I’ve been a little silent on the blog writing and reading front. Summer is in full swing so I bet everyone knows what that means! Yard work! Fun stuff there. I haven’t been doing as much as the rest of my family, but we’re working on our yard and I’ve spent a week dogsitting. Not to mention this heatwave! So one of the things I’ve been doing in the evenings is adding things to a private family tree on Ancestry.com. I’ve gone back and forth for ages on this subject, and I finally decided to have a private family tree there.

The advantages are that I will have a sharable tree to invite new connections to. I will also be able to show my source photos. A lot of my pictures are already on Ancestry from people who have visited the website in the past and saved the images. One of the reasons I’m doing this is I would like a way to share some of the source images without having to send huge emails with many attachments. For copyright reasons, there are some sources that I haven’t posted images for on the website. I would never intentionally violate a copyright agreement, so I think a private tree to share certain things would be better.

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I started a new blank, unlinked tree because I wanted to have complete control over the file. If I had synced my FTM file with Ancestry.com, then my source citations would have been a little weird. For example, it would have shown everything on the Ancestry tree, however, the census images and death records wouldn’t be linkable to the databases on Ancestry. I could have added the records through Ancestry.com, but then those sources would have downloaded themselves to my desktop family file. That would be a no no for me. So I decided the simplest route would be to do this. It’s a lot of leg work sure, but I’m really only working on it in the evenings when I feel like I can’t work on my family file for stress reasons.

Of course, there might be some way to do what I want, without the syncing issues, but I think I’d choose to do it this way in the end anyway. I just like having complete control over these things.

Later this week, I’m going out of state for a quick trip. I’m hoping that before I leave, I get an entry written up and posted about the TNG software. I get a lot of questions about it, and I’m hoping to answer some of those this week.