Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

I wrote several months ago about the WikiTree Challenge:
No Genealogist Should Miss the WikiTree Challenge

Each week, WikiTree is holding a challenge for all the people who use WikiTree as part of their “Year of Accuracy”. They invite a genealogy special guest – usually someone well-known amongst genealogists – to add their basic tree onto WikiTree and let the WikiTreers (that’s what they’re called) go at it. The goal is to extend their ancestral lines accurately, adding people and writing biographies that are based on reliable source information. The challenge part is that the WikiTreers get points for each ancestor or ancestor’s sibling added and extra points if they break a brick wall, which is finding ancestors that the guest didn’t have in their primary tree or correcting ancestors they may have had wrong.

And LOT of brick walls get broken!

Look at the special guests to date. If you’re into genealogy, you’ll likely have heard of many of them:

Week 1 – A.J. Jacobs
Week 2 – Cece Moore
Week 3 – Jonny Perl
Week 4 – Jen Baldwin
Week 5 – Henry Louis Gates
Week 6 – Judy Russell
Week 7 (rest week)
Week 8 – Thomas MacEntee
Week 9 – Katherine Willson
Week 10 – Pat Richley-Erickson
Week 11 – Rob Warthen
Week 12 – Dallan Quass
Week 13 – Ellen Thompson-Jennings
Week 14 – Tim Janzen
Week 15 – Cheri Passey
Week 16 (rest week)
Week 17 – Connie Knox
Week 18 – Scott Fisher
Week 19 – Devon Noel Lee
Week 20 – Nathan Goodwin
Week 21 – Gena Philibert-Ortega
Week 22 (rest week)
Week 23 – Yvette Hoitink
Week 24 – Coral Parks
Week 25 – Melissa LeMaster Barker

Each week on Wednesday, WikiTree has an hour live video on their YouTube channel and their Facebook page that reveals all the findings of the previous week’s guest, and introduces the guest for the next week. If you miss it live, you can watch it later on YouTube as all the weeks are recorded. As part of WikiTree’s weekly Saturday morning livecast, they include a brief progress report on how the WikiTree Challenge is progressing. 

From Wednesday to the next Wednesday each week, WikiTreers work together on the guest of the week’s tree on WikiTree.

Learning About WikiTree

I found out about the WikiTree challenge early on. On week 2, when Cece Moore was the guest, I got hooked. I then attended almost every Wednesday live session and many of the Saturday sessions.

This of course, raised my curiousity level about WikiTree. I knew about it since 2011 when I included WikiTree on my GenSoftReviews site. I didn’t open an account at WikiTree until 2017 when I got back to working on my own genealogy again, but I only added a few profiles. This year, after watching a few WikiTree challenges, I was impressed enough to take the plunge. I signed their Honor Code in February and started adding more profiles of my ancestors and my closer relatives to the tree.

WikiTree is a One-World tree. Like FamilySearch and Geni and several others, WikiTree wants each person to be in their tree just once. So everybody has to collaborate and work together on a common genealogy and add sources and improve each others’ biographies.

WikiTree has a lot of features. So many, that it will take you several months to just find out about them. There are apps and tools that help you in many ways. There are watchlists, feeds, profiles, images, charts, help, markup, connections, relationship finder, merging tools, DNA. The list goes on and on.

But it’s the social aspect of WikiTree that is the most interesting. They have group projects, their Forum called G2G, and recurring events to give users fun ways to improve the information in WikiTree such as their Source-a-thon, Friday Date Night, the WikiTree Question of the Week, and this year they started their WikiTree Challenge.

Week 26 – Jarrett Ross’ WikiTree Challenge Week

I had just stood on the sidelines for all the WikiTree Challenge guests up to now. The guests had varying backgrounds: early America, England, Germany, Netherlands, even early Canada. It would have been in a trial by fire for me to try to work on any of those. My expertise, like anyone’s, is of course in the lines I research and the places my ancestors lived. Few of the guests up to now had overlapped with what I know most about.

That’s until the last week. Jarrett Ross was the guest.

Jarrett Ross is a professional genealogist who calls himself the GeneaVlogger. Jarrett’s YouTube channel called GeneaVlogger is where he posts wonderful videos on genealogy that include interviews, tips, tutorials, reaction videos, and videos about his own ancestry research.

Jarrett’s ancestry is Jewish on all his lines. And many of the lines come from the Russian Empire. Hmm. Sounds like something I can relate to.

Behind the Scenes at the WikiTree Challenge

I signed up for the July challenges and was allowed to work on Jarrett’s tree with the other WikiTreers.

Mindy Silva is the challenge coordinator, and Laura DeSpain was this week’s team captain who leads the research for the week.

A shared spreadsheet contains all the participant’s names, where we write the ID of the profile we are editing. That’s so we don’t try to edit a profile that someone else is currently working on.

There are special pages set up to document any brick walls or mistakes we find in the guest’s tree, and there is a page of resources specific to the guest’s genealogy including additional information from the guest. It has a place to add interesting finds and anything needing extra work.

And for motivation, the challengers have access to a live scoresheet showing the points we’ve currently earned compared to everyone else, ordered by highest total points earned.

There are also links to Jarrett’s main research tree. His happens to be at Geni. The challengers are allowed to use his information, but must make sure they have a source for anything they want to add to WikiTree and must verifiy that information themselves.

After the Wedmesday guest intro, everybody gets to work.

Jarrett’s tree initially includes some information about all his ancestors out to at least his great-grandparents. We are allowed to work on any person or lines that we like, for as much time as we like, but we only have a week.

On Thursday morning, I started on one of Jarrett’s lines, went through a few of the sources he provided on his Geni tree as well as some I found on my own.

The genealogical puzzles started appearing. Some facts didn’t align with others. I needed to research more, possibly to check different places for BMD records or Census or ship records. Russian Jewish research is more difficult, and JewishGen and a few other resources are the best you can do for those.

A huge part of this is how we communicate. The WikiTree Challenge uses Discord as their method of coordinating the work. Discord is a powerful group chatting platform, that originally was developed as a social gaming platform for mobile games. It works wonderfully for team coordination. We all were using it to tell each other what we’re working on, what we need help on, get help, give help. It really worked well and looks like this:

Whenever I asked for help on Discord, I always got it.

I must have spent 20 hours on Thursday, Friday and Saturday researching that one line. I found a bit of new information that I hoped will help Jarrett. Along the way, I added a few people to WikiTree, including biographies, source notes and pictures whenever possible.

All WikiTreers are encouraged to add research notes to a profile whenever they encounter something about a record that is important to note, such as conflicting evidence, assumptions, what resources were researched and whatever else might help anyone reading the profile.

I switched gears after three days and spent a day looking at some of the other lines. Once I found a line needing a bit of detective work, I continued with it until the end of the challenge.

Overall, this was a 50 hour week of very intense research and detective work. Most nights I was up until 2 a.m, simply because it was such a rush and I’d lose track of time. There was a lot of very pleasant communication on Discord with all the other researchers that was a lot of fun. It was nice to be able to help others and get helped by others. And I learned new things as well.

It was definitely a manic and intense week, but also exhilerating. So much fun, but quite exhausting. My family wondered where I was hiding most of the week.

I can see how some WikiTreers can love doing it. Each week, the participation seems to be increasing and the participants keep gaining experience and are becoming really expert researchers.

The work of several dozen diligent people plus some of my contributions produced an impressive result.

The reveal for Jarrett is recorded here:

What’s Next for the Challenge

The above video finished with Jarrett and introduced John Boeren as this week’s guest. John is a regular on Mondays with Myrt. He lives in The Netherlands, with all Dutch lines going far far back. That’s not my specialty, so I won’t be part of the team this week. I’ll wait until a future challenge comes up that I feel I can better help with.

And the week after John. Well, that’s my week!  I’ve been selected to be the guest for the week of July 14 to July 21! All these WikiTreers will be working on my tree, hopefully breaking some of my brick walls and finding information new to me, or even disproving what I thought was true. Anything and everything will be accepted with open arms.

I’ll give all the details about my week in my next blog post in a few days and let you know when you can catch the livecasts which I’ll be on.

When I first started doing my genealogy in 1974, I didn’t have a genealogy program to use. I started just like everyone else, simply recording information, and how everyone was connected in hand-drawn family trees.

I had access to a Script document processor utility on the mainframe at my University that I could use, so I entered what I had into that. I used its outliner to number the people of my tree. I added basic birth, marriage and death information plus the occasional note if I knew anything else about  the person. Script would then create a document for me of all my information including a table of contents and index of names. It definitely did what I needed at the time.

Sources? Nope. Nobody knew enough to record those in their genealogy back then. Fortunately, I kept all the papers where I gathered my information, so I do know where I got most of my early stuff from.

From about 1992 to 1995, I tried various genealogy programs. The one I liked best was Reunion for Windows and I entered all my information into that. Leister sold Reunion to Sierra Online, and Sierra named it Generations and worked to improve the program, which I was a beta tester for. But within a few years, Generations was purchased by Genealogy.com who stopped selling Generations in favour of the other program Family Tree Maker that they owned.

Between 1995 and 1999, I entered the genealogy I had in printouts from the Script DP into Reunion/Generations. The GEDCOM I created in 1999 was the last bit of genealogy data entering I did for quite some time. I decided I was going to write my own program for that, and it would be Behold. Alas, today Behold still is still just a GEDCOM reader and not yet a full featured genealogy editor.

Online Genealogy Trees

After I retired from my day job in 2016, I decided it was time to get back to working on my genealogy and taking it to the next step. There were now hundreds of different genealogy programs out there. Not a single one of them totally appealed to me. But I, like many of you, discovered that our genealogy hobby had been changing.

There were online genealogy systems now available. You could enter your data online and others could see it and communicate with you about it. But even better, these online systems would help you with your genealogy, They would find records and other trees that might apply to you, and offer them as hints, and allow you to bring in their information while sourcing them automatically for you. Wow!

The two that come to mind are Ancestry and MyHeritage. I ended up subscribing to the full MyHeritage plan, mainly because they provide their free Family Tree Builder program that runs on your computer and fully syncs the data up and down between your PC and their online system. By comparison, Ancestry does not have their own program that can sync, and they have only allowed two 3rd party programs, Family Tree Maker and RootsMagic, to connect to your online Ancestry trees. FTM’s syncing has always been problematic, and RootsMagic’s was more of a person-at-a-time rather than an all-at-once syncing. By comparison, I found that Family Tree Builder’s syncing with MyHeritage works very well and reliably.

So now I’ve got all my facts with dates and places being entered, and I’m continuously fed new hints via MyHeritage Record Matches and Smart Matches along with their source citations.

This is the new genealogy people. Embrace it!

There’s an important second type of online genealogy tree as well. These are called One World Trees. They are all collaborative efforts where all the genealogists work on the same tree at the same time. Some people don’t like that. They say that the bad part is that other people can change your information. But on the other hand, don’t you want others helping you and collaborating with you and working with you to make your information better? (Aside:  I don’t know why people think it is “their” information, but that’s a whole other can of worms that I’m not going to get into in this blog post.)

The three main One World Trees are FamilySearch’s Family Tree, Geni, and WikiTree. All three are collaborative, and the ultimate goal of each is to create an accurate representation of all the people in the world, with each person being a unique non-repeated profile. If you truly want to record your genealogy for posterity and contribute to the greater good, you need to get your information up onto one or even all these trees and help make the data right.

MyHeritage does Smart Matching against these three One World Trees and will tell you if you have people in your tree who are already on one or more of them. I have found this MyHeritage feature so very useful.

WikiTree Biographies

This is wonderful. I’ve got all this magically supplied sourced information coming at me in droves. How do I keep it all straight?

Well recently, I discovered the secret.

A few months ago, I heard about an amazing promotion by WikiTree, called the WikiTree Challenge and I wrote a blog post about it:  No Genealogist Should Miss the WikiTree Challenge. I had started looking at WikiTree a few years earlier, but it was this event that got me to look more closely at what makes WikiTree tick.

WikiTree is different from all the other genealogy programs. They only let you record the basic facts about a person: Name, birth, marriage and death, dates and places. Everything else goes into a Biography.

The Biography can be anything you want. It is the only place you can include source information. It is where you can include research notes. What you really want to use it for is to tell the story about the person and provide the sources that back your information up.

WikiTree includes a markup language, so that you can easily include titles, bold text, lists, links, pictures and stickers. It allows you to make a really nice looking biography.  Here for example is the biography I created for my grandfather Louis Braunstein on WikiTree:

Now MyHeritage also has an area where you can add a biography like this with formatting, but it’s nowhere near as easy to do it there as it is at WikiTree.

And you know what I discovered? You can just go to WikiTree and copy the biography and paste it into MyHeritage’s biography and presto, it includes all the formatting and pictures and looks great.

So I’ve now got a great way to create my person profiles.

The Value of Biographies

Now I know that we as genealogists are supposed to go through our sources and learn everything we can from them. But how many of us really do that. Is it really possible just by analyzing a source and what it contains to remember what it contains? No, not unless we write it all down.

And how best to write it all down?  How about this:

1. Find each important fact mentioned by each source.
2. Include that fact in each affected person’s biography.

Many of you, I’m sure, have been doing that. After all, that’s what they teach us to do in genealogy school.

But it’s really hard to do until you start writing these biographies, something that WikiTree prompted me to do. And am I ever grateful.

Not only do I have a way, through the biographies to be able to accurately recall the facts about their lives, but I am also learning new facts and correcting old or contradictory facts as I go.

My biographies each start small and basic, but they grow and gets better every time I revisit one.

Biographies are central to genealogy. Don’t gloss over them. Add everything you know. Your ancestors are more than just a bunch of facts. Bring them to life!

It’s been just over a week since FamilySearch released the official version of GEDCOM 7.0. See my article about the announcement.

Now we probably will go into a period of silence, where nobody hears anything more about GEDCOM 7.0 for a while. The expectation is that all the developers are hard at work implementing the new standard so that they can release it as soon as possible.

But are they?

Not likely.

Motivation. Why?

Developers need a good reason to go through the work to implement the new version of GEDCOM. That’s true for any new feature they add to their program. It needs to be something useful and worth their time. The benefits must be better to them than any of the other features they are thinking of adding.

And unless it is an absolute must-have, then there’s no way a developer will put their current work aside and make GEDCOM a priority.

Something will need to motivate developers to implement 7.0.

Is GEDCOM 7.0 a Must-Have?

Everyone got very excited about GEDCOM 7.0 when it was announced, first before RootsTech as a release candidate. And then again a week ago with the official release. It’s because FamilySearch has not released a new version of GEDCOM in over 20 years. It seemed like something was finally being done. Maybe finally, our data would transfer properly between programs.

If you looked closely at the new spec, you’ll see a good number of small changes. The assumption is that each of these is addressing the transfer of genealogy data that GEDCOM currently doesn’t transfer properly.

Do I see one item there that makes GEDCOM 7.0 a must-have? To be honest, I can’t say that I do. There’s a whole lot of small changes, small new things added, and small things removed.

Okay, maybe there are 3 or 4 really good and useful changes that I see and I as a developer would like to implement. I won’t list them because every other developer will have 3 or 4 different items that they want. The point is, do you go through the work of implementing the hundred other changes required for the 3 or 4 things you want?

The developer likely already had implemented those 3 or 4 things into their own GEDCOM export and import in their own non-standard and custom way. What they’ve done already works for them. Why change?  They’ll need a good reason.

Why Your Data Doesn’t Transfer

GEDCOM 5.5.1 limitations are not and never have been the primary reason why your data does not transfer between programs.

The primary reason why your data does not transfer between programs is because the programmers have not implemented GEDCOM 5.5.1 correctly.

An example: Source information. This has been the number one complaint of people who use GEDCOM to transfer data is that their source information doesn’t transfer properly between two programs. The blame is often placed on GEDCOM being incapable of transferring sources details.

That is False. The problem is that developers were lazy and did not take the time to look to see what GEDCOM had. If they would have, they would have seen the PAGE tag and how to properly construct it. They could then have exported any source citation to GEDCOM in a manner that any other program could properly import it again.

I have seen few, if any, programs that have implemented the PAGE tag properly.

As I said over 10 years ago:

Maybe what’s really needed is an education program. So that developers will be able to study and learn what treasures are really hidden in the old GEDCOM standard. So that they’ll be able to learn how to implement the features correctly.

FamilySearch Needs to Be A Leader

Developers need a reason to use GEDCOM 7.0. If one developer is the first to implement GEDCOM 7.0, nothing is gained. There are no other systems to exchange data with. If two developers implement, they can exchange. If a dozen implement, they can all as well. (Assumption: they are all implementing it correctly, or we’re back to data loss.)

FamilySearch has emerged 20 years later from their abandonment of GEDCOM. They now want to lead the charge towards a new standard. For the others to follow, they really need to lead by example.

FamilySearch needs to show their commitment to their own GEDCOM 7.0 in a strong and demonstrative way. They need to show the rest of the genealogical community that GEDCOM 7.0 is required and they need to do so through their FamilySearch Family Tree.

You cannot export a GEDCOM from FamilySearch. The FamilySearch Wiki says:

Currently, a GEDCOM file cannot be exported directly from FamilySearch Family Tree. However, you can use partner programs of FamilySearch to get the data from FamilySearch Family Tree, and then create a GEDCOM file in those programs. Here is a list of the programs that are compatible with GEDCOM and FamilySearch.

What FamilySearch has done is developed GEDCOM X as their means for transferring data within their Family Tree and between Family Tree and partner programs. GEDCOM X is a programming interface to transfer the data directly. It does not produce an intermediate text-based file such as GEDCOM.

If FamilySearch really wants to commit to GEDCOM, they need to program into Family Tree a means for any user to export their tree to GEDCOM 7.0. In so doing, they’ll no longer be making a standard that they believe will work, but they’ll be putting the standard to test and see what works and what doesn’t and what needs to change. That will make the standard solid, and produce GEDCOM files from FamilySearch that other developers will want their programs to be able to input, and that alone will encourage developers to implement GEDCOM 7.0.

Supporting their own standard is not something new for FamilySearch. During the development of GEDCOM 2.0 to GEDCOM 5.5.1 from 30 to 20 years ago, FamilySearch had their program PAF (Personal Ancestral File).  Every time a new version of GEDCOM was released, a new version of PAF (usually with the same version number as GEDCOM) was released which used the new GEDCOM format.

PAF was free, and was an excellent and very popular program. And it still is being used by many people as it continues to work on Windows 10 even though FamilySearch dropped support of the program 8 years ago.

Maybe its time for FamilySearch to release PAF 7.0 to support and promote GEDCOM 7.0? That might do the trick.

Otherwise

Otherwise, I’m sadly quite pessimistic about GEDCOM 7.0.

I think FamilySearch could have done a much better job with this release. The goal needs to be to help developers do GEDCOM right. We don’t need “new expressivity”, “new flexibility” or “new compatibitlity”.  The old ways weren’t that bad. The developers just weren’t implementing them properly.

I was one of 10 genealogy developers and GEDCOM experts who worked during 2018 and 2019 to contribute our thoughts and ideas towards the GEDCOM 5.5.1 Annotated Edition and the GEDCOM 5.5.5 document that followed that were both edited by Tamura Jones.

Tamura is a well-known GEDCOM expert who posted scores of articles about GEDCOM over the past 15 years, including many detailed analyses and sets of best practices. He was encouraged to put these best practices together into a document to help developers. He did so in 2018 as the 5.5.1 Annotated Edition. Then a year later, Tamura released 5.5.5 as a “Maintenance release. Quality. Simpler & Stricter”. 5.5.5 has already been implemented by several different GEDCOM validator programs.

In my opinion, 5.5.5 is an excellent and important improvement over 5.5.1 for developers, without introducing anything new for developers to deal with. It is much superior to FamilySearch’s 7.0 which changed too much for no real apparent reason.

If FamilySearch is truly interested in advancing GEDCOM, they should be including what the genealogy programming community wants. The work and best practices of Tamura Jones are not something they should be ignoring. In fact, FamilySearch’s best move would be to contact Tamura and invite him to be a managing editor (or even THE managing editor).

Otherwise, I repeat, I’m sadly quite pessimistic about GEDCOM 7.0.