ten0rman wrote:Possibly slightly off topic, but, well, if so, I apologise.
I'm looking into my wife's family and I've managed to find rather a lot of people going back to the 1790's. And that's only for her father's side of the family. In fact, if I take the current generations right down to our grandchildren, I've got around 10 generations. Which given the size of my laptop screen is too much. Using Ancestry's latest version of tree drawing, they can be shown, but are almost unreadably small.
So, what to do? Well initially, I split the family at her Gt Grandparents, and produced two separate trees. That seemed to work well until on updating the most recent generations, I realised I had two lots to do and it doesn't seem possible to merge the trees. I'm now considering a third branch, but this time of the most recent generations, say 1900 to 2022. The other two would be, eg paternal gt grandfathers lot running from, say 1910 back to 1790 or whatever, with then the maternal gt grandmother's lot covering the same period.
So I'm now thinking that when it comes to her mother's side, that's going to be another two trees, so five trees in all for her side. And then there's my side. Another four trees?
Anyone see any problems? Anyone actually done it? Does it seem reasonable to have five trees linked via the most recent generations? Your thoughts please, negative or positive. The advantage I can see is that I would then be able to print onto A4 sheets of paper which should make it reasonably easy to cross refer.
Cheers,
ten0rman
Having multiple trees is generally not a good idea in my experience. [Talking about a single family history here, of course if you are researching for friends then start a new tree.]
Some problems with splitting your family up in multiple Ancestry trees are:
-There will be overlapping people in the two trees. You'll have to maintain all those overlaps with sometimes extensive timeline information and sources in multiple trees
-Searching for people and places within the trees now has to be done in multiple stages
-You have to do the same maintenance on multiple trees: add the same images, define the same custom sources and repositories, enter addresses manually because automatic matching only happens within a single tree, invite guests to multiple trees, manage hints etc etc
-Certain DNA (e.g. ThruLines) and other tools won't work properly
-Hints may be less useful
-And probably a bunch of others I haven't thought of.
Quite besides these it is MUCH easier to split a tree when you need to than to merge two trees.
Merging trees can be done but you'll almost certainly want some desktop software to help (free apps are available); it's probably a topic for another thread.
To split a tree merely for the convenience of viewing it appears to me to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem and applying completely the wrong solution. I'm pretty sure we've discussed this issue before on this board and several people suggested software which can enhance the family view. Ancestry have already made improvements themselves but if you are not satisfied there is almost certainly a tool out there that can do what you want. Just a matter of searching for it and learning how to use it.
GS
