Mightier Acorns

My Strategy in a (coco)nutshell

When we talk about our “family tree,” we tend to focus on “lines” – which leads us to an over-simplification of what our “tree” looks like. For the sake of understanding who we’re talking about, we will skip over several generations to get to a particular family, and we can end up picturing that tree like this:

Sometimes your tree actually works out that way. In the case of my great-grandmother, Bertha (Greenlee) Callin, for example. If you just go up her paternal line:

• Robert Greenlee (many siblings)
• Allen Greenlee (only child)
• Bertha (one half-sibling)

More often, you have a lot of siblings in each generation, and visualizing them all can feel a lot more complicated:

There is nothing wrong with simplifying things to make them easier to explain. But when you’re building your tree, it’s important to remember the Big Picture. You have to zoom in and focus on one family at a time to get anywhere, but you also need to figure out good maps for navigating both up and down your trees.

I have spent a lot of time adding profiles to WikiTree and connecting them so that I can take advantage of their visualization tools and figure out where I need to focus my attention for future research. Usually, I start with one of the eight grandparents (my four, and my wife’s four) and click the “Ancestors” button, follow the line back to where I am stuck, then click that person’s “Descendants” button and figure out which family has been most neglected.

That might sound like a daunting task – a fractal tree is always branching further, always growing, and never ….done. But that’s good news for me because I like to keep going.

If you want to have a say in which way I am going, drop a note.

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