My sister became interested in genealogy in the early 1960s. Our paternal grandmother was up in years and yet had kept in touch with many of her relatives. My sister had the foresight to record much of this. She approached our maternal grandparents and asked them for as much as they remembered and wrote this down as well.
For a long time she kept her records in boxes. She kept doing research and adding more information. From time to time I would help her at the libraries around Seattle.
She was an early adopter of Personal Ancestral File and has moved through several programs. Each program and version comes with its own set of problems. My sister's problem has been how to store the information she has collected and document her sources. The GEDCOM file format let her share information with the contacts she has made over the years.
My interests lie more with integrating massive stores of data and making sense of it.
There are many genealogy books all over the world. Unfortunately a lot of it conflicts with each other and lots of errors have been introduced.
I tried my hands at integrating genealogy with a couple of early versions of World Family Tree. The first edition I bought had, maybe, about three disks of family trees people had submitted. A later edition had, I think, fourteen disks of family trees. Many people didn't know birth dates. World Family Free took to adding "WTF est" followed by a date range when no date was given. I spent some time trying to make sense of all of this. The noise was too much. What that computer died so did my interest, at least to the extent of working on it.
Earlier this year, 2013, I decided to try again. I chose Ancestry.com. While it still has the familiar Ancestry Family Trees one can use to acquire information it also has US Census records, state and county marriage and death indexes, and much more. I started by entering my name, my parents' names, and my grandparents' names. From that I could find Family Trees so I started collecting as much as I could. Again I encountered inconsistencies so I backed off and started adding documentation as I went, well at least some times.
It seems people make mistakes and intentionally introduce errors. I understand mistakes. We are humans and humans make mistakes. Intentional errors are another matter. People have changed census records so people's names appear as curse words. Ancestral Trees include fake ancestors. (Unfortunately I've copied some of that into my tree.) Religion has pushed people to document several generations and bind parents together even if it's not the reality of the matter.
Dealing with this raises my stress level. The work is daunting and I've only collected about 6,200 names into my tree. My sister snoops around the web. After finding errors in my tree she shared a backup of her tree with me. It has over 100,000 names in it. She has much more on hardcopy she has yet to enter. Everything I enter comes from the web but in some cases I have selected between alternates based upon her file. I've left some of the stuff that doesn't appear in her file even though some of it may be fake and I may have mistakenly merged unrelated individuals.
It's too much. I have to back off for days and weeks after encountering certain issues in the records. I want to be as accurate as I can and as inclusive as I can. I have other interests and this could easily suck up all my free time.
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