Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - March Madness!

It's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun! 

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  The NCAA Basketball Tournament, called "March Madness," opens this next week. 

Think of your Pedigree Chart like a basketball tournament bracket - there are 64 teams (4th great-grandparents) in the First round of the tournament, 16 teams (2nd great-grandparents) in the Second Round of the Tournament, 4 teams (grandparents) in the Regional Tournament.  Think of yourself as #1 on the Pedigree chart.  You're the winner of the Pedigree Chart!  All of your ancestors did the hard work to make you you!

Have you honored all of those ancestors up to, say, 4th great-grandparents?  Do you know who they all are?  Have you researched them in repositories and online?  Have you written a biography for each one of them?  Have you entered them all into the FamilySearch Family Tree?  Have you looked at all of the green leaf Hints on your Ancestry Member Tree?

2)  For this week's SNGF, please show us a Pedigree Chart of a portion of your family tree that shows that you have work to do to determine the identity of an ancestor, or to add content to the person profiles of your ancestors in your software or an online family tree. 

3)  Pick one of your ancestors that you need to work on. Then do a little bit to add more information to that person in your genealogy software or online family tree.  For example, check all of the green leaf Hints on Ancestry, add them to the FamilySearch Family Tree, do research in FamilySearch or Ancestry to find more records for that person.

4)  Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook or Google+ post.

Here's mine:

2)  Here is a Pedigree Chart View in RootsMagic 6 for ancestors of my 2nd great-grandmother Lucretia Townsend (Smith) Seaver (1828-1884).

3)  This Pedigree view is full for all four generations of ancestors for Lucretia, but I see that I haven't matched her great-grandparents, Moses Smith and Patience Hamant to persons in the FamilySearch Family Tree.  I can tell because the FamilySearch icon to the right of their names is not blue - it's gray, which means they are unmatched to persons in the FamilySearch Family Tree.

Here is the Family View for Moses and Patience (Hamant) Smith family in RootsMagic:

I clicked on the FamilySearch icon for Moses Smith, and RootsMagic opens the "FamilySearch Person Tools" screen for "Find Matches" to help me find a match in the FamilySearch Family Tree:

There are a number of possible Moses Smith persons already in the Family Tree, but only one of them has the correct birth year, birthplace, father, mother and spouse names.  I matched my person with the match at the top of the list.  I also matched him to the next two persons down the list which had the birth date and parents names right.

When I was done, I clicked the "Close" button and went into the "FamilySearch Person Tools" screen for "Share Data:"

The information in green are the people and events that my RootsMagic database and the FamilySearch Family Tree agree on.  In yellow are the people that need to be matched, and the Events that don't match exactly but probably should be matched, edited or added. In white are the People and Events that are not covered in either RootsMagic or the Family Tree. I have a lot of work to do on this family.  

After about 15 minutes of effort matching Persons, and adding or modifying Event data, I had significantly improved the Moses Smith profile on FamilySearch Family Tree - almost everything is green, and nothing is yellow.

I still have some clean up work to do when I'm in the tree.  I need to delete the "Unknown father #1" for Moses Smith.  I need to disconnect the son Calvin Smith from Moses and Sarah (Clark) smith (Moses' first wife) and make sure he is attached to Moses and Patience (Hamant) Smith (he is also listed as a son to them because I added him to the Family Tree), and Calvin Smith on the screen above has the same FSFT ID number, but he has two sets of parents in the Family Tree.  

Then there's the matter of Moses Smith's christening...the Family Tree has a date exactly the same as his birth date - I need to check the Medfield vital Record book and see if it lists a Christening date or a Birth Date.  If it's a Christening date, I will add that to my RootsMagic database and change the Birth date.  If it's only a Birth date, then I will delete the Christening date.

I also added three more sources to the FamilySearch Family Tree profile for Moses Smith - for birth, death and burial.  

Later, I will go through the rest of this family and add Event data for both wives and the six children of Moses Smith, and their spouses.

4)  I did it!

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/03/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-march.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver