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.
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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