The Troubleshooter's Guide to Do-It-Yourself Genealogy: 01/05/20

My mother's cousin has built and maintained the Weber family tree for a number of years. He set up accounts for all of us. As it happens the service he used was also one I could access through my library. It was a website, then, that I am comfortably familiar with, albeit in reduced capacities when I was a subscribed but non paying member.

Thanksgiving 2017 my mother in law told me how there was conflicting information about when her father changed the family name. The question was basically: did he do it before or after he was married? I volunteered to figure that information out.

But here's the thing, I couldn't save any of what I had learned to my first cousin once removed's family tree. The site only allows one administrator who is in charge of adding or removing people from the tree. If I were going to ad my MIL's tree (or even my husband's tree), I would need to be a paying member and be the administrator of the family tree.

In March, I felt like I had hit a dead end with confirming my grandfather in law's history. To see if I was missing anything obvious, I checked out The Troubleshooter's Guide to Do-It-Yourself Genealogy by W. Daniel Quillen. The book verified that I was doing what I could with the online tools and that I wasn't missing out on anything obvious.

If you are just starting with building your family tree, Quillen's book will be a good place to start. If you have already started and feel like you've hit a brick wall with what you can do online, this book won't be advanced enough. The book is also slanted heavily towards Family Search, the Mormon run site. Personally I've found that site hit or miss with a lot of stray or cloned data.

Three stars

Comments (0)