Hi all, Susanna here. I've only been here a few weeks so am not sure I have any useful tips. Except to take your time if you're new. Read everything, consider before adding things, and if in doubt ask. Everyone's really friendly. Oh, and bookmark everything useful. I have a separate Wikitree folder in my bookmarks and it's getting very full.
The only improvement I'd love to see is a search engine for pages. It's pure laziness on my part as I have to go out of Wikitree and on to Google to finds things on here sometimes.
I love the collaboration here; the thought that I'm part of something so much bigger than myself, that my two family trees (biological and adopted) have been grafted on to the great tree of life and so I no longer feel like I have a split personality! Would it be uber cringeworthy at this point to quote Jerry Maguire? I also love the attention to detail. By nature I'm a visionary rather than a detail person so this is good discipline for me. It's forcing me to go slowly and work methodically which I'm loving.
The stories are endless, but one of the stand out experiences I had was in Winchester, VA. I am an ordinated pastor in the PC(USA) and in 2005 took a call to a small church in Winchester. One day I was at a meeting at the downtown First Presbyterian Church on Loudon Street. One of the beautiful, stained-glass windows was dedicated to Henry Martyn White. I'd heard of the name and suspected he was a relative so called my grandfather to find out. It turns out he's my great v 2 grandfather and he founded both the Loudon Street church and also the little church where I was called, and a number of other churches surrounding Winchester. Not only that, we had a family record that he preached his last sermon on Sunday, 20 Nov 1910 in my church before passing away nine days later. As you can probably image, I never felt the same standing in that pulpit after that. As my grandfather used to say I was 'surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.'
I made the decision not to import my trees from Ancestry as I wanted to make sure they were as accurate as possible, so I have been labouring away entering them by hand. I am working on both my biological family - Hayes, Byrd, McLeod, Hudson and beyond, and also my adopted family - Hendy, Dant, Rich, Eve and beyond. The former are from the southern US, the latter from England, so I never get bored.
I've also worked a fair bit on my step-father's tree here in the UK so will add that later, and have done trees for a number of friends. (I'm never going to run out of things to do!)
I love England in the spring. I live in a village in Hertfordshire (something of an oasis in a sea of concrete) that is surrounded by park land and fields. There are lambs playing, ducks and chicks on the village pond, and the birds are going crazy. We have one particularly proud blackbird who sits on the huge oak tree outside my window singing his heart out while he guards his family nest. There are flowers everywhere and the blossom is spectacular this year. We are due for a bumper crop of apples in the autumn. Oh, you asked about the weather... cloudy... it's England!
