Analysis Paralysis!

Due to various reasons, including overload of work and more recently illness, I spent years thinking about how to get started unravelling the genealogical mess I found myself in. Visiting Germany last year I caught up with my best Genealogy buddy, Reiner(we have yet to discover how many centuries ago we were related) and apologetically confessed that I had not yet absorbed the mountain of genealogical data he had generously given me.  I told him I felt like I had fallen into a genealogical mess and total confusion. He told me to beware of ANALYSIS PARALYSIS.

Well that hit the nail on the head! It explained my situation. Just to do a stocktake, at that stage I had my own data stored in Ancestral Quest, some of it also in Family Tree (FamilySearch). I had a partial tree in Ancestry.com and I had a huge tree which Reiner had given me in Reunion. Due to his generous gift I had after many years of prompting finally bought an Apple Mac because Reunion was totally Apple. Some of my data in Ancestral Quest had also been captured in Reunion by Reiner over the years we had been friends. Reiner's mother was a born Terhaag and so was my great grandmother hence we both believe there is a link there somewhere. Reiner's family roots go back to Belgium, mine to the part of Germany close to Holland and Belgium so I am sure if we could go back far enough we would find the connection. Hence Reiner had incorporated all the data I had shared with him on my father's side also into the Reunion Tree.

... not to mention the boxes and boxes of paper files.

So why the Analysis Paralysis?

Well the Reunion Tree was the most complete set of data I had, just missed my mother's information and my husbands but it would not have been that difficult to add those to it. The bigger issue was that Reiner had heavily customised Reunion and created many tailor made fields and all field names were in German.

Do I then convert all my stuff over to Reunion and to German? Do I convert all of Reiner's to English as all of my siblings and their families speak English - being born and bred in Australia. This includes my husband and our sons and grandchildren and my husbands entire family. Yet I also have a large family back in Germany who could then understand it.

Or do I focus on Ancestral Quest and somehow move all relevant data from Reunion into Ancestral Quest and keep it in English and then maintain Reunion in German, Ancestral Quest in English?

Then there were the issues of how to keep all of this in line with what was on Ancestry.com and in FamlySearch. The longer I thought about it the more confused I became. When I heard the words Analysis Paralysis ... bingo ... that described me to a T ... everything was parked into the TOO HARD BASKED.

On top of that my husband and I decided to have our DNA tested and for this I created a tree in MyHeritage. Another one! The emails from Ancestry and MyHeritage kept piling in about all the matches and smart matches and hints that I felt like tearing out my hair.

On top of that we moved house so I had another good excuse to postpone the decision on how to proceed for another year and here we are ... no more procrastination. Time for action.

If you feel like you are in Analysis Paralysis then I will share with you how I started to get moving. I have a long way to go but I am finally on the way and the first few steps have been taken and will be described in the next post.  Happy reading!