Spring Cleaning: Weeding Out All the Unsourced and Unnecessary Profiles on My Tree

It was over 57,000 profiles in my tree last year.

I'm paying the price for putting all those unnecessary in-laws and step-brothers of stepbrothers on my tree without any reason besides just getting carried away (see my previous posts here and here).  In other words, not straightening up as I went.  While I know that distant relations, even non-relations, can be very important in studying someone, this was just ridiculous.  A lot of these people were on the tree because they were bright, shiny objects.

But today I finally got below 50,000!


© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Spring Cleaning in October

Crista Cowan explains and shows why a clean tree improves your genealogy.

Let's just say I've gotten carried away with the research and shiny bright things since I started using Ancestry in 2009.  Right now I have over 52,000 people on my tree (down from over 57,000! a few months ago) but that is truly unnecessary and ridiculous.  I'm not sure what the right amount of people on a genealogical tree is, but it can't be that many.

So as I've been standardizing my locations (i.e. fixing all the locations in every profile) I've also been pruning any and every one who isn't a blood relation or FAN club member.  Turns out there are a ton of siblings of distant cousins' wives and husbands, as well as stepchildren galore (including stepchildren of stepchildren), who don't add anything to the tree or my research, but are just there as remnants from an over-enthusiastic research session.  I figure that if any particular person is important I can always add them back on.

I can't wait until I've tightened up my tree and standardized the locations, because I have a lot of plans for using my Legacy 9 software to do some interesting reports. But for now I have to atone for my sins and do some much needed clean up.



© 2017 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.