Reasons To Restart My Genealogy Tree

My adventure into genealogy has had it’s ups and downs. Most times when you are new to tracing your family, you can get carried away. I accepted so many hints from Ancestry.com and My Heritage, which I joined, that mistakes were made.

An example of a mistake: A connection all the way to someone on the Mayflower was “shot down” by the organization for the Mayflower. They said that Ancestry was giving some wrong clues about a person who can’t be verified. Guess what? I had to chop that limb off of my tree.

From https://leesbird.com/2018/05/29/mistaken-identity-birds-and-ancestors/

Recently, I found the website, Genealogy Do Over at https://genealogydoover.com/. It has some great tips and reasons to start over from “almost scratch.” That is what I have begun doing.

My father was in WW I and was in the trenches that were attacked with Mustard Gas. This was the information on his return to the U.S. on the U.S.S. Zeppelin. [What a find!]

Now, I went back to me, added my parents. Then I “proved” them with marriage and birth certificate records, censuses, etc. I added my husband, and documented our marriage. Since then, the tree is re-growing. Actually, the information and tips from the Do Over site has helped me gain more information about my ancestors than before.

An example is looking at the census more. There is quite a bit of information that I had missed before. The occupation was there, but I didn’t take time to record it. Where the parents were born, where they were born, who was living with them. I missed much of that when I first began tracing my family.

I found my widowed great grandmother living with grand children, for example. The suggestion to look at other people listed on the census helped me find a relative living on the next farm, etc.

My main blog is about birdwatching, but tracing my ancestry is becoming a close second. My number one thing is knowing the Lord as my personal Savior, and these are my hobbies/ministry.