Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Yesterday was the final wrapup of the challenge week at WikiTree to try to add as much as possible to the Mark Cuban @mcuban family tree.

Mark Cuban is the the American billionaire who co-founded Broadcast.com and owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team. He is widely known as one of the sharks on the TV show Shark Tank.

The challenge was a whole week, from Dec 1 to Dec 8, where a few dozen people, myself included, worked hard to research Mark’s genealogy and add information on WikiTree to his ancestors and their nuclear families.

Wiki Tree Challenges

WikiTree has been very innovative in publicizing their platform when they devised the WikiTree Challenge. In 2021, its first year, each week WikiTree chose a well-known genealogist as their subject, breaking many of the brick walls that had previously stumped these admired researchers and professionals. In 2022, they changed their tactic to use noted personalities and entertainers.

I first wrote about the Challenge in March 2021:  No Genealogist Should Miss the WikiTree Challenge. In July 2021, I myself was honored to be chosen as one of the genealogists to be featured: My Week as the WikiTree Challenge Guest. A lot of interesting was added to my relatives’ profiles on WikiTree. It was just amazing to have a team of people work on my tree for a week.

I also participated as one of the people helping with several of the challenges. My expertise is in Jewish Genealogy in what is now Ukraine and Romania, so naturally I selected those guests where I might be able to contribute.

A few week before my week,t I helped with the challenge for Jarrett Ross the GeneaVlogger  - The WikiTree Challenge – From the Inside. 

The week after my week was Daniel Loftus, and he had one mysterious relative Peter Welsh who emigrated in Manitoba and just happened to be buried in a cemetery within biking distance from my house. I had never been to that cemetery before, so I visited and took a picture of Peter’s grave and found additional information that I added to Peter’s profile.

In September 2021, I helped with Melanie McComb’s challenge on her Jewish side. Melanie had previously put in a lot of work on my challenge, so I was very happy return the favor and to do the same for her.

And in December 2021, it was Marian Wood whose challenge I participated in.

For those participating in a challenge, each one is a week-long intensive effort to flesh out new ancestors and find sources confirming them. We’d then write up their profiles on WikiTree and add to their biographies, source information and research notes. All week, the participants would all be collaborating on the WikiTree Discord channel for that challenge.

There would be a "kickoff” on YouTube with Mindy Silva (the challenge coordinator), the Team Leader for the challenge, and the featured genealogist. And a week later, there would be a “results reveal” on YouTube where Mindy and the Team Leader would “wow” the guest with all the brick walls broken and information found.

Mark Cuban’s Challenge

When the format changed in 2022 to famous people and celebrities, there were fewer people I felt I could really help with. You really need to be dedicated to spend a week of your time. It’s a very intensive week. So there would need to be a personal connection or something of interest to draw me in.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Elaine Martzen, who is the coordinator of the Jewish Roots Project at WikiTree. Elaine has been participating in a lot of the challenges, and was a contributor during my week when I was the guest. Elaine had asked me in September if I could participate in the Scott Turow challenge, but I was busy that week. This time she asked me if I was interested in helping with Mark Cuban. I was available and Mark looked like he had a very interesting Ancestry, all lines being Ashkenazi Jewish from Eastern Europe, so I said sure.

Prior to the challenge, Mindy as the Challenge Coordinator, set up Mark’s Ancestors up to his great-grandparents as our starting point. I was one of 23 participants on the challenge team. There were also several other members of WikiTree who participated unofficially and provided additional help.

On Thursday Dec 1 at 11 am, we had a Zoom Kick Off session, with about 12 of us from the team in attendance, so we could meet each other and discuss strategies.

I spent most of the first day on my MyHeritage site adding a new family tree that I called “Cuban Family Tree”. I seeded it with the ancestors up to the great-grandparents that Mindy initially put up. I used the “Quick and Dirty” techniques for building a family tree that genealogists often use to determine the ancestry of their DNA matches. That was helped greatly by the wonderful Smart Matching to records and trees that MyHeritage provides. I quickly built the tree up to about 80 ancestors, their siblings and spouses. My goal was to find approximate birth years and originating towns in Eastern Europe of Mark’s family.

Interestingly, I got Smart Matches from a MyHeritage user named mcuban, who turns out to be Mark Cuban himself.

and also Brian Cuban who is Mark’s brother.

It seems the Cuban family is very interested in their genealogy and unlike many of the other 2022 Challenge celebrities, have done quite a bit of research themselves.

Mark Cuban was contacted by the Wiki Tree people lto see if he’d be willing to be the subject of a challenge, and he was fine with it. Mindy wrote on his Challenge Page:

We had spoken to Mark Cuban about this challenge. He is "big into genealogy" and has used Ancestry, MyHeritage, and 23andMe. But he wasn’t so sure we can find anything new for him. "Not sure you would have sources I don’t," he told us.

So the challenge was on!

The Week’s Progress

The team had another Zoom session that evening. Jewish Genealogy in Eastern Europe is not simple. You can go back to 1800 if you’re lucky (it’s hit and miss depending on the town) but very few of the available records are digitized and fewer yet are indexed. The records themselves are in Russian and sometimes Hebrew, and the people themselves spoke Yiddish. And just to add to the fun, the handwriting in these languages on these records is often atrocious.

Even so, I still was going to try to find some records of Mark’s family that were in Eastern Europe. I was very familiar with using JewishGen and many other Jewish Genealogy resources. A few others in our group were as well, but the majority of our team although new to Jewish records, were quite experienced with North American research. They looked for and found many immigration records and gravestones which were essential to help determine or confirm where the ancestors were from and what the person and father’s name written on the stone in Hebrew was.

Everyone helped everyone else on the Discord channel throughout the week, asking questions, getting answers, posting interesting finds and getting help with certain tasks.

For my initial searches, I started looking at Mark’s maternal grandmother’s ancestors. They were from what is now Lithuania. Wow, JewishGen had a lot! I had no experience with Jewish records from Lithuania, so I was amazed at the incredible amount indexed compared to my ancestors’ locations. I was able to collect evidence for 3 more generations of Mark’s Ziv ancestors than he had on his MyHeritage tree.

There were so many Lithuanian records for the family that it took me 3 days to compile them and write up people profiles and source on WikiTree. I spent 3 hours developing a spreadsheet to help me generate the source citations, because doing 100 of them manually one-by-one would have been torture.

I knew these records were accessible by anyone on JewishGen if they knew where to look. So I presume a lot of this information would not be new to Mark.

Four days had passed already. Only 3 days remaining in the challenge and I had only really looked at one of the four grandparent lines.

I noticed early in the week that Mark’s paternal grandfather came from the town of Malin (now Malyn) that is now in the Ukraine. That was very near to where some of my ancestors were from. I know a researcher, Boris Makalsky, who has a group that has been scanning records from the archives in the Zhytomyr province. Boris has found about 200 records for me over the past 3 years from several of my and my wife’s lines. I emailed Boris and asked if he might have any records from Malin and I gave him information about Mark’s great-grandparents.

On Tuesday, Boris emailed me back. He had found and provided me with one record for each great-grandparent which added another generation onto both lines. Both I and the team found this very exciting, and this surely was information that Mark could not have found, as this information had not previously been scanned and was not available in any form online.

Not only that, but Boris said he has records for both families going back to about 1750. Mark would very likely want to contact Boris if he would like to get access to the other records available.

Seven days is never enough. I would have needed another 7 days to thoroughly research Mark’s other two grandparent lines. But you can only do what time will provide. I was very happy with my contributions to the team.

And I must say the team’s work was equally amazing. They found and documented many stories and details about Mark’s family, There were 21 Interesting Finds recorded on the Challenge Page. And the 23 of us registered for the challenge over that week added profiles for 16 more ancestors and 513 of Mark’s other relatives to WikiTree, totaling 2,711 profile edits. I’m tired just thinking about it.

Wrap Up

I was invited to be a on the panel in the Challenge Wrap Up yesterday. It is available for viewing on YouTube. Mindy, Elaine, our team leader Thomas Koehnline and I discuss what we found:

We don’t know yet what Mark thinks of the research we did on his family, but Eowyn Walker of WikiTree emailed him and he responded:

This is amazing. Let us spend some time with it.

Thank you so much !!!

I’ve paid my deposit and my wife Cheryl and I will be going on the Find Your Roots on the River Cruise with Blaine Bettinger and Judy Russell from October 17 to 24, 2024 (yes, almost 2 years away), from Amsterdam through Germany to Basel, Switzerland.

This is an opportunity no genealogist should miss. With a capacity of only 156 passengers, we’ll be a close-knit group and it will be a delight. Blaine and/or Judy will be giving a talk each day. Blaine and Judy give superb presentations and both have been Keynote speakers at many genealogy conferences around the world.

Don’t wait because available cabins are being snatched up fast. For more information about the cruise, see their subscribe page at: Find Your Roots on the River (subscribepage.io). If you’re on Facebook, this cruise has its own page at:  https://www.facebook.com/FindYourRootsontheriver

There’s an early booking bonus of $500 per person if you sign up before Dec 31, 2022. If you tell them that I referred you, then both you and I will get a free airport or hotel transfer.

Judy Russell – The Legal Genealogist

I have had the pleasure to be at several genealogy conferences with Judy.

The first was the 10th Unlock The Past Genealogy Cruise in 2016 that took us around New Zealand and Australia. Judy was part of our Hobbiton gang who ventured off together in the land of the Lord of the Rings.

The Hobbiton gang together in Middle Earth, Tauranga, New Zealand. Left to right: Judy Russell, Allyson Luders, my wife Cheryl, myself, Helen Smith and Lyn Hudson-Williamson. Photo courtesy of Lyn Hudson-Williamson.

Following one of Judy’s talks on this wonderful cruise, Judy implored me to get my 93 year old uncle DNA tested, so she really got me started in DNA.

Just 4 months later, I saw Judy again at the Ontario Genealogical Society’s conference in Toronto, and I got to introduce the moderator of Judy’s panel on “the Future of Genetic Genealogy”

Then we met again at RootsTech in Feb 2017 in Salt Lake City, where Judy was a Keynote speaker and I was a finalist in the Innovator Showdown.

Then in Nov 2017, I spent time with Judy again at Family Tree DNA’s 13th International Genetic Genealogy Conference in Houston.

I’m looking so forward to spending time with Judy again in 2024.

Blaine Bettinger – DNA Expert

Every genealogist who has done DNA testing will know the name Blaine Bettinger. Blaine literally wrote the book on DNA testing. Here is my own well used copy:

I always wanted to get the opportunity to meet Blaine, and when I found out he’d be the Keynote speaker at the Kelowna District Genealogy Conference in Sept 2018 in Kelowna, British Columbia, I jumped at the chance to go. I was accepted as a speaker which allowed me some wonderful one-on-one time to talk with Blaine at the speaker’s table at the buffet dinner following the conference.

Photo courtesy of Blaine Bettinger.

European River Cruising

It was the 3rd Unlock the Past Genealogy Cruise in February 2013 that got Cheryl and me hooked on cruising. Including our two genealogy cruises, we have now cruised 7 times on large ships, the last being in February 2020 just before Covid hit.

We have always wanted to try river cruising on their smaller more intimate ships, but had never found the perfect cruise to go on. When I saw Judy’s post on Facebook a few days ago, I realized that this was the one.

I was planning to go to the MyHeritage Live event that was to take place in Tel Aviv, Israel in the Fall of 2020. But that was kiboshed by Covid. So this cruise in 2024 might be the first live genealogical event that I go to since Kelowna in 2018.

Genealogy and cruising. There’s nothing like combining pleasure with pleasure.

In an earlier post, I reviewed the Family Statistics that MyHeritage provides. It pointed out that I had some data that wasn’t correct. So at the end of that post, I ran MyHeritage’s Consistency Checker and it found that my tree of 9,050 people has 492 issues and MyHeritage’s desktop software Family Tree Builder came up with 561 issues.

So what are these issues? How many of them are issues that I need to fix, and how many are incorrect diagnoses? What are the differences between the 492 and the 561 issues of the online and desktop software? 

Why So Many Issues?

Like most genealogists, I pride myself in recording accurate information from source records. Specifically, I am very careful with the information I record for all my ancestors and their children and children’s families, maybe 500 people. For them I try to ensure every fact has a source. Very few, if any of the above issues, are for these most important people in my genealogical research.

But then there’s the rest of the family. This is made up of my cousins and their spouses and their families. It also includes my place to place study of all people who travelled from Mezhirich in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to Winnipeg and all of their descendants. For these 8,500 people I’m not so rigorous.

The goal for the rest of the family is to build up these people as best as I can without too much research. Most of the information comes from MyHeritage Smart Hints and Smart Matches that include other people’s family trees. Often there is conflicting information here and I do the best I can. Information from records will take priority, but sometimes there aren’t records and there’s only family trees to use. Many of these people are living, and information about living people is harder to find, especially of people in Canada.

The rest of the family is where all these issues are appearing. So it’s very worthwhile for me to run MyHeritage’s Consistency checker to at least help correct some of the incorrect information I have for them.

MyHeritage’s Online Tree Consistency Checker

When running the Consistency Checker online, it shows you its progress and tells you how long until it is finished. You can interrupt it by pressing on the X but if you do so, it will leave you with just a partial list. For me the report takes about 3 minutes to complete,

This is what the the start of my report of issues looks like:

The printer icon at the top right allows you to print the list of issues.

The little gear icon at the top right brings up Consistency Checker Settings and lets you select which issues to check and allows you to change the default limits for each issue, e.g. how many years is too old or too young.

Types of issues are grouped into Errors, Warnings and Notices. By default, all issues are selected for inclusion in the report except for two: “Children with different last names” and “Inconsistent last name spelling”. There are 3 types of issues that are Errors, 148 that are Warnings, and 42 that are notices.

The 492 issues that came up for me and the number of each type were:

Error: Birth after death (2) 
Error: Child older than parent (8)
Error: Child born after death of parent (2)
Warning: Died too old (1)  
Warning: Alive but too old (10)
Warning: Parent too young when having a child (24)  
Warning: Parent too old when having a child (4)
Warning: Fact occurring after death (156)
Warning: Fact occurring before birth (41)
Warning: Siblings with close age (19)   
Warning: Large spouse age difference (4)
Warning: Married too young (8)  
Warning: Died too young to be a spouse (2)
Warning: Multiple marriages of same couple (10)  
Warning: Married name entered as maiden name (16) 
Notice: Prefix in first name (1)  
Notice: Suffix in last name (1)
Notice: Multiple birth facts of same person (15)  
Notice: Multiple death facts of same person (29)   
Notice: Tagged in photo after death (1)   
Notice: Incorrect use of uppercase/lowercase (2)  
Notice: Disconnected from tree (10)   
Notice: Death place resembles cause of death (3)  
Notice: Siblings with same first name (3)
Notice: Double spaces in name (7)  
Notice: Inconsistent place name spelling (113)

These total 12 errors, 292 warnings and 186 notices. 

MyHeritage does a good job of making it easier for you to correct each issue. There are links from each issue that will open the person and/or facts involved in a new browser tab.

So I went through each issue one by one to see what I could fix. 

The 12 errors are definitely issues that need to be corrected one way or another. Each has a couse, for example, In a couple of cases I saw I had the century wrong, with a parent born in 18yy but written down as born in 19yy by mistake.   

The warnings are all possible errors. The “died too old” is for people who were (by default) 110 years or older. I have one warning for that, and it is a person in my tree who is actually documented at passing away at 111 years old.

Over to the right, you can’t really see it in this image, is a grey X which you can click on and select “Ignore this issue”. In this case I did.

But she was the only one. The 10 people living over 110 years old are likely not living, but I just haven’t found their death record or obituary or otherwise know that they’ve died. It was worthwhile searching again for each of these to see if I could find a death record. Even if I couldn’t, it was probably safe to mark them as deceased and MyHeritage makes this easy to do by pressing the green “Mark as deceased” button.

The parent too young to have a child often turned out to be a birth year being wrong. A few times, it was a child linked to incorrect parents, and in two cases, I did have documents that indicate the child was indeed 15 years old, so I clicked the X in those two cases for the warning for those two to be ignored.  

The parent too old to have a child in one case was a situation where I do believe the father could have been 67 years old. I have some documents that seem to indicate that. The other cases I have no evidence, but a few birth years looked suspicious, so I blanked them out.

There are lots (156) of facts after death. Most of these are residence facts from MyHeritage’s U.S. Public Records collection. In many cases, they are within a year or two of when the person died, so the particular agency hadn’t yet recorded that they had died. I decided to delete most of these after-death facts.

Some of the facts after death are marriage facts which are actually for the remarriage of their spouse after they died. For some reason, when MyHeritage helps you transfer marriage information from a record, it sometimes assigns it to the wrong marriage. It’s important to remember when there’s multiple spouses to always check that marriage information from records is added into the correct marriage.

And there were a few facts that were “Added to Geni” which is not a fact that should be added to a person’s life. These must have been brought in from other family trees by MyHeritage’s smart matching. I deleted all the Geni events.The proper way to document is simply to include the Geni profile as a source.

Now this next one is an odd one. It gives me a warning for Burial date being after the death date. I know I have a lot of cases like this, but this is the only one where a warning is given. I don’t know what’s different about this death fact and burial fact from the others, so I just clicked the  X to ignore this warning for this person.

Facts before birth: Many of these are again residences, a few are immigration, and one is a census. These all needed deletion or correction.

19 pairs of siblings were said to be born too close together. These ranged from 4 months apart which has to be wrong up to 9 months and 23 days apart, which biologically is possible. Here is an actual case of siblings 6 1/2 months apart. This warning only involves siblings who both have exact birth dates. If only one of them had a document, then I’d set the other’s birth date to just an approximate (circa) year which will eliminate the warning.

Large spouse age difference: One example was a birth year was 1991 and should have been 1919.

The Married too young and Died too young to be a spouse warnings were useful and helped me correct a few errors.

Multiple marriages of same couple allowed to me eliminate an extra marriage event. Married name entered as maiden name, Prefix (e.g. Dr.) in first name and Suffix (e.g. III) in last name allowed me to fix those.

The multiple birth and death events for one person notices are nice to have. I had a couple of people with 5 death events. Those seem to have come from copying FamilySearch Family Tree information which often have multiple birth or death events.

And then I found I had 10 people who weren’t connected to anyone else (disconnected from tree). I was surprised to see these. They must have happened while I was deleting or moving a branch. After checking that they didn’t need to be added back somewhere in the tree, it was easy to delete them.

I had 3 “Death place resembles cause” notices. “Holocaust” was in the place of death so I moved them to the Cause of Death field.which MyHeritage makes easy to do.

Siblings with the same name did help me find some people who were entered twice.

Double space in name helped to quickly fixed that problem.

Then there were 109 cases of Inconsistent Place Name Spelling. This is a very nice check that gives you a quick and easy to fix many of the typos in your place names.

It took about a week, working an hour or two each day, to check each of the above consistency issues and fix what’s obviously wrong, find records to help correct what isn’t obvious, or mark issues to ignore if the data is correct. There were only a few (maybe 6) that I marked to ignore.

Rechecking With Family Tree Builder

What I did next was sync my online tree down to my tree in Family Tree Builder (FTB). Then I ran the Tree Consistency Checker in FTB. And I got this:

I’m actually surprised. When I had consistency issues, MyHeritage online gave me 492 issues but FTB gave me 561 issues, so I was expecting there still to be a few issues left over in Family Tree Builder once I synced. I’m not sure what’s going on here. Maybe the checks between the two are exactly the same but they are reported somewhat differently.

Family Tree Builder also has a Check for Deceased People that is not available online at MyHeritage. Even after fixing all the Consistency Checks, this check results in 39 more people who are likely deceased:

These likely deceased people do not have birth dates, but their descendants do which makes it likely that they are too old to be alive. I felt safe letting FTB mark all of these people as deceased.

FTB also has a nice Check for Duplicates which in my case gave me 32 pairs.

Of those 32 possible duplicates, 3 of them actually were duplicates that I needed to merge. It looks like they were added once through one person’s family, and a second time through that person’s spouse’s family

Is My Data Better Now?

The reason why I was prompted to do this Consistency Checking and fix the problems was from MyHeritage’s Family Statistics that were indicating I had some issues to address.

So now if I rerun MyHeritage’s Family Statistics online and go back to the ages tab, I can see it looks a little bit better. Now my oldest living person is 106 years old which may be possible, but I’ll still check it. A very simple way is just to put the person’s name into Google and see if his obituary pops up. I found about 5 very quickly that way. My “oldest when married” includes 10 people who were over 75. And I still have 5 people who were married at ages 10 to 15. I have a husband 30 years older than a wife, and a wife 17 years older than a husband. These may all be correct but will need to be checked. I don’t know why the Consistency Checker didn’t report some of these, especially the person married at age 10.

My data is now better. But I’m sure there’s still a lot of mistakes in it. The proper way to error check is to rigorously go through your tree one person at a time and fact check each person against source records. Even source records can be wrong, but not nearly as often as data from family trees are wrong. It’s just that  one by one checking is not fun and can take a lot of time..

Which is why the new Smart Matching and automated record matching services that MyHeritage and other companies now do for you is something every genealogist should partake in. There is no way I would be able to find one one-hundredth of what these automated searches find for me.

The challenge then is to disseminate the good results from the not so good. Fortunately, the information found automatically is often correct, and even if not, it is usually helpful in some way.