52 Ancestors Week 1: Fresh Start

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 1's theme is "Fresh Start." The themes are meant to be open to interpretation :-) Perhaps you have an ancestor who had to make a fresh start after a loss or setback. Maybe you had to make a fresh start on researching a particular ancestor. (We all have that one person who we thought was an ancestor... and then we discovered we were wrong. Back to square 1!)

Our whole universe was in a hot dense state....

Welcome to the first #52Ancestors blog of 2020! This year's prompts look especially amazing and I've listed them all in the archive for easy access. I'm looking forward to doing quite a few entries. I've got the gears in my head going and I am going to roll out some really cool blogs. Keep your eyes open! It is going to be a great ride!

What shall I talk about this week? Well, the topic is "Fresh Start". I think I should talk about what got me back into genealogy. I think that qualifies as a fresh start. I started on Ancestry back in 2006 and my tree looked like this:

Not the tree of a mighty warrior. Never was a fan of the brown background.

This tree had so many errors and it sat like that for a decade until it finally looked like this:

Above is "old and busted". This is the "new hotness".

That doesn't mean I didn't poke in every once in a while to spruce up the tree. I did. Every time there was a family birth or death, I would add it to the tree and keep it updated. I did some research when I started. I added a source here or there. It wasn't much to write home about. Everyone has some harsh criticisms about their own work and my tree, like my first videos, needed work.

It went on and on like this until the summer of 2017. My uncle Bob randomly asked me if I considered going to geni.com to see if I could find some random bit of information that he needed because he was working on the Hamel side of the tree. I said "Sure". I went there and made a tree. Then I got another great idea. What if I were to expand my work to all the major genealogy sites? I mean it would make sense to go fish in other ponds, right?

So, I thought about and I registered on MyHeritage, FamilySearch and WikiTree. Once I hit up the major sites, things began to unravel on my main tree over on Ancestry. Certain errors were coming to light and I knew I had to fix them.  

Maria Tedesco's REAL parents!!

One of the biggest mistakes I had was having the wrong Tedescos on the tree from the beginning. A user on FamilySearch pointed it out to me and she ended up helping me figure out the Ferraiolo side of the tree. I don't know why I had Francesco Tedesco and Maria Spano for years and years. My great-aunt told me her grandparents were Antonio Tedesco and Domenica Gullo. Why did I have that for so long?! That was so embarrassing!

Well, we're all human and we all make mistakes. It wasn't the biggest mistake on the tree. Or the last. After fixing up the tree in September of 2017, I said to myself that I needed a fresh start. I wasn't going to delete the tree or nuke it from orbit. I needed to do something else. 

1. Get rid of the errors. That was the important thing. Is it OCD? You betcha! But, it's worth it in the long run.

2. Listen to the sage advice others give me.

3. Don't be afraid to ask for help this time!

Truth be told, I was nervous about asking for help back in the day. I didn't know where to go. In 2006, there was very little in the way of videos telling you how to do things. YouTube was brand new and was relegated to being about kitten videos and cute babies. Oof. Man, how times changed. It's 2020 and some babies are ranting about their favorite media not being what they should be. 

With all this in mind, I needed to start over and really do some research. I needed to fix the tree I made in 2006 and put my best foot forward. I haven't really looked back since. As you can tell a lot of things changed from when I did the tree. Now there's less errors because I really, really put in work into it.

The sad part is that since my tree had errors for so long, other users on Ancestry picked up on some of the mistakes in my tree and used them as fact. I changed them and I tried every way I could to tell people I was wrong. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't. One of the weirdest, though, was people having my grandfather as being born in Sicily when that wasn't the case. Many trees had that until I informed people it wasn't the case.

All in all, it wasn't as bad a fresh start as I would have thought. I got some advice on what to do to spruce it up. I changed quite a bit. I even looked into things instead of taking them at face value. That's how you do good work and great genealogy. Every now and then, it's a good idea to step back and look at your work and see what can be fixed or done better. I learned that doing videos on YouTube. You really can be your own worst critic. I'm glad that rather than destroying a decade's worth of work, I simply revised it. It just goes to show that any tree with errors can be saved with just a little time and a little effort.

"Math. Science. History. Unraveling the mystery. It all restarted with a big bang."