First of all, I happen to live in the same area where most of my ancestors lived. I have surnames in my family tree in, say the C18th, who were recorded hereabouts in the 1379 subsidy roll. There are transcripts of PRs either in print, formerly in print but now on archive.org or on data CDs which cover most of what I need. This means that filing and retrieval of most physical records isn't a problem. Also I've been able to grab some of the machine readable stuff into an RDBMS which now contains most of the C18th & parts of adjacent centuries of baptisms for 3 parishes (the exact cover varies, plus about a century of marriages for another plus I have almost all for late C16th & half the C17th in a holding table. Naturally transcriptions are only as good as the transcriber so it means occasional trips to the library a couple of miles away to check things on microfiche - assuming they're legible ;) In this respect I'm probably a good deal more fortunate than most although my wife's family are a different matter altogether as she's from Ireland and we have trouble in some cases getting beyond the late C19th. However, one of the penalties of having one's ancestors in the same place for generations is that lots of collaterals are also around and often using the same names. That means that problems start to arise long before records dry up. It means that I have to try to sort out which child of George Boothroyd belongs to which of the several contemporary George Boothroyds etc. My solution to that is to use a spreadsheet (recounted here in previous posts) to shuffle records into coherent family groups based on clues of location and occupation of fathers and likely assumptions about minimum intervals between baptisms of children to the same family. The sort of rule-based approach which Richard mentioned in the previous thread could be really useful here. The spreadsheet approach is made easier where the baptisms come from the period covered by my database. When it gets earlier than that I have sometimes resorted to grabbing IGI PR transcripts as GEDCOMs & loading them into Gramps to sort which is why it hurt when the GEDCOM download broke at the turn of the year. I also use Gramps for recording finished work. I also keep a Gramps database containing location information and merge exports of that with the various family databases to keep the locations consistent. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

On Monday, May 23, 2011 6:51:44 PM UTC-4, Ian Goddard wrote: > First of all, I happen to live in the same area where most of my > ancestors lived. I have surnames in my family tree in, say the C18th, > who were recorded hereabouts in the 1379 subsidy roll. There are > transcripts of PRs either in print, formerly in print but now on > archive.org or on data CDs which cover most of what I need. This means > that filing and retrieval of most physical records isn't a problem. > Also I've been able to grab some of the machine readable stuff into an > RDBMS which now contains most of the C18th & parts of adjacent centuries > of baptisms for 3 parishes (the exact cover varies, plus about a century > of marriages for another plus I have almost all for late C16th & half > the C17th in a holding table. Naturally transcriptions are only as good > as the transcriber so it means occasional trips to the library a couple > of miles away to check things on microfiche - assuming they're legible > ;) In this respect I'm probably a good deal more fortunate than most > although my wife's family are a different matter altogether as she's > from Ireland and we have trouble in some cases getting beyond the late > C19th. > > However, one of the penalties of having one's ancestors in the same > place for generations is that lots of collaterals are also around and > often using the same names. That means that problems start to arise > long before records dry up. It means that I have to try to sort out > which child of George Boothroyd belongs to which of the several > contemporary George Boothroyds etc. My solution to that is to use a > spreadsheet (recounted here in previous posts) to shuffle records into > coherent family groups based on clues of location and occupation of > fathers and likely assumptions about minimum intervals between baptisms > of children to the same family. The sort of rule-based approach which > Richard mentioned in the previous thread could be really useful here. > > The spreadsheet approach is made easier where the baptisms come from the > period covered by my database. When it gets earlier than that I have > sometimes resorted to grabbing IGI PR transcripts as GEDCOMs & loading > them into Gramps to sort which is why it hurt when the GEDCOM download > broke at the turn of the year. > > I also use Gramps for recording finished work. I also keep a Gramps > database containing location information and merge exports of that with > the various family databases to keep the locations consistent. > Ian, Thanks. You have a very practical approach. Your data is in lots of forms so you manage each form the way that seems to make the most sense. You summarize the important information in a spreadsheet so you can get a high-level overview of your data, and have it in a form where you can rearrange inforamtion quickly and easily to experiment with different ways of joining evidence into persons and persons into families. Of the four ways of handling evidence I summarized in my response to Steven, I think we'd have to add a fifth now: 5. An ad hoc approach in which we keep different types of evidence, taken from different types of sources, in different formats that seem best for that type. Note one very interesting thing about the five answers so far. No one says they use their genealogical application to store their evidence. Is this a failing of genelaogical software in general, or is handling the evidence and handling the persons such two fundamentally different things that we need two completely different programs for handling them? My answer is that genealogical programs should be able to handle evidence, but no one has figured out how to do it yet. Tom