‘What have you been up to lately?’, I hear you cry. Well, actually, I don’t but I’m going to tell you anyway.

I have been spending time with some drunken women, I should hasten to explain that this is in the historical, not actual, sense. Our Few Forgotten Women Team, aided by more than fifty helpers from all parts of the English-speaking world, have been tracing the stories of women found in two inebriate homes in the 1901 census. Their stories are mostly pretty tragic cycles of despair and degeneration but it is important that they are told. Photographs of many of the women survive in the online Habitual Criminals’ registers and they tell their own story. The stories of eighty six women are beginning to appear here.

There’s been a bit of a social media discussion lately about large online trees. Do people take large trees seriously? How large is too large? Here is my take on the issue. I was 100% against EVER putting my family tree online until I took an Ancestry DNA test about five years ago. I didn’t even have an Ancestry account at this point, being an inveterate FindmyPast fan (and I still am, finding their searching infinitely easier. Horses for course and familiarity is a great  thing, others will feel differently). Anyway, I took the test, the results came, I started looking for matches. Which were the matches I was prioritising? Those with online trees. Well, I thought, maybe I’d just add a very basic, private tree of my direct line. So I did. With all those thousands of DNA matches, in my case mostly very tiny, I found myself concentrating on those with public trees; so I went public. Of course, to link with DNA matches you need to be wide and deep, so I began, slowly to add all those individuals that lurk on my family tree, garnered over nearly fifty years of research. This I did cautiously and meticulously, one person at a time. One reason for not importing a tree wholesale was because I don’t have one single tree but about twenty different trees for different branches, as I prefer to work that way. Yes, I could have merged them and then uploaded in one go but I deliberately chose not to, using it as an opportunity to check what I’d done. Only one 9x great grandmother was felled from the tree as a result.

I wasn’t going to add sources because why would I? This was not my primary way of recording my tree, this was just for DNA. Then of course I realised that I was only taking online trees seriously if they were sourced, so sources were added. I included my children’s ancestors as well as my own and then, later, some of my grandchildren’s. I began by only adding individuals that I considered to be verified. Then, hesitantly, I have added a few individuals, clearly labelled ‘hypothesis’, in case the hypothesis is right and a DNA match could help to support it. Even with all this, as of today, my tree contains 3161 people. Maybe it isn’t larger because I never add information from other trees, although I do use them as clues to further research.

So what is wrong with larger trees? Do I dismiss them out of hand? Well no, that would be short-sighted but I must admit to a certain amount of scepticism as the numbers stretch beyond 5000. I find myself wondering if each one of those individuals really is carefully researched and verified using original sources. I’ve been at this for since 1977 and spend more time than I am going to admit on it. No way could I add upwards of 5000 people with any confidence. Of course, in some cases, these ultra large trees are well researched. Some are large because they are the result of one-name or one-place studies. It doesn’t take a great deal to gain an impression of the quality of the research on these mega trees and sort the good from the downright ridiculous. Is there a danger though that a large tree might give an impression of careless research? The jury is still out on that one but it is an interesting debate.

There’s been a lot more going on but this post is already too long so I’ll leave you with the tale of my mother’s day gifts. One daughter sent a package that included a mystery book (she chose the genre not the title) the title is ‘Family might be the death of you’, possibly not the most appropriate! A planted (I use the word advisedly) floral arrangement from other daughter was delivered to the neighbouring chapel porch, which shares my postcode. Fortunately, someone spotted it, retrieved it and handed it to me. It was also delivered by someone who had clearly ignored the ‘this way up’ notice and arrows. I seem to have successfully salvaged/replanted it and it is now flourishing but there was quite a bit of earth everywhere.