What's New
I add names to the Family Tree Maker database almost daily. The database, converted to GEDCOM format, gets updated to this website using GEDsite.
I am slow... because its not just about collecting names, I am after connections and stories. The 'Living' are excluded from this website, the total viewable in website can be seen in footer at the very bottom of the page.
22 February 2026:- Total 55,076 including living. Sunday Double Back Up. A couple of entries than an update of the website frontpage medal for fun.
21 February 2026:- Total 55,075 including living. A good few people and sources today for Monmouthshire in Wales. A tricky piece of problem solving with problems exacerbated by incorrect on-line transcriptions and, unfortunately on the source in question, no facility to send in corrections. Oh well, it is correct on my One-Name Study.
20 February 2026:- Total 55,051 including living. A few entries for existing people while hunting another degeneration back on a Somerset line but it doesn't seem the records are there and I am not going to jump to a conclusion without enough grounds.
19 February 2026:- Total 55,049 including living. Wales and Shropshire records following last correspondence with a good few refurbished sources added. This Somerset/Welsh branch had been in the Study for a long time so was overdue and overhaul.
18 February 2026:- Total 55,026 including living. Added some US entries but, receiving another correspondence via Ancestry, I started a review of a James Dowling Wiltshire/Monmouthshire line that hadn't really been touched for decades.
17 February 2026:- Total 55,009 including living. Broke the 55k barrier so into my 'emerald' phase. Added a fair amount of people today some with lots of detail and some 'in-laws' with skeletal detail... so as not to find myself cataloguing the entire world!
16 February 2026:- Total 54,974 including living. Alabama sources for existing people and some new entries from Find a Grave.
15 February 2026:- Total 54,943 including living. Sunday Double Back Up. A family day today but added some in-laws photos which have been sitting on a folder for a while.
14 February 2026:- Total 54,943 including living. Busy with other things and an email that needs lots of fine work.
13 February 2026:- Total 54,935 including living. A few more Find a Grave entries. Not much to be done this weekend as its a big family weekend.
12 February 2026:- Total 54,923 including living. Detail for existing people and quite a few new people added as a result of combing Find a Grave for the Alabama link.
11 February 2026:- Total 54,893 including living. A couple more censuses in Alabama. Busy this week with non-genealogy.
10 February 2026:- Total 54,889 including living. Censuses in Alabama. A second marriage sorted out... these can make things tricky as it is not always clear that a person has had a second marriage. I have had people marry a second time to someone with the same first name and for years I had put the children with the wrong mother! Sometime luck helps and other times its just logic.
9 February 2026:- Total 54,874 including living. Following some correspondence am now back working on the US Dowling Family of the South again in Alabama.
8 February 2026:- Total 54,858 including living. Sunday Double Back Up. A couple of people added from quite possibly the shortest email I have received and pretty quickly found, against the odds, ancestors to which I added a large number of census sources for existing people in Illinois and Indiana.
7 February 2026:- Total 54,855 including living. Following a Kildare Dowling and with a tentative similarity to a 26 year old email connected family to Canada... always more to do.
5 February 2026:- Total 54,841 including living. A merge in Wicklow... these take some time as I feel I have to be very confident that two Edward Dowlings, in this case, are one and the same individual. Consequently, numbers dropped by one for a couple of days deliberation. Merges are important as they can, among other things, reduce unnecessary proliferation... that is to say, more people than there really are!
3 February 2026:- Total 54,842 including living. A census and baptism for Dowlings in the vicinity of the correspondent's area.
2 February 2026:- Total 54,838 including living. A lot of looking and not finding... again in Baltimore, Maryland and California following correspondence. So back to Kildare tomorrow.
1 February 2026:- Total 54,838 including living. Sunday Double Back Up. A few sources for existing people and including one in Mexico.
31 January 2026:- Total 54,838 including living. A few Kildare entries from census and baptisms. A few queries stacking up now and I am short of time at present.
Legend:
| Sunday Single Back-up: | On Sunday of each week my computer gets backed up to a separate hard drive on my network (NAS). |
| Monthly Double Back-up: | On the 1st of every month my computer gets backed-up to a separate hard drive on my network (NAS). The NAS, which also has other files not on the computer then gets backed-up again to another separate hard drive on the network that is normally off-line for the rest of the month, disconnected from the internet and powered-off. |
| Merge: | A merge is where evidence has emerged to allow two separate people on the database to be merged into one individual. For example, there may be two people called Michael Dowling, one as a son of John Dowling and the second as a census entry. The two initially start off from records as separate entries but a marriage of Michael to Mary Phelan showing a father of John and matching other factors allows me to say with some confidence that they are one and the same person. This can be quite complicated with much playing around with probabilities and numbers of candidates for merging or occasionally very simple. The number of people in the database drops by one and it is a major cause for celebration as it increases accuracy and future confusion. |
| Join: | A join is where evidence emerged to allow one person to be connected to another. For example, a daughter to be added to a father. A cause for celebration as it reduces the number of separate families in the database and increases accuracy and future confusion. |
Projects
There are a huge number of entries in my database form a variety of sources. So, even though there is no project that covers a particular source or region does not mean there are no entries for that source or region. The projects cover where I systematically extract entries from a source to make sure the source has been 'milked' for all it's worth. The What's New page also shows when I have worked on a particular project.
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