www.itowler.com

While I have a goal of having 2650 people in my tree by years end (and I think that this can be done) I have a bigger goal of getting the tree Documented in an appropriate manner. To that end I have spent a great deal of time recently cleaning up the sources I use in my tree. One of the efforts that I have undertaken is attaching images to the sources If I have them. This is useful for a number of reasons, First off, you no longer have to leave the family tree section of the webpage to see a document, now you can view it along side the individual that the record pertains to. For the record, most of my sources are United States census records, and as such I have named the file using the year of the census followed by the head of the Household.

I am pretty sure that I have attached images to every US census record that I currently have in the tree. This has taken a good bit of time, but I feel that it has been worth it. During the process of adding the images to the each source, I have discovered that I am missing some records (think census time points, i.e. I have 1900,1920,1930, but I am missing 1910) and it was a great chance to review the census records that I already had. Looking back at some of the census records now, I am starting to recognize names of people that lived nearby, that I did not recognize a year ago. This is a prime example of why you should go back and review the data that you have already collected every now and then to see if some of the information that you need is already sitting right in front of you.

One of my next tasks in cleaning up the tree is to start to document and cite each fact that I have for an individual. This is going to be a huge task. To give you an idea about what I plan to do, here is an example :

Henry Preston Towler, I will need to cite where I collected his name from, his birth date, his death date, his marriage, his children, etc. Each one of these facts will have their own citation (even though some facts may share the same document). With around 1500 people in the tree as of today, you can see that this is going to be a huge undertaking, essentially it means entering about 4 detailed facts for each individual, or 6,000 entries total. Some people are going to have more entries than others, but I think that the 4 per person is going to be a pretty good average. I know that this is a huge amount of data entry, but I am going to start with the Main Line Branches of my tree, those consisting of the surnames Towler, Arbuckle, Spaugh and Brown.

So that is what I have on the agenda for the next couple of weeks, let me know if you are browsing the tree and find a source that needs an image, or anything else that needs to be corrected. I promise that I will try to do better about getting posts up, I know that I am behind, (I still owe you 3 more…)

take care,

Ian