Ancestor Hunting Can Be Frustrating At Times

Sometimes when you get a “brilliant” idea, it isn’t so brilliant. My brother and I both have taken a DNA test. I am the manager of both tests on my Ancestry account. I had the idea that the different tests had to be associated to two different family trees. This means that two different family trees were being maintained by me, “the manager.”

Since my brother is not really doing any family tracing on his own, it has been left up to the “manager” to find our ancestral roots. So, the two trees online were needing to be maintained twice, or ignore his and just work on my tree. See the conflict?

In Reasons To Restart My Genealogy Tree, the need to begin the family tree and build it better was explained. That old tree had been duplicated and used as my brothers tree. I had cleared up some of the mistakes, I thought, and was using it for his tree. See the laziness?

Why couldn’t the two DNA test be based on one tree?

It always helps to READ the HELP section from time to time. There, it was written that the two DNA test can be assigned to the same online tree at Ancestry. I assigned his DNA to my main tree. Problem solved, right?

“A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” (James 1:8 KJV)

As I kept working on the combined tree, the other tree was still online at Ancestry, just not being used. It kept “calling to me” to use the data that I had worked so hard on before. All those limbs out there that had been built before the Genealogy Do-Over began. Why totally start again? That kept running through my mind. Why not use some of those previous limbs? See, heading toward the wrong road?

Well, long story short, I merged the two trees, and now the good tree is swimming in DUPLICATES!! Now you know why there haven’t been any blogs produced lately. I got off the beaten path, and chased a “rabbit.” [See Rabbit Chasing Sandhill Crane that was just published today on my other blogsite.

Stay turned as I straighten out my mess!