Over the last few months I have been busy pruning and tidying my family tree so that I can focus on relatives who are a little bit closer. My 'active research tree' now contains just over 7000 people rather than the 40,000+ I had before, so is a bit more manageable. I have made some rules for myself, explained in my new course ("How to spring-clean your family tree"), and my top tip is "Just because you can add someone to your tree, it doesn't mean that you always should".
Hand pruning a tree; emblematic miniature showing a hand coming from left, pruning a tree with a pruning knife; in a roundel; from an album of 82 leaves Watercolour and bodycolour heightened with silver and gold
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Think about whether you really want to devote time to researching the siblings of your husband's great-aunt's second husband. If not, no need to add them to your tree! I feel that if I am adding people to my tree, I should be willing to devote enough time and energy to research them properly.
As a result of all this work, I can get back to concentrating on Ari's ancestors, and I will be writing about them here. Ari and his sister Eva are now 5 and 2, and they have 596 known ancestors, of whom I have 421 left to write about!
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