A Brand New To-Do List

 

Starting a new project always throws the unexpected into one's path. That, at least, is my story, now that I've jumped into the collaborative possibilities at WikiTree. Well, let me amend that. "Jump" is too strong a word. How about "seeped" or "oozed"? Something more like molasses in January.

Speaking of January, that is usually when I assemble my research to-do list, and that becomes my working plan for the entire upcoming year. No room for detours, usually. This weekend, though, I made an exception—and ended up with a brand new to-do list to merge with the current one. 

My hope was to be more collaborative with the discoveries I've uncovered in the past kazillion years of chasing my family's stories. Another instigative shove I owe to the lonely fact that there aren't too many of my relatives out there, at least on some of my lines. Perhaps someone else is puzzling over those same family history mysteries, as well.

Once I crashed into the realization that uploading my thirty five thousand name GEDCOM into WikiTree was not the best of ideas—even if I used my stripped down version—I settled down to the drudge work of starting from scratch, one name at a time. Of course, that meant uploading information on references, too. But what do you do when some of those documents were obtained pre-Internet via snail mail (and its obligatory six-week waiting period)? 

That's where my weekend got hung up. It was a simple footnote to my paternal grandfather's date of death. Fortunately for me, those New York City records are now supposedly uploaded to various online genealogical resources, so I took what I thought would be a quick peek to see if online searches would once again save me some time.

Wrong. Once again, my ancestors found a way to hide in the cracks, so back to the notebooks it was to pull up the stored hard copy of my grandfather's death certificate. Granted, those old three ring binders did not age well in the past, um, forty years since I've first been at this paper chase. But that didn't matter; of all the records in those multiple binders, the entire file on that specific family was not in that storage collection.

In the meantime, I cleaned up all those stored files on the other family lines, tossed duplicates of records I've already noted, and digitized documents I still needed to add to my records online. And then, there were just a few more minutes left to compose profile entries on WikiTree for three ancestors: my dad, my mysterious paternal grandfather of the top-secret origin, and his wife—none of whom have matches within that vast WikiTree database.

Let's just say I've managed to get a jump on my spring cleaning chores. But not much else.

Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

 

How do you take a 35,000+ name family tree and merge it with another one of the same size, then edit it down to less than five thousand names? That's what I had planned spending the rest of this weekend doing—but believe me, it wasn't what I had in mind when I first got the idea to sign up for WikiTree.

Yes, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had been exploring the profiles posted on that universal tree, mainly to examine resources that other researchers had discovered on my family's hard-to-find ancestors. I'm not above being nosy when it comes to well-conceived proof arguments or even the serendipitous footnote.

It was while puzzling over my mother-in-law's matriline that I spotted a note on WikiTree regarding lack of any participants sharing their mtDNA results for that particular ancestor. "There's something I can share," I thought, and decided right then to sign up. I believe in collaboration and in giving back to the genealogy community, and this was the perfect open door.

After reading all the important statements and signing up to be a "member" (WikiTree is free, but does have standards), I got down to the business of uploading my tree. Only problem: WikiTree has a limit of how large a tree can be uploaded via GEDCOM. Depending on when my search engine drops me into the history of volumes of internal conversation on this touchy topic, the number of profiles permitted can be up to five thousand, or down to a much more modest amount. And the drawback is totally understandable: it's hard to police a community tree when there are far more new members doing data dumps than WikiTree volunteers checking for unsourced information.

There is, however, one problem not addressed in the conversation about unsourced material: as I understand it, no matter how well-documented my source tree might be (mine is on Ancestry.com), taking it through the GEDCOM process may automatically remove some of the hard-won documented details I might have added into the original tree. Though facts, notes, and sources are usually retained through the conversion process if text-based, media may be lost in the transition.

Of course, I say this after spending an afternoon and evening collapsing two different trees into one stripped-down pedigree in preparation to convert it to the necessary GEDCOM. Now what? Perhaps the participants in that WikiTree conversation were right: far better to just hand-enter each record one ancestor at a time. A better idea, perhaps—until one realizes the reality of my actually getting around to doing that becomes a rapidly-shrinking "maybe." 

Of Royal Relatives

 

Depending on who your friends are, your social media accounts may have been a-buzz this weekend over the coronation of King Charles III. While I don't exactly count myself in such a crowd, I was grateful for one side benefit of the gala affair: it generated a couple articles I found not only interesting, but possibly useful.

One, from the BBC, asked, "Are you related to a king?" The article's writer, David Cox, traced the story of confirming the identity of skeletal remains of another king, Richard III, through DNA—including a photo of professor Turi King guiding the ancient king's current-day descendant through the process of swabbing to collect samples for a mitochondrial DNA test. From there, inserting some calculations by professor Graham Coop of UC Davis, the author discussed the not-so-remote possibility that a large number of subjects of the British crown could also be descendants of the nation's previous kings.

Long live the king, who just may be our distant cousin.

While I was musing over such a thought, a second post thanks to social media drew my attention to another genealogy-inspired take on the weekend's coronation festivities. Blogger Roberta Estes used the event to mention use of WikiTree to gain a quick take on whether you are related to the king—or to anyone else, for that matter. 

I had discovered that very feature last month as I was puzzling over my mother-in-law's matrilineal connection to the Howards of colonial Maryland. Because of WikiTree's dedicated research community and their incorporation of DNA test results, it became obvious to me that those mtDNA test results linking my mother-in-law to that Howard line might be helpful for other collaborating researchers to know. I've actually been considering becoming part of the WikiTree community. From what I've seen so far, I'm impressed with the care taken there to have document-supported entries on their community tree.

All told, I'm sure the celebrations in England have been spectacular and I wish the new king and his subjects all the best. But what I'm really glad about is the coincidental information which came my way over this weekend, thanks to some genealogy buffs on social media.