2018 YEAR END FAMILY TREE PROGRESS REPORT ~ By the numbers–How many new people? How many new events and sources?

This is a topic that was first shared on Randy Seaver’s blog Genea-Musings.   It’s all about the statistics or numbers in your database.  How well did we actually do in our research of family?
2018 is quickly drawing to a close.  Each year I take a look back at my Legacy database to see how my family tree has progressed.  
To get to your statistics report in Legacy go to the Help tab>About Legacy and click on General.

• Have I added more people? Although that isn’t my primary goal.
• Have I kept up with citing my sources?
• How about events?  Have I continued to enter events for ancestors lives?
• Am I continuing to add media to my tree?

I’ve run this year’s report and here is how it looks.



Let’s go back to the 2017 year end report and see what that looked like.



I see that I have 508 more people in my tree.  That’s an addition of 1.4 people per day.  Since I don’t work on my tree each and every day, that’s not bad.

How about citations?  Have I continued to be diligent about adding sources to the items I am entering, census, vital records, newspaper articles etc.?

By dividing the citations by the number of individuals you come up with a percentage.  Last year that percentage was 222.5%.  This year for 2018 the percentage is 213.7%.  That’s a drop of 8.8%.  I believe this is the first year in 5 years that my citations have dropped.  What this means is that I’ve gotten lazy.  I add people and events and I’m not citing them like I used to.  For me it’s vitally important that what I put into my tree, be verified by sources and those sources MUST be cited. Legacy makes it so easy and I’ve been doing it for years, so I have no excuse.

Let’s take a look back 5 years and see what’s happened in my tree. 
Here’s the year end report from December 2013. (Aren’t these some ugly colors I was using back than?)



Here’s a comparison table of 5 years of work on my family tree.



In these 5 years I’ve added about 360 people per year to my tree.  That’s an average of just under 1 person per day.  This means I’m discovering new families.  How many new families?  According to the stats I am adding about 128 families per year.  The largest jump I see is the number of times I have linked media to events in my tree.  I will admit to being a media junkie.  I want the visual proof of what I record.  Whether it’s a marriage register, a page from a book, a draft card, pension card or census report.  I like to add that image to my tree.
 
The question for me is, what are my goals for 2019? 

• Definitely to increase my citation percentage and quit being lazy about citing sources
• To continue to add individuals and families to my tree
• To go back and look at some of the families I haven’t looked at in a while
• To continue to blog about my journey
• To keep attending conferences, seminars and classes to increase my knowledge
• To break down a couple of brick walls I’ve had for over 15 years

That sounds like enough goals to keep me out of trouble in the coming year.  LOL!

What are your goals for 2019?  I’d love to hear about them.  Perhaps you’ll mention something I’ve missed and inspire me.  Are we cousins?  Maybe we can work together on our goals?  I love collaboration.

I wish you the greatest of success in your research in the coming year.

Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

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