My family’s history and story is of great concern to, so much so that I intend to reconstruct the family tree as far as I can get in order to know who came before me.
In this same sense, I put a lot a value into objects that have reached through the generations. I have china, some furniture, personal items, photos and photo albums, etc.
Everything tells a piece of a story I wasn’t able to fully live through and instead just brushed me growing up.
It gives me a sense of belonging.
I use Wikitree to document my tree. GRAMPS was a consideration but trying to share with older relatives was going to be an issue for me that way. I do keep a local GEDCOM copy though. Yes I do feel disgusted the LDS created the format every time I save a backup. Gedcom files can be used with basically everything if you weren’t aware.
The biggest pitfall I’ve seen is trusting other people’s work. At all. You might stumble upon what looks like a full family tree of your relatives and start adding people to yours and get all excited about this treasure of information you’ve found. You’ll realize later it’s probably so big because the person spent a while on Ancestry.com just randomly accepting any “match” and it isn’t really that accurate.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with perusing the trove of data on acenstry.com, and there’s good trees around from there. Just verify.
The second biggest pitfall is similar, start by not trusting family stories. In my family I always grew up hearing we were related to the people who built the white house, and had Native American blood (an especially common story in America which I could write for ages on) in us, and were related to a famous poet. Turns out none of that was true and until I realized that I spent hours chasing down random paths trying to prove those things I supposedly knew. Turns out we just had someone who’s name was “White”, there may be an ancestor who’s last name was “Whitehouse”, the poet just happened to have the same last name, and for us a part of the family was in the KKK and disappointed a different family member had married a person of color and to cover it up they claimed the dark skin was native american.
Grandma made mostly greeting cards. Every birthday and christmas was a custom card from her. I wish I had thought when I was younger to keep more of them or at least a picture of some of them. She had boxes and boxes of stamps and different textured paper and strips of fabric and things. Each one was always hand made with care.
I have another hobby with fountain pens and trading postcards around the world and know I could have put at least some of it to use.
I’ll be using the birth, marriage and death certificates my country issues to go beyonf my own memory. This will give me at least 75 years of reliable and easily accessible information. At some point, I’ll have to query my national library where such registries are kept for historical purposes.
There are a few things I want to put a rest to, like the story of an uncle, who alledgelly spent 18 years in prison and a supposed move of a branch of the family from one area to another in the country. Some 90 years or more in the past, it was uncommon.
The move 90 years ago I might actually believe. A great uncle of mine did basically the same thing, picked up a whole branch of the family and moved. After WWI they’d struggled to rebuild and he saw the start of WWII coming (although he didn’t realize how big it would be at the time). He moved just far enough to get a new start with people who didn’t know him before and went from there. I’ve seen others did the same before WWI seeing it coming.
Also around the 1850’s to 1960’s was the peak of cruise ships. It opened up movement a little more and people started realizing they could possibly relocate easier. That was also the tail end of railroad mania which caused a lot of that shuffling around of people.
Not in my country. Workers would travel around, even work away from home for months, but always returned home. There wasn’t much movement within the country and when the dictatorship settled in things just got harder. The country was mostly rural then and nearly every peasant had a peace of land to sow some potatoes, cabbage, turnips and onions, along with some vines for wine. Leaving that notion of security was very hard. Hence the strangeness of a branch of the family leaving their origin.