I'm experimenting with posting some random bits of my genealogy research here with the goal of eventually creating a linked family tree on Hive. You can see the index here.

Ellen FitzHerbert goes back to about 1245 which is pretty far. This individual, like most you'll find this far back, has some relation to royalty. According to the relationship calculator in Gramps, she is my twenty-second Great Grandaunt. So my Great Grandaunt with 22 more "greats" in front of it. There isn't a whole lot of info on her that I have found beyond the basic ancestor, descendant and date information.

One of the things to watch out for when creating your family tree is importing too much data. How can you have too much? Well, one of my approaches to creating my family tree was to take one branch as far back as I could, at the time using the World Connect site (which has such been bought and decommissioned by Ancestry). It was a site in which people uploaded their family tree info. Some of them let you download full or partial gedcoms. A gedcom is just a data file in a standard format understood by most genealogy software. While I would manually trace my direct line back, for descendants of my direct line's siblings (cousin relationships) I would often download these gedcom files and automatically import them. The problem is that if you go back far enough, you are bound to be related to someone in multiple ways. This leads to duplicates as descendants of one individual may share descendants from another individual in your family tree. I have had lots of duplicates that I am discovering lately.

My current strategy lately has just to been to pick a random name from the tree and see what more I can find. Sometimes I find duplicates and those duplicates may have duplicate descendants or ancestors, etc. Sometimes one duplicate line will have individuals or other info that the other does not. This makes removing the duplicates without losing data a tedious process. Every time I creep close to the 100,000 individual mark in my family tree I seem to find a batch of duplicates which often involves deleting a dozen or several dozen individuals. I'll get there eventually.

I use GenoPro to maintain my family tree but I use other programs to generate reports/web pages. GenoPro will do this also but I don't like the format of its reports. Gramps is open source software for Windows, Linux and MacOS that I have been using to generate static HTML reports and is what the info you see below is based on. I also use its relationship calculator functionality as noted above. I've also been exploring GedSite, a program that takes a gedcom file and converts it into html, and The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding which is web based and requires a setup with a web server, PHP and mySQL. Mostly I've been playing around with TNG which is excellent but I'll get back to GedSite eventually.

I actually like TNG enough that I have contemplated just using that as my only reporting software. However, there are a couple of reasons why I probably won't. First, it's "closed source" (though by its nature you can of course see and modify the source) commercial software whereas gramps is open source. Also, Gramps generates pure HTML/Javascript so that it is easy to copy and move around whereas TNG relies on having a database and webserver. While I have been using GenoPro and Gramps for many years, I've only started using TNG and GedSite within the last year.

The chart at the top is an ancestry chart out to four generations from Gramps. The chart at the bottom is the same but from TNG. The index of all individuals I have posted so far here.