Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

@WikiTree #WikiTreeChallenge

Wikitree with over 25 million profiles, is the 3rd largest collaborative family tree, after FamilySearch Family Tree and Geni. As the name suggests, the site is designed like a wiki, giving all users ability to contribute and change (preferably with sources) and collaborate about the contents of any page.

The goals of the site is to strive for accuracy through collaboration.

But I’m not here to tell you about the site. You can go to WikiTree and find out that for yourself.

What I wanted to tell you about is one absolutely amazing activity that the WikiTreers thought up and are taking on.in 2021, their Year of Accuracy. This don’t-miss event is their WikiTree Challenge.

Each week, they focus on one guest star who is very well known in the genealogical world. Previous to appearing, this special guest has his/her ancestors entered onto WikiTree. The guest appears Wednesday evening in a live kick-off event where Sarah Callis acts as host and is joined by Eowyn Langholf, Mindy Silva and the team captain for the week who do the work to coordinate the event. They review the guest’s family tree together asking the guest about his/her challenges and brick walls.

Then dozens of volunteer WikiTreers work all week on the guest’s tree. They collaborate with each other to find new sources, make the tree more accurate and even break down a few brick walls finding new ancestors and relatives that the guest didn’t know about.

The next Wednesday, Sarah and gang are back with the guest to review what was done, what information was uncovered and to get the guest’s reactions to all this new research.

It is impressive how much the diligent WikiTeam uncovers. They summarize each week with a scoresheet that lists all the researchers involved and how much each has added to the guest’s tree. That’s the “Challenge” part.

This event will be taking place all year, with a new guest almost every week.

WikiTree Challenge deserves your attention and publicity!

Think of it. Where else can you find your genealogy super-stars talking about their own genealogy? Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is noted for presenting the genealogies of his special guests on Finding Your Roots on PBS. It was so much fun to hear Dr. Gates talk about his own ancestry, and then a week later in the big reveal, was provided with information about his own family that was new to him. At one point he had to call his wife over to show her what was discovered.

All the shows are taped. You can go back and watch them if you missed them. But it is so much more fun to go there while its live and join the chat.

Here’s a list of the challenges they’ve had already, and a link to the videos so you can watch:

Week 1: January 6
      - AJ Jacobs (Journalist & everyone’s cousin): Kickoff, January 6

Week 2: January 13
      - AJ Jacobs (Journalist & everyone’s cousin): Reveal
      - CeCe Moore (The Genetic Detective): Kickoff

Week 3: January 20
      - CeCe Moore (The Genetic Detective): Reveal
      - Jonny Perl (DNA Painter): Kickoff

Week 4: January 27
      - Jonny Perl (DNA Painter): Reveal
      - Jen Baldwin (Ancestral Journeys): Kickoff 

Week 6: February 3
      - Jen Baldwin (Ancestral Journeys): Reveal
      - Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Finding Your Roots): Kickoff

Week 7: February 10
      - Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Finding Your Roots): Reveal
      - Judy Russell (The Legal Genealogist): Kickoff

Week 8: February 17
      - Judy Russell (The Legal Genealogist): Reveal
      - a break for all the WikiTreers

Week 9: February 24
      - Thomas MacEntee (High-Definition Genealogy): Kickoff

Week 10: March 3
      - Thomas MacEntee (High-Definition Genealogy): Reveal
      - Katherine Willson (Social Media Genealogy): Kickoff

Katherine will have her reveal next week on March 10. Look who is also scheduled for March:

- Pat Richley-Erickson (Dear Myrtle)
- Rob Warthen (DNAGedcom)
- Dallan Quass (RootsFinder)
- Ellen Thompson Jennings (Family History Hound)

And following that, April has been announced:

- Tim Janzen (Genetic Genealogy expert)
- Cheri Hudson Passey (Carolina Girl Genealogy)
- Connie Knox (GenealogyTV.org)

Do make sure you check out this WikiTree LiveCast recorded Feb 27 as a RootsTech Special, recapping the first 7 weeks of the Challenge.

The Challenge is going to be continuing all 2021, so expect many more great guest stars to be revealed.

In addition to the Wednesday LiveCasts, they also have a weekly recap every Saturday, discussing how research is progressing for the guest of the week. For all of their past LiveCasts, see the WikiTree Video list on YouTube.

For information on upcoming LiveCasts, follow @WikiTreers on Twitter or go to the WikiTree page on Facebook.

If you want the challenge of working with others to break through the brick walls of your genealogy heroes, then join WikiTree (it’s free) and sign up for some future challenges.

Here’s a great presentation prepared for WikiTreers who want to take on the WikiTree challenge and work to improve the profiles of the guest stars.

This is fantastic stuff. It’s so much fun to join in the live chat every Wednesday night. Hope to see you there.

Like hundreds of thousands of you, I had been looking forward to this year’s version of #RootsTech2021,  which is completely online and free to everyone.

I have attended RootsTech in Salt Lake City three times in person, in 2012, 2014 and 2017. I couldn’t go from 2018 to 2020, but those years RootsTech had started live streaming their keynotes and one track of their talks, so there was lots I was able to enjoy from home. They also introduced the RootsTech App which helped to know what was going on. Those of us not there were still live tweeting with the hashtag: #notatrootstech

This year, due to the circumstances, RootsTech Connect has been forced to be all online. It was very different. I’d like to go over the parts of the conference that I enjoyed the most.

Road to RootsTech

The RootsTech site wasn’t available until Wednesday. But the people behind the conference got together about a week before and produced a series of videos called the Road to RootsTech. They were well produced, fun and information. It was great to see all the people behind the conference telling us what was coming. We sa even got a sneak peek of the website from Bryan Austad, the main programmer behind the site who was working 24/7 right up to Wednesday to be sure it would be ready.

The Website Itself

Once the website activated Wednesday morning, it was quite a beautiful site to take in. The choice of colors and graphics were very well done.

You had access to descriptions of the hundreds of sessions available, information about all the speakers, and later that day, the expo hall opened where you could visit the virtual booth and get information about and even chat with the 80 or so vendors. And you could build your personal Playlist of all the sessions you wanted to see.

DNA Sessions

DNA topics are a big interest of mine. I have been to a lot of webinars about DNA over the past year, so I was looking for something a bit different or new to me this time around.

Alison Wilde presented a session on her SCREEN Method – Alison described her structured way to record your notes on each of your DNA matches. I thought that was really innovative and well thought-out.

Also see Alison’s other video on YouTube on her advanced note taking system called AP-Screen and her website: www.AlisonWildeDNA.com

The other DNA topic that was of most interest to me was Leah Larkin’s two sessions: When Your Tree is a Banyan: Untangling Endogamy, where Leah explains the difference in endogamy between different groups of people:

See Part 1 and Part 2. Leah is also asking for more shared match data for her Endogamy study. If you are interested in helping her out, check Leah’s blog post: Contribute to the Endogamy Study.

Digitization

A month ago, I started taking an hour every night to digitize all the stuff I have in the boxes in my closet and basement, the binders in my bookshelves, and the folders in my filing cabinets. The most interesting sessions for me on that were the series of 3 sessions by Maureen Taylor, Christopher Desmond and Nancy Desmond called Unlocking the Shoebox.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.  Lots of great hints, tips and ideas.

I also noticed that ShotBox was a vendor with a virtual booth in the Expo Hall. I had heard about ShotBox several years ago, but now that I’ve actually started my digitization, I understand what types of items my sheet feeder scanner, my flat bed scanner, and my hand-held digital camera phone cannot handle well.

ShotBox had a show special on for RootsTech so I went for it.

My ShotBox should be arriving in about a week.

GEDCOM 7.0

Only a week prior to RootsTech, it became known that FamilySearch was going to announce a release candidate for GEDCOM 7.0, to replace the over 20 year-old standard that currently is in use. Because my program Behold is a GEDCOM reader, I’ve always been involved with GEDCOM and was very interested in hearing what was going to be presented. Gordon Clarke of FamilySearch had two sessions about this. I watched the two sessions Wednesday night.

But inexplicably, the sessions were removed from RootsTech on Thursday, and all information about GEDCOM 7.0 was taken down. For a timeline of what happened, see my blog post: GEDCOM 7.0.

Socializing

A genealogical conference isn’t a genealogical conference without socializing. RootsTech Connect provided the ability to chat with other attendees and speakers. I was able to get in touch with a few people I knew from past conferences and have some enjoyable live chats with them.

There were also two other sessions I very much enjoyed.

One was the Family History Fanatics RootsTech Connect 2021 Recap that was on Friday afternoon. 

There were over 70 of us watching live and we were all involved very actively in the live chat that was happening while the webinar was going on.

Then on Saturday, I attended my first ever Dear Myrt After Party. My flight time home had always prevented me previously from attending her After Party which she hosted at her home. But this time, I didn’t have to fly home.

It was a lot of fun. Rather than a webinar, this was a full virtual meeting, so we were all full participants. We had about 60 people there.

Pat set up a game for us and we split up into breakout rooms to form teams to try to find the answer to research questions on FamilySearch, Ancestry and Trove.

Conclusion

Steve Rockwood closing RootsTech Connect. 

Well, RootsTech Connect technically isn’t over. The hundreds of sessions will be available to watch for a year at the RootsTech site. I have about 30 left on my list to watch, many to help with my own personal research.

At the end of the conference, FamilySearch updated their number of attendees:

A million of us. Wow!

Today I got a newsletter from Elizabeth O’Neal, who runs the Heart of the Family site.  The newsletter was about “Getting the Most Out of RootsTech”. What caught my attention was her point 5: “Check your growing list of cousins.”

Elizabeth was talking about Relatives at RootsTech, which looks at your FamilySearch tree and sees if there are any of the over 320,000 attendees that you are connected to. Some people like Randy Seaver are connected to tens of thousands of people. Me: zero, zilch, nil, none.

I had already added all of my direct ancestors to FamilySearch, which amounted to about 31 people, and I connected them to anyone I could find at FamilySearch who was related, putting in the necessary intermediaries to connect us.

But what Elizabeth said that I did not know was that you can upload a GEDCOM file to FamilySearch. She gave this link to the FamilySearch article: How do I upload my GEDCOM file.

This does not upload your information to FamilySearch’s FamilyTree, but uploads it to their Pedigree Resource File (PRF) which “allows you to share your family history on FamilySearch without letting other people change it.”

One you’ve done that, then you can copy that information into FamilyTree. See the article: How do I copy information from my GEDCOM into Family Tree?

So I had to try that. Other than this possibly being a very good way to get my information into the tree, it might allow me to fairly quickly connect more of my branches to the main tree. And maybe I’ll result in finding some relatives who are also registered for RootsTech.

So let’s try it and see how it goes.

Initial Step:  Create GEDCOM

I have my main tree at MyHeritage. I use their free desktop program Family Tree Builder which keeps the two synced together. I’ll open Family Tree Builder and export my GEDCOM.

I’ll select all people and omit all living people and all people and data that I’ve marked private. I’m not sure if the photos I have of my relatives will transfer to FamilySearch, but I’ll export them in the hope that they will.

Checking the GEDCOM file with Behold, I can see I have 6413 people in the file. The GEDCOM includes all the living people in the file, so all the father/mother/child connections are there, but none of them have any information included, not even the NAME tag. I do want the tree to connect to me, so I find my INDI record in the file and add to it a new line:
     1 NAME Louis /Kessler/

Step 1: Upload my GEDCOM to FamilySearch

1. I sign into FamilySearch and click Search.
2. I click Genealogies.
3. I scroll past the search fields to the section titled What are Genealogies?
4. At the end of the section, I click Submit Your Tree.
5. I click Upload GEDCOM File.

I chose my file, entered a tree name and description and clicked Upload.

In very little time (less than a minute), my tree was uploaded and ready to compare.

Step 2: Compare My File to FamilySearch Family Tree

So now I press the Compare button in the screenshot above. The word “Comparing…” appears as the Status while this takes place. After about 15 minutes, the Status changes to “Ready”.

I press the View link that now appear where Compare used to be. The results flash for a second and then I get taken to this:

I go back and try again but this keeps happening. I try it in Edge, Google Chrome and Firefox. It’s a problem in all browsers. The page before does stick around long enough that I can do a screen capture:

So there’s a glitch here that FamilySearch should fix, but it looks like the processing worked. I had 2128 non-living people in my GEDCOM of which 680 are already in Family Tree, 42 are potential matches and 1406 that I can add to Family Tree.

Step 3: Review the Potential Matches List

(*** NOTE:  I learned after the fact that it might be better to do Step 5 before doing steps 3 and 4.  See Step 5, below)

Aha! If I go back and click on “Potential Matches” before it transforms to the “Oops, I did it again” page, the Potential Matches page does appear. Glitch workaround success!!  I get this:

Below the summary, on the left are my 42 potential matches. The first potential match is shown on the right comparing my GEDCOM to what’s on Family Tree. Now I can select in the top right either “Not a Match” or “Yes”. This one is a “Yes”.

After clicking “Yes”, I get this screen:

I can now decide to replace some of the information for this person in the tree with the information from my GEDCOM. I’m going to be very conservative here, and not transfer anything that is different or suspect. If I don’t click on any of the “Replace” links, then the “Save” button doesn’t activate. 

If I do click on at least one replace link, and then click on “Save”, then the following Reason for Update box appears:

They do not, however, force you to enter a reason. You can just click “Continue” and it will be saved.

They gave me two potential matches for the following person, but neither was the correct one, so I clicked “Not a Match” for each one. That took me to this screen:

I now clicked “Add” to add this person to Family Tree.

The name of each potential match links to the Family Tree entry for the person, so when I’m in doubt, I can check in more detail what Family Tree shows.

Of the 42 potential matches, about half were the correct person so I merged them. And the other half were not the correct person, so I added them. 

I found some new information that I didn’t have before, as well as a few corrections which I then added to my MyHeritage tree.

It took a couple of hours to go through the 42 potential matches:  a very worthwhile effort.

I liked the way this procedure worked. It was nicely implemented by the FamilySearch people.

Step 4: Review the Add to Family Tree List

Here I have 1407 people. It appears they have to be added one at a time. It takes two clicks per person, one to add them, and one to navigate to the next person.

Looks like this will be grunt-work that I’ll save to do while I’m watching some RootsTech sessions.

Step 5: Review the Already in Family Tree List

This list now included the 680 people that were already in Family Tree, plus the people I added from Steps 3 and 4. If I were doing this, I’d review this list first before the others get added. 

It is nice to review the information that I have for each of these people versus what FamilySearch has. It is presented in the same format as shown in the “Already in Family Tree” graphic (above). You get the opportunity to replace information in Family Search if you’re sure (with evidence hopefully) that yours is correct.

Final Thoughts

I never realized that FamilySearch Family Tree had this capability to load a GEDCOM, compare it to the tree, and merge your information into it.

I was very impressed by how it worked. Family Tree already had 680 of my people in my tree, and this will allow me (after I do the grunt-work) to add 1448 more people, which is all the other people in my Family Tree Builder tree who are not living or private.

I don’t know when FamilySearch added this capability, but thank you Elizabeth O’Neal, for making me aware of it.

Hopefully the addition of so many new people will allow Relatives at RootsTech to find me a relative before the end of RootsTech.

A few glitches, but I got the job done. I do see why they don’t want to blindly add people’s GEDCOMs en masse, as that would cause a mess.