Monday, December 7, 2009

Overwhelmed

I've mentioned several times that I am researching (and documenting) one family line in my heritage, with the intention of writing both a genealogy book, and an historical fiction book based on their early life in America.

Yesterday I had a long talk one of my cousins in New Mexico who is also working on the project. We have 12,000 names so far and we're not finished. That number didn't sound too bad, until we talked about some realities. To print out a family sheet on each of those people would take
over 24 reams of printer paper... and we didn't even bother to try and estimate ink consumption!

Clearly, that's a daunting task... and who would buy a book that large anyway?


So we're re-thinking the project, and best way(s) to organize the geneology data to make it available in reasonable sections. I'm thinking that if my family had been in Kentucky for generations, the relatives out in Iowa would not interest me very much.


The very earliest generations, say maybe 1700 to 1840 or so, will still be slated for a book since none exist that are accurate, but those generations are manageable (we think).

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions on how best to do the genealogy portion?

1 comment:

  1. Darius, I like to use Geni.com to keep track of the family...its easy to use and always available. Kris

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