Sataurday Night Genealogy Fun: Have You Used "Helps" to Check for Errors in Your Family Tree?

Checking your work is always a good thing to do, and it's what Randy Seaver is discussing in this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun discussion.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  Have you used "helps" such as Tree Checker on Ancestry, Consistency Checker on MyHeritage, or the Family Tree Analyzer program to check for errors in your family tree?

2.  Share about your efforts to use helps to improve your family tree in your own blog post or on your Facebook page.  Be sure to leave a link to your report in a comment on this post.

[Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic!]

I have never used aids such as Tree Checker, Consistency Checker, or anything similar to check my online family tree, as I don't have a family tree online.  I'll admit, I didn't know they existed, but I'm glad there is some mechanism available (even if it's obvious that a lot of people don't use them).

The only time I have run what Randy calls a problem search (the results of which Family Tree Maker, the program that I use, calls an error report) was when he made that the challenge for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, which was almost a year ago, on October 21, 2023.  I did remember how to find it, something I worried about at the time, so I'll take that as a small success right there.  My list of practical problems was only five pages long, which I still consider to be pretty good overall.

The Family Tree Analyzer program that Randy mentioned looks as though it could be pretty useful, so I will put it on my to-do list to investigate in the future.  I don't want to try downloading and running it tonight just to post for the blog.  But I will try to write about it when I do use it, and I'm not surprised with Randy's assessment that it finds different problems than the other programs do.

I guess my short report means I'm not checking my work often enough.  Something else to add to the to-do list!

Wordless Wednesday

 

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Is Your Most Recent Genealogy Happy Dance?

It's always fun to hear about people's genealogy successes, the topic of tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver.

A Genea-Musings reader asked me [Randy Seaver] in email, "What is your most recent genealogy happy dance?  What did you find, how did you do it, and what did you learn from it?"

My most recent genealogy happy dance was not for a new discovery of my own, but for one by my cousin.

In response to last week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post about staying in contact with relatives, my cousin wrote about having met a cousin she had not known previously.  It was even an in-person meeting!  The newly met cousin brought photos to share and mentioned that he and his family had identified everyone in his bar mitzvah photo except one couple — who happened to be my cousin's parents!

Now if that isn't worthy of the genealogy happy dance, I don't know what is.

And as far as I'm concerned, the lesson to be learned from this is that you should reach out to as many cousins as you can, because you never know what you will learn.

Wordless Wednesday