Be Nice - She's A Relative, Even Though.....

I look like a nice guy don't I? I better be, or better learn to be.

Be Nice - She's A Relative, Even Though the impulse is, " She's messing with my grandfathers file"

The trouble with my possessive instincts is that my grandfather has lots of relatives besides me. Others have the same emotion as I do.  Not only that, when he was married to my grandmother, yes he had a wife that died, they have their history with him, even may know different facts about him differently than we do.

So here comes FamilyTree. When a cousin changes their tree, like a name spelling, she changes mine. What? Yes! Trust me, its going to be fabulous. We have to work together now, and documentation will be the key. The best documentation should be used.

Anyway, I experienced the emotion described today. I quickly let the the kinder me take over. I think it was quickly.

Here is a letter I wrote to my relative: It explains a lot, including the nicer me. I hope the nicer her writes back, as we are meeting here by email for the first time;

My email to her:

Hi Judy,

I am guessing we are cousins as I see you have been working on my grandfather Simeon Cragun's new family search file. It would be nice to know our relationship and connect.

I am wondering if you are in as a beta user in family tree yet? I am on a family history mission at church headquarters. Family Tree as you may or may not know is going to replace new family search as a totally different approach. There will be one tree and a change I make affects your tree. That means we are working together in documenting our common ancestors.

For example: We have Simeon spelled the way I have used it, versus the Simion as you selected on the 5th. So the tools in family tree are that we can provide links to documents. There is also a forum where we can discuss what we believe is accurate and why. The forum is sometimes being worked on, but often works. (beta issues) So, I will go into the forum and make statements all family members can see. We can decide together through the forum and through documentation what is the correct spelling.

How is that for bringing families together?

I could change the name back, but am going to just put up documentation I have. As it is a link, (we don't upload the document), I am using my blog as a place to put the document as an article. I could have made it a photo and placed it somewhere like Flickr.

I hope this isn't grueling to follow. I will start the process, if you want more let me know. If you don't have access and want access to FamilyTree, I can get you into it.

Sincerely,

Larry Cragun