Mightier Acorns

My genealogy tools of choice

This post is meant to provide you, dear reader, with some insight into how I work: tools I use, techniques I employ, and what I’m trying to discover. If you have been doing family history for any length of time, you might have gained different experiences which means some of your choices will be different from my choices.

So, when I tell you what software and which sites I use, I don’t mean to imply that those products are best for you – but I thought it might be helpful for you to understand how I work.

Currently, the three main tools/platforms I use are:

• WikiTree.com – where I am “Callin-50”

• Ancestry – where I am “Tad_Callin”

• FTDNA – where we might show up in each other’s matches.

You may note that I don’t actively use a standalone family tree program – I do have RootsMagic, and try to sync my files there with my Ancestry tree, but I would say I haven’t actively used any family tree program on a regular basis since Legacy 7.

Since publishing The Callin Family History in March 2022, I have been trying to organize my work around my grandparents and my wife’s grandparents – the 8 great-grandparents of my children. I created an Ancestry tree for each of those 8 individuals and began working back from each of them.

I generally work through the available information on Ancestry, where I have a full subscription, and document each individual, their parents, spouse(s), siblings, etc. with as much information as Ancestry has in their databases. If there are glaring gaps, I will go to FamilySearch.org or other free websites to look for documents – but most of the time, I can get the vital information I need from Ancestry.

Once I have a family thoroughly documented in my Ancestry tree, I will move over to WikiTree and add or update profiles for as many of those individuals as I can. So far, I have avoided creating profiles for living people. Privacy is a great concern of mine, and it is one of the primary reasons I like WikiTree – and I plan on writing more extensively about that later. (You can read up on their Privacy policy here:)

For now, I am testing the limits of what I can do with this approach. I was able to assemble The Callin Family History this way, and while each family presents its own set of unique challenges, I am enjoying the work of expanding to the other lines of my ancestors.

At some point, I will need to take the work I’ve put into WikiTree and build trees in FTDNA so that it’s easier for people who see me in their list of matches to find me – and I will probably need to be a bit more assertive about looking them up, too.

But for now, I’m enjoying my process, and I am very satisfied to see how my WikiTree contributions have begun to build up. Take a look at the page for James Callin (c. 1750-c. 1816) and click the “Descendants” button to see the top several generations from The Callin Family History outlined on WikiTree.

Not familiar with WikiTree? Here’s a quick intro:

As always, I’d love to hear from you. Drop a comment here, or email MightierAcorns at Gmail if you have questions.