Using a new skill

 

Bessi / Pixabay

In May last year, I decided to start my tree on WikiTree. I had heard a lot of good things about how the members are trying to create one single family tree using both genealogical sources as well as DNA.

I began by adding mum’s side of the tree as I had a great paper trail as well as matching DNA trail for her ancestors. I was still working on proving dad’s tree as his DNA results didn’t match his paper trail and oral history. But I had made a breakthrough earlier in 2021 through DNA matches.

I had also been writing biographies of my direct ancestors including sources mainly as links to images or as hyperlinks.

When using WikiTree, sources are most important.

You can’t add a new person (called profiles) to your tree unless you have a source. My main sources are from Ancestry, Family Search, Find My Past but more specifically Trove newspaper reports and records from the Tasmanian Names Index.  My maternal side of the tree have been in Tasmania since the 1830s and most of the records needed are digitized and available for free on the Libraries Tasmania website.

Now that I have dad’s side of the tree back in England prior to 1924, I am using the big databases mentioned. I find the English censuses are extremely useful for moving backwards each generation as well as finding siblings and children. I have also started to purchase some birth, death and marriage certificates from the GRO in England.

As of today, I have added 77 profiles to the WikiTree. Twelve of them have decent biographies (my grandparents and great grandparents) and each of those have quite a few sources added. But I still need to do some formatting and adding more sources.

This will be an ongoing project as I want to be writing full biographies for my direct ancestors but not necessarily all their siblings and children.  Hopefully other members of the family can add them if they join WikiTree.

Below are the profiles I have written so far:

Grandparents:

Great grandparents:

So far I have connected with one cousin on the England surname side of mum’s tree who is also on WikiTree.

One thought on “Using a new skill

  1. Enjoyed your post about WikiTree. I’m also adding bios to ancestors on WikiTree, one by one, with sources because that will really help other researchers. The formatting part is not so easy for me.

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