My Week as the WikiTree Challenge Guest - Sat, 24 Jul 2021

@WikiTreers is a free One-World family tree set up like a wiki. It has been in operation since 2008. It currently has over 27 million profiles.

The community of people who use WikiTree set up various online social events and challenges amongst themselves to encourage improvement of the quality of their tree. They declared 2021 their “Year of Accuracy” and this year thought of a very innovative way to promote WikiTree and get new people involved. Each week, they invite a well-known (in the genealogy world) guest to add their ancestors up to their great-grandparents to WikiTree. The challenge part happens when the WikiTree community goes at it to extend the guest’s tree adding sourced profiles with documented biographies. They collaborate with each other in a Discord chat room. The challenge part is to see who can acquire the most points, by breaking brick walls (when compared to the guest’s main tree elsewhere) and adding profiles for new ancestors and their siblings, with additional credit given for any profile edited. The points really are just for fun and extra motivation to help do the best job possible with the guest’s tree.

The guest’s week starts on a Wednesday. There is a livestream with Mindy Silva, the WikiTree Challenge coordinator, the Team Leader for the week, the previous week’s guest and the current week’s guest.

My Intro, Wednesday July 14

My week started on July 14. It was the end of the John Boeren’s week. The first half of the livestream was what was called the “reveal”, where the team reveals what was done on the guest’s tree and who did the best, points-wise, in the challenge. John has all his roots in The Netherlands. The Wikitreers managed to add over 1000 profiles of John’s ancestors to WikiTree, just about completing his ancestry to 8 generations deep, in some cases breaking brick walls by extending John’s tree further than he had done in his own research.

This was followed by my introduction and a review of some of the brick walls that I have in my research:

(Note: It appears WikiTree removed the video so it is no longer available as of Jan 2022)

Unlike some of the guests, this was not my first exposure to WikiTree. I heard about the WikiTree challenge in January and that prompted me to join WikiTree in February. I then added my ancestors and started to write up their profiles on WikiTree.

I really enjoyed watching the Wednesday livestreams with the various guests, and seeing their reactions at their reveals. The WikiTreers worked very hard and always surprised the guest with what they found.

Then in June, they had Jarrett Ross, the GeneaVlogger as the guest. There was a tree I thought I could help with, so that week, I became one of the challengers working on Jarrett’s tree. It was an intense week of working on someone else’ genealogy, but was a lot of fun.

Wed July 14 to Wed July 21

With my involvement up the that point, I was hoping that Mindy would allow me to be one of the challengers, or at least help the participants in the Discord chat. Unfortunately, that was not allowed. I was not supposed to know anything about how they were doing. It was all supposed to be a surprise to me at the reveal.

So I followed the rules, stayed off WikiTree, and I even uninstalled Discord from my phone so I wouldn’t get notifications that might clue me in. I was very honorable in that way because I realized it would be more fun for me to be surprised at the end.

But I was allowed send one-way messages to the WikiTreers. Jarrett had done this two weeks earlier with a few tweets from his Twitter account. So I did the same and sent out a series of 21 hints via Twitter including the @WikiTreers address to make sure they’d see them. e.g.:

Hint 4: @WikiTreers - Rivenu Braunstein had a daughter Rebecca/Becky who married Leib Feinger and together they moved to France. There should be good French records on them that might give their history.

— Louis Kessler (@louiskessler) July 15, 2021

I had no idea what they were working on, but those hints I sent out made me feel like I was involved.

Every Saturday, WikiTree has a morning livecast with Sarah Callis, Mags Gaulden, and Mindy that summarizes the WikiTree community’s activities for the week, ending with a brief summary of how this week’s WikiTree Challenge is going. Mindy couldn’t make it this week and invited me to take her place. Of course, nothing of significance was going to be revealed to me. I was to be kept in the dark.

My Reveal, Wednesday July 21

I kept myself busy on Tuesday and Wednesday diverting my mind from thinking about WikiTree by working on a few projects, cleaning my desk, and adding sod to my lawn.

I knew my challenge would be tougher than the others. All my grandparents and only one set of great grandparents had emigrated to Canada from Russia or Romania in the early 1900s. That meant that any deeper research would require Russian or Romanian records. Those records do exist, but very few of them have been digitized, translated, indexed and been made available online. I have had success on several of my lines using specialized researchers who have access to the archives in Russian and Romania and have been able to find records for me. I knew the WikiTreers would not be able to do that.

To make matters worse, I had been adding profiles to my tree since February, so the WikiTreers didn’t even have very many new profiles they could add for me.

Sure enough, they realized they would not be able to take my genealogy further back, so they wisely did the next best thing and focused more heavily on the siblings of my ancestors that had come over and worked to improve their profiles, find new sources, newspaper articles and other valuable information that I had never seen before.

This was WikiTree’s summary of my week:
Highlights from Louis Kessler’s WikiTree Challenge - WikiTree G2G

Excellent Results

Although they may not have extended my genealogy, the results were extremely rewarding to me. I had a few brick walls, not ancestral, that I really thought they could help me with and they did.

My great grandmother’s brother was Louis Segal who married Sophie and had a daughter Sarah in Romania. They moved to England in the 1900s, went to Canada in the 1910s and ended up in Jacksonville, Florida in the 1930s and then I lost track of them. The WikiTreers found their ship record to Canada as well as the likely 1940 gravestone of Louis Segal in Jacksonville, plus other twists and turns and tidbits to that story. They added all that information to Louis’ profile on WikiTree along with sources. I’ve got enough there to solve most of my big mysteries about him. I’m currently working on rigorously going through his biography and forming conclusions and reorganizing it appropriately. The “Research Notes” section of WikiTree biographies is a wonderful tool for this type of analysis.

The WikiTreers also added valuable information like this to other relatives. It will take me several weeks (at least) to go through all the work they did and review the new information found.

They attempted to look at the Rothschild family for me. Although they could not connect my wife’s Russian-based ancestor to the family, they added a lot of Rothschild profiles to WikiTree which was valuable work.

Another absolute breakthrough happened when I was going through some of my documents to provide for my hints. My number one brick wall is my father’s stepfather Louis Kessler and his first wife Sarah Katkow. They were supposedly from Ogec, Russia according to the 1916 Canada Census, and I couldn’t nail down where that was. That is until I found two death records for Sarah.

I ordered the same record in 2004 (likely forgetting that I ordered it before). I had thought they were identical. But they’re not. Compare the two carefully. pic.twitter.com/GdvLwXOgmu

— Louis Kessler (@louiskessler) July 16, 2021

I had always thought those were two copies of the same death certificate. But they were in fact death registrations for Sarah registered in two different municipalities. And the 2nd one lists Sarah and her parents’ place of birth being Odessa, Russia!  The mystery of Ogec is finally solved. It was nice for me to contribute significantly to my own research during this challenge week.

Mondays with Myrt – July 26

I discussed my week on the WikiTree Challenge on Mondays With Myrt (Pat Richley-Erickson) starting about 13:50 in until about 47:00:

Going Forward

I know how long it takes to write good sourced biographies. It involves cross referencing all the information you have and putting it together into something that makes sense.

So the biographies that were added during my WikiTree Challenge week are very much appreciated. I’ll be maintaining those into the future and using WikiTree as the place I write my ancestors’ history.

Great thanks to all the WikiTree people who worked so hard on my tree this week.

There are still 5 more months of the WikiTree Challenge. Great guests are lined up. There are a few coming up, like Drew Smith and Melanie McComb, whose trees I plan to help with. Looking forward to the fun.