Vavanty1 did a huge amount of research to collect a vast amount of data about our family tree (starting from ~200 families to ~double that now). But for one reason or another, I didn't get around to collating all of it. I think the problem started when I needed to update the data after my Mom died. In the text file twf that I use to track all of this data, all that I had to do was add ",78" after Mom's name to designate her age when she died and for some reason I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I assume all of us grieve differently and I guess that was just my way of grieving.
Just as I had to watch helplessly as Lisa died, it was my burden to watch helplessly as Mom lay dying for 2 months. I'll have to carry all of those memories for the rest of my life. Of watching her starve to death for 2 months while she just helplessly lay there with needles supplying her nutrition which her body ultimately rejected every time when she got up out of bed to throw it all up - in the form of hideous green bile, rejecting the very nutrition that was supposed to sustain her and keep her going. At a mechanical level, it was just cancer at work, but I wonder if there was a message in there - along with a new rider added: "Not by bread alone, nor by saline" but I guess I'm just too dumb to understand these things.
Anyway, that's just my long winded excuse for having not worked on the family tree and for almost having let all that data that Vavanty1 gathered with so much effort just gather dust for more than 2 years.
I've also come to realize that maintaining this data by myself is making me a huge bottleneck to this entire process so I'm thinking through some ideas on how this work can be distributed out so that the information can be maintained by multiple "scribes". Maintaining it online using any of the current crop of ancestry related websites 2 might be one solution (with all of the lock-in issues that engenders). I find the text file format that I came up with to be much more convenient and faster. I also like the fact that the format I use can be used as an offline bookkeeping format as well (as in literally tracking it in a notebook that can be handed down by generations). Editing a flat file is also definitely faster than using any of the GUIs like gramps3 or even TUIs like llines4 both of which use GEDCOM as the backend. It is also way faster than using the web to clickety clack your way through a family tree. One solution that I've thought of is to use a script that turns the data in the format I use into GEDCOM and then upload that but the problem with that approach is that any later updates will then need to be done to the GEDCOM file instead of the original that was used to generate it.
While I'm still thinking through these issues, on All Souls day this year, I decided that I've procrastinated long enough and I've restarted working on the family tree again. I started off by adding ",78" after Mom's name and to make up for the delay and as a peace offering to Vavanty1, the very first entries that I've added are part of the information about Paul Uncle's side of the family.
Updated on 20 Nov 2024 to add a link to a description of the "tree walk format" flat file format/DSL twf used to store the family tree data.