Vertical to Horizontal

[darkerhorse]

I've more or less done what I can with vertical researching of my direct ancestors and their siblings.

The next move would be to fill out the family tree horizontally but that holds much less interest for me.

Has anyone found it rewarding?

[MarcuccioV]

I've more or less done what I can with vertical researching of my direct ancestors and their siblings.

The next move would be to fill out the family tree horizontally but that holds much less interest for me.

Has anyone found it rewarding?

Yes -- I'm doing that on my maternal (Italian) side since I too, have maxed out vertically (for now). The benefit is I can include more of the commune's surnames (through marriage) which in an indirect way, gives me a better view on family dynamics and how the various families are interconnected.

It has also provided some insight into how some of my DNA matches may relate to me -- in some cases there are no direct connections, but in researching the indirect relatives deeper connections sometimes come into greater focus. For that alone it makes it worthwhile for me.

The only downside (and I'm using Ancestry as my family tree matrix) is once these horizontal relations are added, it brings up further clues/relations which can take time to add/sort out. I guess it's not everyone's cup of espresso, but I find it rewarding...

[darkerhorse]

I've more or less done what I can with vertical researching of my direct ancestors and their siblings.

The next move would be to fill out the family tree horizontally but that holds much less interest for me.

Has anyone found it rewarding?

Yes -- I'm doing that on my maternal (Italian) side since I too, have maxed out vertically (for now). The benefit is I can include more of the commune's surnames (through marriage) which in an indirect way, gives me a better view on family dynamics and how the various families are interconnected.

It has also provided some insight into how some of my DNA matches may relate to me -- in some cases there are no direct connections, but in researching the indirect relatives deeper connections sometimes come into greater focus. For that alone it makes it worthwhile for me.

The only downside (and I'm using Ancestry as my family tree matrix) is once these horizontal relations are added, it brings up further clues/relations which can take time to add/sort out. I guess it's not everyone's cup of espresso, but I find it rewarding...

Grazii. I appreciate the thoughts on your experience. I would limit my horizontal efforts to my Italian side.

[parkergambino]

My research methods have always been intuitive, with my intuition not necessarily being similar to that of others. With the limited information available to me when I started I thought it best to find ALL of the people in the ancestral locations with the key surnames and then reconstruct the various family units. Followed by sifting through for "my" people. So, horizontal is partially my default method. I find that it does provide some useful context, in an imprecise way that would take more time to try to describe than I will do here; quickie example: so many from Palermo with the surname Randazzo are fishermen. It even carries through to Randazzo's seafood market in Bronx's Little Italy centered on Arthur Avenue.

It also seems to me (again, too much time involved for me to dig up now) that there have been instances where knowing the identity and relationship of a cousin or some such relative gave an opportunity to work around a brick wall or two. We can chalk this up to (the latest euphemism is) "endogamy". Since marriages between relatives were not uncommon in the insular communities of my Sicilian ancestors, sometimes this was the path to documents that were also relevant to my directly vertical objectives.

On the endogamy subject, what is true for my lineages is, I believe, also true for much of Italy back not so many generations ago, and also essentially a partial default for humans in general if we go back far enough.

Happy hunting,

Parker