of my research are causing me to strongly consider a go-over vs. a do-over

• Same name research: My first encounter with this issue was trying to find my great-grandfather’s grandfather. I knew his name was James Crawford and that his son, Nelson, lived in Warren County Indiana. Since there was a James Crawford family in Warren County of the right age to be Nelson’s family, I tried my darnedest to put Nelson in this family. In the process, I researched not only this James Crawford but three others who were in the same area of Kentucky at the same time before I was able to separate out my James Crawford. My genealogy file contains information on all of these men and their families.
• Cluster Genealogy: In trying to separate out the James Crawford’s and to potentially identify their migration path and ancestors prior to Kentucky, I have researched a cluster of people that migrated from Kentucky to the same area of Ohio.
• Collateral Descendants: To help find elusive ancestors, I have tracked information on siblings and their descendants. I don’t have all lines to the present day but I have a lot into the 1900s.

For these reasons, I am going to stick with a go-over starting with myself.