Data Sources
My data source (or lack thereof) frequently felt like the biggest weakness of my project. Because the information I was looking to manipulate for this family tree project was simple, fairly limited in scope, and readily available, I had no need to look for primary source documents or gather large amounts of data. In fact, because I didn't initially have a clear idea of what sort of information I was even looking for, I didn't even WANT that much data yet.
For now, most of my data has been hand-picked from Wikipedia pages and a few books, and entered manually into an excel document. This feels very non-academic for a research source, but has the advantage of being easy to access and is readily available.
Future Sources
In the future, I'd like to try to use a data scraper to gather a similar type of data from a geneology website. With this process I'd be able to gather a greater quantity of information, even if I'd have to manipulate it more. Perhaps once I get a handle on the Astor family, and see what information ends up being useful, I could use this technique for the Vanderbilt or Rockefeller family.
Takeaway
Despite the frustration of feeling like I have a weak source for my information, I've have a lot of opportunity through this process to think about what a dataset IS. The next time I approach a project like this I'll be able to be clear about wether the goal is to start with a clear source of data that needs to be mined and organized (like many of my classmates are doing), or starting from scratch to build the database itself. Good thing to know!