I grew up in the years when one had a secretary to do one’s typing so I never really learnt how to touchtype. I am a hunter and pecker on the keyboard. With loads of data entry to do for my CurryAus study I came up with an idea to avoid some typing.
I created a new private tree on Ancestry and uploaded a gedcom with just a few Curry records to kickstart my process. While I have several private and public trees on my ancestry account I have never done any data entry directly into an Ancestry tree so this was something new for me.
My idea was to do a broad search for the Last Name : Curry and Place your ancestor might have lived : Australia. My Collection Focus was Australia. It was to be a fishing trip with no real method, this was a test run. Of course with such a broad search I was overwhelmed with hits. There are so many Currys in Australia!
I had no intention of looking at all of these records. All Ancestry Trees in my results were ignored, I concentrated on Records. I added several unrelated Curry records after I worked out how to add a new person. I was eventually after hints, those shaky green leaves. My thoughts being that I could avoid keyboarding if I added people from the Ancestry Records and then at back and waited for the hints to appear.
When the shaky green leaves came on I could once again ignore the Ancestry Trees and add those hints that I thought valid and worthwhile to my records. I tried to avid individuals that I knew were in my Master list in Family Historian because I wanted new people to add to that list.
After several hours down the rabbit hole I downloaded the gedcom of my new tree from Ancestry and merged it into my Family Historian tree.
Will I do this again? Definitely – I avoided lots of typing and ended up with about 300 new Currys in my database with multiple life events with sources firmly attached. Of course there were a number of duplicates that I have to merge into existing records in Family Historian but there is no typing involved for this.
What will I do differently? I will start a new tree so it is easy to produce a gedcom with just the new results for merging into my Master list in Family Historian. I may create an Ancestry tree concentrating on people on Electoral Rolls or Births, Deaths or Marriages but as I practice Tangential Genealogy I may just follow a whim.
CurryAus 