Weekly Puzzle

I've been looking for a puzzle to post all week. The good news was it was a very productive week.  I checked lots of loose ends and tied them all up.  I must have connected thirty to forty individuals and that doesn't include the dozens of family members already connected to them.  But I didn't find a really good puzzle.......

So ...   I thought I'd show how I keep all those loose ends organized when I am working on a one name study.

In order to find individuals later and be able to compare birth dates and places, marriages, deaths, etc., I find that it is most practical to enter everyone into my genealogy program.  I use Roots Magic for a number of reasons, one is the ease with which you can merge two individuals into one when the records prove they are the same person.

With over 11,000 individuals in my file I need a little more organization than just entering them, in order to find them easily again. So I've given everyone the same common ancestor "Main List Trindle" and broken it down from there.

The first breakdown is by Country.  While I believe I am chasing Trindles from the British Isles, the area where they settled also had early German settlers so I decided early on that I would just collect Trindles from anywhere.  Canadian and Australian individuals might well be from the same families as those that settled in the US.  Austrians, Polish and other European Trindles might be descended from soldiers who originated in the British Isles.  Rather than arbitrarily drawing a line on what to collect, it seemed prudent to collect all.  This has proven wise over the years as connections emerege.

There are also many variations of the name spelling, and again there is no easy process of leaving out certain records.  I have too many instances of records with the spellings Trindal, Trindel, Trendle, Trindall, etc when I know that they connect to William of PA to not collect all of them.  What if I skipped the one record that might tie them all together.


The next breakdown after country is state, shire, county etc.

Most states then have between five and ten loose ends, Trindle individuals that have not been connected to a father. In the US, Pennsylvania has the most.  Forty-two individuals await the connection of their parents.  Among these are William of Trindle Springs who has thousands of descendants, William of Westmoreland, who has hundreds more, and a few individuals that are totally unconnected to anyone.


Each line is placed in the location of the earliest record found for the family.

This system works for me.  When I find a new record, or perhaps an old one that I've forgotten I had I can easily search two ways for connections.  I can look first at the main listing of people in the file to see if there is a person with that exact name and birth date that the record might be for.  Then if I'm still looking for a match I can look at those living in and around the place where the record was found to see if there might be a fit.  With so many spellings of the surname and the flexibility of given names this often produces better results.  Once I find a possible match I can then start an in depth record search for that individual.

In fact, I thought I had a puzzle for today, but that in depth search produced a record that added parents to one of the individuals involved that could not be the parents of the second.  There are still many loose ends, watch for more puzzle postings!