Scotland (country)

Helping a challenge

Miss W. Wikitree , , , , ,
stevepb / Pixabay

As most of my readers know, I am adding my family onto Wikitree. This is a website trying to connect one big global tree. But you must include sources to prove connections on the tree.

I have 287 profiles that I have added to the tree that relate to my family ancestors and descendants. I am manager of each of these profiles but will willingly hand over managership to a person more closely related than I am. I actually have 549 people connected to me, so nearly 300 profiles have been added by other cousins.

Here is how many steps they are away from me:

24 Jan 2023 3 13 51 86 145 74 177 549

I am degree 0, my parents and brother are degree 1 so they are the 3 in the chart. Degree 2 I have 13 people – these are my grandparents and my aunts and uncles. So I have a total of 549 people who are 7 or less steps away from me on the global Wikitree.

During this last week the Society of Australian Genealogists have been running a challenge on Wikitree. We started with 7 Australians that needed their trees built out further.

I was asked if I would look at some documents related to Oliver “Otto” Peters Heggie, his siblings and parents.

Oliver was a famous actor who got his start in Angaston, South Australia where he was born and passed away in Los Angeles.

During the week, I added 58 new profiles from the information in the Heggie memoirs. I started in Scotland with birth of James Heggie, father of Oliver. There was a lot of detail in the memoirs but I needed to find a source to add to each new profile – so looking for births in Scotland, then arrival in Australia, marriage in Australia and then birth of all the children including “Otto” in South Australia. I also found articles on Trove proving some of the information in the memoirs that I could then add to the biography of the profile person.

The idea of the challenge was to create at least seven connections going forward (children), backward (parents) or sideways (spouse and siblings)

There were 65 participants in the challenge. These were wikitreers from all around the world but quite a few from Australia. By the end of the challenge I was 16th on the list – I had added 58 profiles and won 10 bounty points for being the first person to connect a new Heggie profile to a profile already on the wikitree. I edited 74 profiles altogether and made 253 total edits.

I thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the challenge and have put my name down to help on the next one which relates to One Place Studies. I am interested in this as I also have a blog about the Sorell Municipality which is counted as a One Place Study (OPS).

Readers: Have you collaborated with other people to improve your family history?

Day 1 RootsTech 2022

Miss W. Conferences , , , , , , , ,

Any links will take you directly to a recommended website.

My playlist is ready and I have now started checking out some sessions, series and keynotes. Some are of interest to me personally and others might be helpful information for those people I help at the local library doing their family history.

UK Ancestors on a budget by Karen Evans

Three sessions – first one about census

  • Irish census 1901 and 1911 can be found at the National Archives of Ireland.
  • English and Welsh returns for 1841-1911 found at Family Search. Scroll down the page to specify which collection you want to check by typing in England census then choose from the options.
  • England, Wales and Scotland records transcribed by volunteers at FreeCen. Note not all places have been transcribed.

Second session – BMD

Civil registration was different for each country.

  • England 1837 but compulsory only from 1875
  • Ireland from 1864 but non Catholic marriages from 1845
  • Scotland from 1855

Places to find civil and church records:

  • ScotlandsPeople – search for free but pay for documents at reasonable price – incudes both civil and church records
  • IrishGenealogy – has both civil records and church records
  • General Register Office – has index for BMD and you can order certificates here more cheaply than from a large database like Ancestry
  • FreeBMD – shows indexes for BMD – all volunteers
  • UKBMD – again a volunteer based group which shows parishes or counties looking at BMD in their area specifically. Also includes lists of counties with Online Parish Clerk websites (OPC). Also has one place studies and census info – so great site for lots of free information and indexes to use.
  • National Library Ireland – Catholic parish registers
  • Family search – lots of registers for particular counties and parishes. Find them through Records and narrow further with Collections
  • FreeReg – similar to FreeBMD and FreeCen – run by volunteers

Third session – hidden treasures

After having looked at the censuses and BMDs, where else can you look for information while on a budget?

  • Find a grave – often includes images, basic info on the person being searched and maybe family info as well
  • Commonwealth War Grave Commission (CWGC) – for those who have died in war – variety of ways to search
  • County councils – some councils have their own archives of things like dog licences, canal boats, gaols
  • GENUKI – great site, breaks down to country then county and parish and what records are available at each level
  • Cyndi’s list – world wide links to thousands of websites
  • Also check out specials and free trials of the big databases. Often family history societies and local libraries have more resources as well.
  • Help online from rootschat, facebook groups and other social media.

Latest DNA Painter releases by Jonny Perl

I love using some of the tools on DNA Painter especially What are the odds (WATO) and the shared cM page. But I have also tried to paint chromosome maps but have found it very tedious adding in one person at a time. But there are now ways to import more than one persons DNA chromosome segments which I might have to start using.

I also learnt about using phased kits at GEDmatch to import just my mum’s data or just my dad’s data. This makes it easier to work out if segments are maternal or paternal on the chromosome map when importing from GEDmatch cluster groups. (Tier 1)

Another new tool was looking at adding dimensions such as birth/death year on your family tree instead of just names. Also colour coding on family trees as well as on WATO.

Main stage events

Many of these sessions are very early in the morning in Australia so I will have to watch them at another time once the recordings are up on the website. But I did listen to Maysoon Zayid and Matthew Modine talking about their family history and how memories make connections through oral history as well as movies and photos.

I did look at some other sessions but will not be writing about them all.

I am disappointed though that I only have 13 relatives at RootsTech – maybe my relatives are not into family history as much as I am.

Readers: What were your takeaways from day 1 at RootsTech?