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Should you include an uncle's family or even godparents and witnesses of an event in your family tree? Let's take a look.
Starting your genealogy is also like getting into an endless gear. You've probably been told several times: 'a genealogy is never finished' and for good reason! Its extent will largely depend on the people you decide to include or not in your family tree.
The key to success is to find as much information as possible about an ancestor or to find new elements that can help unlock your research.
By including the families of an ancestor's brothers and sisters, you will limit errors and confusion if some people share the same name in the same village. You can also confirm or not a family connection with a distant cousin.
Going through other family members will help you unlock information if you are, for example, looking for a birth, marriage, or death place.
From past centuries to today, our ancestors' social circle has continued to grow.
Remarriages were not rare and sometimes occurred within the same families. By including as many people encountered in records as possible in your genealogy, you can more easily make certain connections.
By also including godparents, godmothers, or witnesses, you can understand the social status of your ancestors within the village. It can also be interesting to see the same names reappear throughout an ancestor's life, proof of the important role that person could play in their life.
Including neighbors can also help you explain family connections that may have been built over time.
Adding cousins, even distant ones, to your family tree expands the scope of your research. You will then increase the number of possible connections. And connections mean possible discoveries...
Only you know the answer to this question.
Some genealogists, called 'collectors,' prefer to expand their tree without deepening it, unlike 'investigators' who extensively deepen their research.
In our opinion, it's all about balance and desire, of course.
Considering that finding information in archives can be very time-consuming, several tips can help you decide who to include or not in your tree:
Prioritize your research. Focus on direct-line ancestors, then on siblings, then on your cousins, then on your in-laws for example. Add people without blood ties as you encounter them in records.
Choose who to include and stick to it. It's up to you to decide if you find it useful to include people who do not share blood ties with your family. However, note the importance of the role of witnesses (outside the family) and neighbors in past centuries.
Note your findings as you go. This also means: include people as you encounter them in records. Add witnesses, godparents, godmothers, and even neighbors if you know them. Including them doesn't necessarily mean you have to do their genealogy. Noting a name will be useful to realize that it appears several times in your tree or even that it connects to one of your branches a few years later.
Don’t put pressure on your research. The workload associated with your research may seem enormous and unrealistic if you choose from the start to include as many people as possible in your family tree. But remember, Rome wasn't built in a day. Take things one at a time. Don't hesitate to explore your family tree, to move from one generation to another, from ancestry to descendants, to add new people as you go along in your investigation.
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