Just Checking In

It has “been a minute” since I last posted. I have tried and tried to come up with a post-worthy topic but to no avail. It’s not to say I have not been working on genealogy, but the work I have been doing is not research. Not much anyway.  

I have been continuing with my “housecleaning” of my digital tree profiles to ensure correct and complete source citations, and attaching images to my profiles. But alas, as with all else I do in genealogy, I have unwisely split my efforts between drafting source citations using industry-accepted standards, updating tree software, and updating my WikiTree profiles. I have an order I follow for each ancestor, just to keep one ancestor fresh in my mind while I complete the updates. But it takes sooo much tiiiiiime!

It has taken so much time, in fact, that I took a break from the tediousness of it and just started entering vital records for all my tree profiles so I could produce “the” coolest feature of Heredis software in 2023 (they have now released 2024 with even cooler features – smh).

Originally, I tried to capture this in an Excel spreadsheet, but it’s clunky and subject to shifting when I add generations. And is also quite tedious to update and creates yet another tree file to manage.

What is this visual I am trying to maintain? Why, it’s a visual that shows where in my ancestral line our immigrants to the USA occurred. Petty, sure, but it’s soooo coooolll! I have been working on deeper ancestors and I have a hard time keeping track of how “American” we really are. And, it also addresses that cousin’s question many years ago asking if we had any ancestors that came through Ellis Island (none). The most recent ancestor (not counting my mother) arrived at Castle Garden, the predecessor to Ellis Island.

Here is my attempt using Excel

Here is Heredis’s enhanced tree with color codes for Country of birth. The blue is for all US-born ancestors, the yellow is for English births, green is for the Kingdom of Wurttemberg (before it was Germany), pink is the Kingdom of Hannover (before it was Germany), brown is for births in Ireland, and the lone orange just inside the red dashes is the part of modern Germany that was still in the Holy Roman Empire when this ancestor was born. I do have purple Germany because I have not pinpointed the location of birth so that I can determine what country the event actually occurred in.