How far do you extend your tree?
 

I'm working on a branch of my tree that I had neglected previously. It is not a close branch but as I was going through I realised that I had family that had the middle name of a new in-law. Following things back I realised the new husband was related to the surname, however his family are not related to mine.

Do you add in people to show that families intermarried, even if half of the intermarriages are not blood related to you?

I'd say I do, but not every time I see this might be a possibility. It just depends on how interesting the people seem and how difficult or otherwise the research might be. Sometimes I don't add the whole family, so I might add parents and grandparents, but not all of their children if they are not relevant to the connection, but I would put notes, "Doris is the third of six children of Fred and Wilma", or whatever. Sometimes I don't even add any extra people, just a note explaining the connection.

I have just had something like this come up on my tree. My ancestors sister gets married in 1820 and her new husband has the same unusual surname as her mother's maiden name so is she marrying a relative? Issues are that the new husband died before 1851 so don't know his birthplace and whilst I may know the names of his parents if he was born in the same area he died, I can't be 100% and if I am right then I still can't be sure which generation (if any) gives me the connection to his wife's mother. So, do I persue this? I might do/ I might not! In other parts of my tree I have got extreme satisfaction from being able to prove these types of connections, but no one else cares!

Mum always said I should just follow Dad's family -ie create a stick, not a tree.

I'm with Merry: if I'm interested, I'll add them in, but boring ones I'll ignore. Current research is following the beneficiaries of some wills, so I'm entering them all in the hopes that I can work out relationships. My only caveat is that (knowing how I resent people including my immediate family in their tree) I don't put people born under 100 years ago in my online tree, even if privatised.

I put these people on my home tree, but that isn't shared with anyone. The main reason for doing this is to show the line down to anyone with whom I've have contact so that when they get in touch a second or third time, 'pretending' they don't know me already, I will know who they are!

I have to admit to delighting in discovering exactly who someone is even when they have only told me the name of their great-grandfather and clearly think that isn't enough to find them too! lol

Exactly what Merry says! I come from a small gene pool, lol, and quickly discovered that no one in my family - apart from my mother and father - ever married an unrelated person. Yes, the relationship might be six generations previously but the relationship was there. My amazement is how these people kept in touch down the years despite living hundreds of miles apart and presumably not being letter writers.

I have done several village studies as a result of this. The Scottish side is even more amazing, the Scots go in for surnames as middle names and these are almost always the name of an ancestor, usually easy to find, but "Charles Smith" doesn't sound very promising, does it, so I didn't investigate that, but recognised the name when it appeared 200 years previously!

The thing about this hobby is that you don't know what you don't know until you come across it, so I tend to follow everyone as far as I can and that has paid off where interest is concerned, even if I eventually find myself following a family which is not related to me in any way! I have no discipline I'm afraid.

OC

I wouldn't normally add the parents of the people who married in, but put in the notes something like "sister of ... who married ...".

I put anyone and everyone into my private trees. My public one mainly has ancestry quick links to source it.

I know this hobby of ours has no real rules so I could try and do trees for the whole of England if I so desired but I don't normally put in people where there is no relationship to me, except step children as they affected my family but this family are close cousins to each other and some married in to my tree so I wondered what everyone else does.

I sometimes add the parents, especially if two or more siblings married in.

One thing I've been doing recently is to trace forward as many lines as possible, because the additional surnames it throws up help a lot in trying to work out how DNA matches are related to me.

I have been this as well. Now I have started a special private tree which is lots of bits of trees from DNA matches, hoping I might provoke Ancestry to make more ThruLines.

My tree spreads far and wide - we have a lot of inter-family marriages and you need to follow all the cousins down their lines. Recently I figured out the my 3xgreat grandparents who came to Australia, were actually fourth cousins, but I dont suppose they knew.

While searching somewhere down OH's Bennett line from Somerset, one of them married a woman with an unusual name and birth place. I was curious and checked the various census records to see if it was correct - then in 1841 I found that she lived as a domestic servant, in the same small Berkshire village as my paternal ancestors.

These are the little curiosities and co-incidences that I love.