Method or Madness ?

Usually genealogy is researched by trying to find out more about relatives you already know , and trying to find out more names from their records, or general records. This is initially how I started.
After a while I realised the name Ferdinandus was so rare, that a large percentage (maybe all ?) of the people named Ferdinandus in the world could somehow be related to me.

This is when I started collecting data on everyone with the surname Ferdinandus. Initially this brought large amounts of people in the database who did not seem to be related at all. There are currently at least 50 people in the database who I suspect to be in the database twice or more. Often I need much more information to decide 2 entries in the database are indeed about the same person. When duplicate families and individuals are removed from the database, their F- and P-numbers are re-used.

By now most of the Dutch Ferdinandus names have been aggregated into 2 large trees. These 2 trees may not be connected, but it is intriguing that the earliest known ancestors of both families were millers.

The Indonesian branches of the family are many. Records on the Ferdinandus name go back as far as 1701. These records are from the East-Indies company, better known as the VOC (at that time there was only one : the dutch one ) The general lack of records from this period in Nederlands-Indië, and the difficulty of accessing databases in Indonesia makes the construction of an Indonesian Ferdinandus tree much more difficult.  This is not helped by the very common process of adopting children in the 18th and 19th centries. Many of these children would have been adopted because they were orphans. Sometimes because parents could not look after them, and sometimes it is a way of legitimising a child born out of wedlock.

Until the database reached 2000 individuals no connections between people in the Indonesian tree seemed to appear. From 2000 individuals onwards some branches started to appear, and now at 5300 individuals, there are several Moluccan / Indonesian trees, one possibly the larges one in the entire database.

I recently discovered a number of Ferdinandus people, living in Melaka around 1650-1670. Melaka was Dutch between 1641  and 1824. (although the British controlled it between 1795 and 1818)

There is also a branch in Sri Lanka. Again there was Dutch rule here from 1656 to 1796, although there were Dutchmen on the Island from 1602 onwards. The main Ferdinands family on the island appears to descend from a single Dutch VOC soldier called Johannes Ferdinandus. This branch contains hundreds of people. There is a lively genealogically active population in the descendants from "burghers". These people live partly still in Sri Lanka and part elsewhere, often Australia but spread worldwide.

Research according to the usual method is obviously still going on.

It may be that we do not all belong to the same tree. It feels to me however that all people named Ferdinandus are family, wherever and whenever they hail from.

All help you can offer me is much appreciated.