Family Trees - Top 10 Tips

The following are a general set of guidelines which should prove useful as your tree grows or if you decide to use a software package to help you manage your family tree. Following them takes very little effort but can save you plenty in the long run. They will prove particularly useful if you wish to use automated internet searches or wish to merge/join family trees with others.
(Remember, these are only guidelines. Adopt and adapt as you see fit, but don't blame us later!)

1. Use a standard format for all Locations
• ""City, County, Country""
• ""Town, City, County, Country""
• ""Street, Town, Country""
i.e. ALWAYS have a country and always separate with commas. Without this there is no way of distinguishing individual elements of a location.


2. BMD info should be as complete as possible
• ALWAYS include dates and locations
• Legacy 6, provides an automated IGI check, great for pre-1837 (it's free, but may take time on big trees)
• Formatting your locations as above will help greatly in finding good matches
• Set limit to 30 matches for bulk searches. If you hit the limit then re-run them separately, later.
• Set year to +/-1 or 2, to catch most census derived birth inaccuracies
• Only open up the "Possible Matches" when it's "Retrieving Matches", or else it stops searching. Then use "Next".


3. Merge Duplicate Individuals
• If cousins marry ensure they exist only once, don't have either them or their parent multiple times.
• Any genealogy tool worth using will have matching and merging functionality, run it periodically
• Check familiar names when they appear to avoid accidently re-creating a lineage you already have


4. Don't have Empty Locations
• Give it your best shot, it may help solve the problem later
• A good guess is to use the location of their baptism/siblings/parents/marriage/wife/1st child
• Always follow the standard format but include a "?"
• e.g. "Bradford, Yorkshire, England?" or maybe just "Yorkshire, England?" if you'd rather cut down on the number of unique locations used.
This may mean you are holding inexact information, but that fact can easily be recognised by the existance of the question marks. Without any estimated birth location the process of checking for duplicates will prove either painful or of limited worth.


5. Don't have Empty Year-Of-Birth
• Give it your best shot, it may help solve the problem later
• A good guess is 20-25 years before the marriage or first child
• Some Gedcom creation programs do not allow a "Circa" or "abt" indicator, if not try one of the following:
• make it the same as the baptism (if know)
• round up or down to the nearest 5 or 10 (husbands are usually older than wives)
• match the wife/husbands birth if you have it
• make it 20-25 years before the birth of the first know child
• make it 20-25 years after the marriage or birth of known parents
This may mean you are holding inexact information, but that fact can easily be recognised by the non-existance of an exact date for Birth/Baptism. Without even an estimated year of birth the process of checking for duplicates will prove either painful or of limited worth.


6. Don't have Empty Names
• If you don't know the wife's maiden name, give her the husbands name, after all she is part of that family. If required at a later date, then most genealogy tools provide an option to find marriages sharing the same surname.
• In nearly all cases you have a good idea of the the birth year, birth location and family name. Use them. This could easily be enough information for a search to solve the riddle, blank records may get ignored.
• If a forename or even surname is missing then enter a standard piece of text eg "(Unknown)"
Many software tools will either invalidate or simply ignore totally blank names.
If you publish your tree it will look far better and group people better if you follow the above.


7. Record the Source of Information
• If possible, try to keep a record of where all information came from and when.
• This includes censuses, BMD certificates & records, newpaper articles, word of mouth etc
• Genealogy tools have facilities to help, otherwise add it to the general notes or track it yourself manually
• Once your tree grows you will simply not be able to remember where every bit of information came from.
• If you merge someone elses tree into yours then append a source of some type.
Chinese whispers are not a highly regarded element of genealogy research!


8. Confim supplied information
• Much useful information can be given by other people. Check the information as others may not be as exacting or clear minded as yourself!


9. Data Quality - Perform the following checks periodically
• Ensure you only have one tree in your family data.
• Ensure you do not have individuals more than once.
• Check individuals only have 2 or lesss parents.
• Check for blank fields (Forename, Surname, Birth Location, Birth Year).


10. Error Finding - Perform the following checks periodically
• Children born when either parent is aged under 15.
• Children born when mother is over 50.
• Children born after death of a parent.
• Individuals' events are out of order. (birth after baptism, death after burial etc)
• Individual marries when aged under 15.
• Any events occurs to an individual aged more than 110 years.
• Burial date is more than 30 days after death.
Most software packages provide tools to assist you with these checks.

---

---