Split trees .vs. one big tree

[JackMorton]

I've always put all my research into a single tree & now it's up > 3,000 people. As the kids, grandkids & now great grandkids get married, it's getting very 'wide' & unwieldy. Looking for thoughts on splitting things into multiple trees for the different branches. I'm using Mac Family Tree & that seems to be a viable thing. Looking for pros/cons before taking the big step.

[kiterunner]

The "con" that springs to mind is if that if you and your family decide to go in for DNA testing with Ancestry, each person's DNA test can only be linked to one tree at a time. Though of course that would be the tree on Ancestry and you could have however many trees you like on your own computer. Another "con" is that if you have the same person on more than one tree, you need to remember to update them on each tree when there is new or changed information.

[Merry]

I have over 10,000 on my tree and I would never split it. I don't think of it as unwieldy at all - it's not as if I can see all of it at the same time! Also I have a lot of areas where families inter-marry a great deal, so it would be difficult to manage those parts if they were not all on one tree. I would also find it irritating if I had to jump from one tree to another in order to check out information etc etc.

I'm trying to think of a benefit to having separate branches, but can't think of any!!

EDIT maybe I should add that I wasn't referring to online trees but the tree I work on which has been on the same program (Brother's Keeper) since about 2000.

[Olde Crone]

I wish I'd done two trees, one for my father and one for my mother. There's no crossover between the two, so that wouldn't be a problem for me.

I was surprised to find how annoyed I get when someone starts to take info from the "wrong" side of the tree.

OC

[Phoenix]

I have a single, offline tree, with notes culled from various places. I can print off subsets of the information for interested parties.

On Ancestry, I have two major trees: Mum's side, linked to me and Dad's side linked to my aunt as I'm not terribly interested in researching that side and like OC, I'm irritated by people who simply want to fill their tree with masses of unrelated names. I do also have lots of quick and dirty trees on Ancestry, testing theories.

[Olde Crone]

Phoenix, ooh yes, I'd forgotten the pencilled trees, lol. As you say, good for testing theories and good for fishing for just ONE fish, rather than any little fish swimming in the pool.

Early in my internet research, I made contact with someone, we exchanged a lot of information. Once my excitement had died down I realised with a sinking heart that our mutual interest was merely a married-in for both of us and as there were no children of the marriage then there was really no connection worth pursuing.

OC

[marquette]

I have 4 ancestry trees, one for each of my parents, and one each for my in-laws. And then I built another tree linking them altogether, to attach my daughters DNA. My parents DNA is attached to each of their trees. I also have a tree for building information for DNA matches who don't have enough of a tree to connect to a common ancestor. All five trees have between 5000 and 10000 people.

I also have an old PAF tree on my computer, which combines them all into one, but I need to update it and transfer it to a new program.

[JBee]

I started out with split trees which I still have but am now concentrating on one big tree - this is so I can keep the one tree completely up to date and also only have one paid suscription on tribal pages (the rest are there too but the free version) so I can print of whatever I want, charts etc for any person in my enlarged tree.

[JBee]

I started out with split trees which I still have but am now concentrating on one big tree - this is so I can keep the one tree completely up to date and also only have one paid suscription on tribal pages (the rest are there too but the free version) so I can print off whatever I want, charts etc for any person in my enlarged tree

[Glen TK]

Dancing between trees just led me to making stupid mistakes so I scrapped the idea and just have one tree with floating branches where needed.
The wider and deeper the one tree is the easier I find it is to slot dna matches into it and have specific profile icons for them so tree view is much clearer especially with multiple branches open.
Some of my floating branches have dozens of matches in them and twiglets can end up linked to both of my parental lines, it would be a nightmare to try and merge everything as it is now where it spread over multiple trees not least because of the number of duplicates I'd be dealing with.