This post is not meant as a criticism or because I'm burning with envy 
. It is just a wonder.
If you have thousands of people in your tree, do the names loose some significance to you? I understand that you would hold more of an attachment to your direct ancestors than a very distant relative but do the entries become just names and not real people.
I ask because I only have about 3 hundred and I've found that some of them are just names and I really do need to go back and do some more in-depth research on their lives before I start trawling for new ones to add. Otherwise, I feel that my tree is becoming a pointless excersise.
I look forward to your views.
Hi Wheeldon
I don't have thousands (about 1000 altogether, including all the current generation) but I entirely agree with you. I have found far more satisfaction in researching a few of them, properly, than just adding to a list of names for the sake of it.
Shortly after getting into this family history lark I found a couple of trees on Rootsweb which are connected with mine, and very quickly realised that I didn't actually care whether my GGGGG grandfather was called Tom, Alfred or Horatio, if that was all I knew about him. On the other hand, I've found out a painful amount of accurate detail about my great uncle, who was killed in WW1, even though I've known that fact all my life, I've just never gone into it in depth before. Further back, I've found that researching the circumstantial detail of people's lives and putting them into historical context, makes them far more real to me than just getting as far back as possible.
Depends a lot on who you are and what you want to get out of it. The only thing I knew in advance about mine, was that they definitely
didn't all come from the same couple of villages, so working out how they got together in the first place is quite interesting!
Cheers Veron
