At the outset, let me say that I’m a huge fan of Ancestry.ca (or .com, or .co.uk). The software and it’s underlying data has its detractors, not least because it’s very expensive, but it’s enabled me, and countless thousands of others, to document our families in ways that were simply not possible even just twenty years ago. I’ve met distant cousins, visited graves that I didn’t know existed, and even had them analyze my DNA, so I think the whole thing really is the Bees Knees.

But here’s the “but”.

Because the data entry isn’t controlled, the range and format of what people enter is never ending. All capital letters, no capital letters, abbreviations, codes, misuse of fields, it’s all there. I know it’s true that if you give fifty people a form to fill, it’ll be filled in fifty different ways, so I guess this is something similar. But what, you may ask, does it matter?

Well, it matters a lot. I don’t know if some of the users of Ancestry realise that other people get to see the data they enter; that’s rather the point of Ancestry, that we share information. But including a person’s nickname in the Name field helps no one, and like many of the other data input issues, really screws up sorting and searching. That the nickname is often accompanied by quotation marks or parentheses just adds to the confusion.

Then there are the people who invent their own coded method of data entry, including mothers’ names and spouses names in a person’s First Name and Surname fields not only confuses the database and makes reading the data hard, it’s all unnecessary because these nuggets of information are held elsewhere and linked by the system.

Perhaps what I’m really complaining about is having to go through and re-enter data when it pops up in my family tree, not just to keep it consistent and workable, but to make it look reasonable.

Anyway, nothing will change and I’ll spend a good proportion of my time righting wrongs, in data entry at least. In between times I can happily discover 164 people in my tree who were born in Newfoundland (a week ago I hadn’t heard of any), and realise that a long-lost cousin lived two streets away from where I lived in North London, albeit twenty years earlier. It’s nothing if not interesting in the world of Ancestry.