
I can definitely see what you're saying. I think the whole point of the discussion before when talking about making the three projects is that people like to be able to see if they're able to join through an ancestor. I think the biggest (most useful) help with the Descendants line, if we choose to do it this way, is to only include "verified" descendants. For example, I just sent in my DAR application recently and did a "short" application using, basically, the closest proven descendant ancestor I could find. I still had to prove five more generations to get to me, but it was nice to know where I could draw the line and stop looking for records. Does that make sense?
If we are trying to help people find their nearest ancestor, the best and fastest way is to have them join the big tree, look up the tree to find which ancestors we tagged as already on the DAR. It is then trivial to go to the DAR database and check to see if the ancestor line is. Already documented
Lets spend our time in adding ancestors to Geni instead.
I'm working up and down the line, but I'm only tagging the Patriots and Daughters, as it would take more time to tag the in between parts. I'm also finding at the same time that I'm making merges. Recently I came across a daughter which Faustine Darsey on partial hiatus had created. I'm sure when she placed this person on the tree, she had no idea that she was a daughter. It is really interesting on how closely related some families are.
I think I added about 100 daughters before we started identifying them. I was very hesitant to add the more recent information for privacy reasons. Even though the DAR database is public I was concerned that I might get hate mail from descendant who felt the DAR applications were being exploited or something. (Or from the DAR) I was greatly encouraged by Alice Zoe Marie Knapp by the way she handled them. The profiles looked nice & gave recognition to the Daughter & the Patriot. I think interest in these projects is picking up. I get inquiries,sometimes 2 or 3 / day about Patriots. There is a wealth of information from a genealogy standpoint, but that's only part of the picture. I have learned a lot of history & come to appreciate more the price that was paid for my freedom.
One of the things I do when I add a daughter is to see if I can find more information about her on the internet. I search FindaGrave and I goggle her name and her parent's names to see if I get any hits, then I also search the census records. Sometimes I don't find anything, but other times I get a bit more information. I think back to when I first started searching my husband's line. His parents only knew enough back to their grandparents, so I was delighted when I got the information I did.
My mother didn't know she was able to be a DAR member until she was in her 50's. So she was proud of the fact that she was able to be a DAR member. The information on her and her application is still blank for the 3 generations before her, so I felt that I wasn't posting any information which wasn't already source information that couldn't be found anyway.
This is a fun project. Hopefully it will help others.