When do you say NO!

[MarvinP]

My wife joined her family genealogy association a few years back and I went to the meeting. The president of the association said they had a Microsoft Access database of all the members that needed to be converted to GEDCOM so they could create a family book and send it to libraries. She also said that others had tried and failed to convert the data. I got ahold of the database and spent 2 years cleaning up the 120,000 people in it and getting it into GEDCOM and then RootsMagic. The data was a huge mess. Duplicate people and lost links and finally, finding I didn't get the 2011 version but the 2009 data that was missing 970 people was the final straw.

Today I received a link to the Membership data that is stored on the net in Google Sheets. I assume the association wants more free labor to clean it up. I've done all my work for free and have somewhat enjoyed learning more about Access, Gedcom and Excel.

When someone gives you a question/task in Google Sheets can you simply say NO? Because we know about computers or spreadsheets, can we say we only accept problems in Excel?

Do you have similar experiences?

[alansidman]

Personally, if I am volunteering my time, then I have no issue with saying "NO!" and emphatically. If I am being paid, then I may have a different answer.

[JapanDave]

I would make sure they know what you have done for them. But, the bigger question is why wouldn't a few well placed SQL statements have done the job for you? Did you do all this manually?

[MarvinP]

Hey Dave,

It took 2 years because there were 70,000 people who'd been entered into a dBase IV database without a key field along with about 30,000 spouses. I found 64 different ways people had spelled the word "Unknown". There were letter and number substitutions like the lower case l for the number 1. There were about 2000 duplicate people scattered throughout the data. Text had been entered into number fields and vice versa. About a third of the people had dates of birth. After I was done it looked like there was a version control problem where they used two or three files to enter data into. There was confusion on which database was the current one. It was a very awful experience to unravel the family trees.

When I presented the problems with the conversion, only 2 or 3 people understood the difficulty. Others would claim, it is a genealogy database and there will always be problems. After the conversion the group has shown very little appreciation for the effort.

Now the real question is, should I accept they have moved to Google Sheets and continue to help when I prefer Excel as my tool of choice.

[JapanDave]

Wow, sound like a pain in the butt. And I guess I was dreaming when I said, make sure they know what you have done. Can't tell you how many times I have encountered that.
I have never worked with Google sheets, but if it can't be transferred to an Excel file with a few clicks. I would tell them to move it. That is , if you are still willing to work in Excel for them?

[AlKey]

Hi Marvin,
As you probably know already that "No good deed ever goes unpunished"

[JBeaucaire]

I find whining has different effect on different people. Some respect your points, offer some minimal recompense, then proceed to ask you for more work. Others ignore it all together, and some get openly offended.

I think our best advice will be given if we know what your actual goal would be.

1) No more work at all
2) No more free work
3) Some acknowledgement/compensation for past work, then you continue under an hourly rate.


Perhaps test the water. "Might I ask what my budget is on the ongoing work? I've racked up about 350 hours so far, not counting the latest additions....please advise."

[MarvinP]

Hey Jerry,

You have a good point. What was my motivation? My father-in-law was an IBMer and I wanted his family to be able to trace their roots back in history. He helped me learn to program and understand databases. Because of computers and databases my effort was for him. My intent was to make this information very public so anyone in the tree could see what was collected and add or correct the data. Since about 1950 the association collected letters from members to build the family tree. They have about 9 4 drawer file cabinets of correspondences that finally ended up in dBase in about 1980. All this paper was given to Allen County Public Library to scan and put on line, two years ago. It has never gone public as the Association Board thinks they can make money from the information. We pay a $15/year annual dues to be members of the organization. The association has about 150 paying members.

Whining about what should be done with the data has not helped. My end goal was to look through the public scanned information and correct the last 700 "impossible dates" in my conversion (like died before born). Until the scanned letters go online, I will have no additional information that might fix the "impossible dates" information.

My payment would be to have the Association release the scanned images and share the work I've done with everyone. The whole idea with genealogy (in my mind) is to share information so we can all get closer to discovering where we came from. This would be a tribute to my wife's father. By keeping my conversion limited to a very few people, my end goal (and effort) has been blocked. Enough whining.....

I think I'll "test the waters" and suggest I really can't do more work until the PUBLIC library files are released and viewable online, like I assumed they would be 2 years ago.

Thanks for helping me hammer out what I really want..

[JBeaucaire]

Go get 'em.