So, I’ve recently been trying to break down a brick wall in the Gibbs branch of my family tree (here on Ancestry at the moment). John Gibbs (1755-1839) is as far back as I’ve been able to get with this branch, he’s a direct ancestor and seems to appear out of nowhere. Unfortunately, he’s one of a multitude of Gibbs’ from the Somerset/Dorset borders around the 1750s, not easy to pin down. Anyway I’m making progress and hope I can finally identify him soon.
When working on characters like John I like to make free-form trees using diagramming software which allows me to add and rearrange people and facts, create floating chunks of trees and generally visualise relationships, without the need to commit stuff and add sources etc to my tree until I’m sure of what I have.
In doing this with John Gibbs I have constructed trees for potential candidates for my John but have arrived at a point where I can rule those candidates out of my research as unrelated. This leaves me with floating branches of trees, often with multiple, tiny snippets about various people, DOBs, disconnected marriages, etc, that don’t even relate to a specific branch. My question is what to do with this information?
It’s not relevant to my tree so where can I put it? Sometimes I’m making connections that might not easily be made and it seems a shame for that to just sit in my research notes. The links between the people and families that I make might be open to question, but every piece, snippet, person that I look at has a source fact that can be cited. Would it be best to make a Gedcom of the branches and then upload them? This might take care of the larger branches, but what to do with the smaller facts that don’t really constitute more than a baptism perhaps, eg John Gibbs baptised 1751 in Queen Camel son of John and Mary - a tiny family tree in itself but perhaps not linked to anything else. Do I just create three profiles and add what facts I have?
Any advice on how best to approach this would be greatly appreciated.
