Kind of fun

[johnridley]

I can see why (lj user=rmeidaking) some people both enjoy genealogy and are good at accounting. Today I was going through some scans of 150 year old documents, deciphering spidery handwriting, calculating date offsets, and in the end confirming data I already had and sorting out family members that died > 100 years ago. Same sort of feeling as when you finally get that last number to drop into place on the books.

Added individual # 400 this evening. I'm still in solid "known territory" - people who are no more than two generations removed from people I knew growing up, or are direct ancestors/cousins/siblings. I did at one point get into crazyland with data that was cited on my other dataset as coming from FTM. IMO, data from FTM is for hints only, it's NOT reliable. I saw some just stupid stuff. Obviously I didn't put it in to my new data set.

I just have to put it away at some point, but it's hard not to just keep going. Heck, I should have been in bed more than an hour ago, this stuff is just compelling.

Comments

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

I think you should put it in, just flag it as crud. The point being that it documents that you looked at it so you don't keep coming back to it.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

We were discussing this at Kings the other day. I didn't see any good ways to flag stuff as crud. Sure, you can put source notes in that say "this is crud" but you have to specifically go and look at them.

What I'd like would be for some way to put in a "how sure am I, 1-5" rating, and have ratings be indicated graphically both on the data entry screens and in the charts - if I have to get through three "very sketchy data" links to get to some relative, the connecting lines on the charts should be some color or dotted lines with perhaps a note printed next to them - IE if you go through only class 1 links to get there, put a little "1" in a circle near the connecting line. If you go through a 2 and a 4 and a 5, put a "40" next to it. That's probably not very intuitive - but just dotted lines don't cut it. It could be "there's a 1 in 40 chance that this is right" maybe?