Sorry for the insult to Shakespeare, but I have a somewhat rhetorical question. For those of you who started your tree and later decided to delete it and start over, what were the things that made you decide to do this? Was it worth it in the end?
I’m on the crux of a decision about my tree. For context, I have about 1000 people and about 2000 media files. Some lines go back to before the US Revolutionary War. I was downloading from both Ancestry and FamilySearch before I realized the consequences of doing so, and now my sources/citations/media files are a mess. I also used the “merge sources” and “merge citations” features in a version that previously merged citations with blank citation names (which has subsequently been fixed). It’s a big mess.
Not wanting to sacrifice my work, I started a cleanup project to get all of this data sorted out and try to get the tree back to a workable and sound version. After having spent 40-50 hours cleaning up media files, deleting hundreds of duplicates, and renaming them to something that makes sense, I’m almost done with that part of the task. However, next I have to start on the citations and they are going to take a long time too.
As I’m doing this, I wonder if the situation justifies me simply making a clean start. While I have a lot of good data and research in there, I also relied too much on other people’s research and not enough original research when I started. Once I get all this sorted out, I probably need to go back through and check every parent/child relationship again and make sure that I can prove the connection and it wasn’t simply copied from another user’s tree.
Side note - Regardless of what I do about my RootsMagic tree, I plan to delete my Ancestry tree and upload a new version from RootsMagic once the file is cleaned up (or restarted). It’s just too much work to resynch all those changes.
Even if you haven’t dumped your tree and started over in the past, I’m interested in your views about what you would do in this situation. Thanks in advance!