Hi Timothy,
I think you've summed it up quite well, when you said "The dilema is in
managing sources and eventually linking many of those individuals to my
family tree. As I would want to document the sources for all individuals
entered, it seems that managing sources in different databases could be
cumbersome when it comes time to move individuals (and their linked
families) to my family tree database along with their sources."
If you keep it all in one file, then everything is at hand when you need
it, and things like sources are kept uniform.
I have done this for my PLAYFORTH family who once lived in the village
of Market Weighton, Yorkshire, England. When I had access to the census
images, I grabbed every mention of the name in the area. Many I didn't
know at that stage how they fitted into the family, but I recorded them
anyway in my database - there is a lot of information in census records
to help you link people together from one census to the next, as well as
putting family groups together. As time has gone on, I've found other
information and made contact with the descendants of those people, and
have slowly connected the lines up to my own tree.
I've also made transcriptions of things like every SCHLAGER and BREE
entry in the New Zealand birth, marriage and death indexes. These names
aren't so common that the task was onerous, but the resulting files are
very useful when new names are discovered in other places. With these
names I haven't added every one to my Legacy database, but I expect that
one day a good number of the ones that aren't currently there will be,
when I find out how they're connected.
You also said "On the other side, managing hugely numerous unlinked
individuals in one database seems like it could become overwhelming."
Not really, because the names are not in your line of sight unless you
go looking for them. Like all the other names in your family tree, they
sit there patiently until you have a need to go looking for them. It
doesn't matter much that they're unconnected to your own line, because
when you need them they are quickly located using the Name List.
This is no different to people who have tens of thousands of names in
their databases, all connected in some way to the others - I don't think
these people remember every name in their file. I know I don't always
recognise some amongst the 1400+ names in mine!
Hope this helps. :-)
Kind Regards,
Wendy Howard
--
Kaiwaka, Northland, New Zealand
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~wendyh65/
<http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/%7Ewendyh65/>
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