#52Ancestors and Preserving Data

I have been sharing genealogy projects that I am working on and today my sisters and I decided to take on https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/52-ancestors-in-52-weeks/

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Family history is better when it's shared! 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks is a series of prompts to help you share the discoveries you've made in your genealogy.

Just sign up on Amy's site and each Monday, you'll receive the prompt for that week, plus an email on the 1st of each month with a look ahead.

Use the hashtag #52ancestors if you share your work as well as get inspired by others in the project! That brought up the idea of using hashtags more often.  So for example this blog would be  #CapeCodFolks 

In the Ancestry Searsv5 tree that I have been building (https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/tree/75385093/family) I have recorded over 22,000 of the descendants of Richard Sears so this should give me quite a wealth of information to choose from in the #52ancestors challenge. I have used a plug-in called Family Book Creator which extracts the information from the database in "Register" format.  This format is probably familiar to everyone here but one of the problems is that each time you extract the data, people receive a different number in the book.  Individuals who are not carried forward to the next generation are not given any number.  For many years I used Personal Ancestral File (PAF) as my genealogy database and I loved the Record Identification Number (RIN) that was assigned to each person as you added their data.  This number stayed constant and I used the number to index photos and other information.

Now with FamilyTreeMaker there is a reference number and I can even add the RINs as a piece of data from my earlier PAF database. In Ancestry each individual is also assigned a unique number.  You can see it in the URL- for example my Dad is  https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/75385093/person/36319725598/  About the only other way to uniquely describe someone is to include full name with birth and death years.

I have 77,000 people in my Ancestry tree and they are linked to FamilyTreeMaker which is a great feature.  Make a change in either location and it is reflected in the other place.  I don't trust that the FamilyTreeMaker file on my computer will outlive me so having the data duplicated on Ancestry is some comfort.  The same issue with my website  http://www.SearsR.com      It requires maintenance and will die when I am gone.  I did mention that Sears Archives and I plan to copy that all to DVDs and take the scanned papers to Boston this summer- Lord Willing and The Creek Don't Rise.   Paper and DVD currently seem to be the only way to really preserve information for the future.