My March through the FamilySearch Family Tree: Day 30 (what I've learned)

With only two days left in the month of March, I realize that I won't have time to review all of the descendants of my maternal-side ancestors. So I have decided to use these two days to reflect on the past month in terms of what I've learned about my own family tree and about the FamilySearch Family Tree.

First, I learned that I hadn't spent nearly enough time collecting sources to support the conclusions I had formed about relationships and the facts of my ancestors' lives. The Family Tree system made it easy to find many relevant sources and to connect them to my relatives, and its suggestions were nearly always right. In so doing, I had less reason to believe that the work I had done would be undone by others.

Second, I learned that it takes work, and a good family tree isn't really built in a month. Of course, I wasn't starting from scratch. Some of my lines I had researched as early as nearly 30 years ago, although in other cases I had learned about some direct ancestors only as recently as the past few years. 

Third, I learned that the Family Tree had been designed extremely well in order to enter new information, to change existing information, and to remove duplications. On the negative side, in one sense, a lot of duplicates had been created by an automated system where birth records for siblings might generate a new set of parents for each child, which meant that all of those parents would need to be merged together. But at least they were findable by those descended from those particular children.

So what's next? I'll talk about that tomorrow.