WikiTree Community Blog

You can now view a nested list of anyone’s children, and children’s children, and children’s children’s children … . It’s like the inverse of a family tree. Instead of climbing up through ancestors you’re digging down through descendants.

If you have children, click here to view your descendants page.

You can see anyone’s descendants by clicking the icon to the right of their name on their profile page, or clicking the “Family Tree” tab and then selecting one of the descendant icons.

What makes this feature especially meaningful, I think, is how it highlights the connections between distant cousins. When I click to see all the descendants of an ancestor and see my name on there, it reminds me of my special connection to all the names on the list.

In addition to being a great platform for recreating family history, WikiTree is also a brilliant resource for collaborating with others on special community projects. Two such projects currently in the works are for Twins and another for Centenarians.

Our reigning Queen of WikiTree, Joanna Tolson, took the initiative to kick start these pages in an effort to bring together Twins Throughout the Ages and Centenarians: Our Link to Ages Gone By. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see if there is a deep, historical link to all things twin? Or learning the secrets of living into the truly golden years by connecting with others who are or have known a Centenarian?

If you’d like to take part in these global activities, just create an account and start building your family history. After setting up a twin or centenarian on your tree, you can add these individuals to the respective pages by editing their bios and adding [[Category:Centenarians]] or [[Category:Twins]].

We’ve been making improvements to the category system thanks to input and experimentation by C-G Magnussen and his Italians in Sweden project.

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Categories will be powerful tools for history. They enable WikiTreers to connect records in creative and unusual ways. Imagine connecting the pages of sailors who served on the same ship in World War 2, or neighbors who grew up on the same street, or students who attended the same school.

Categories can be used for your own family history too. WikiTreer extraordinaire Joanna Tolson asked about ways to highlight particular people in her Watchlist, e.g. one who was a professional hockey player, or the family with triplets.

If you don’t mind sharing the category with other WikiTreers, you could create generic categories such as “Professional Hockey Players” and “Triplets”. Simply put something like [[Category:Professional Hockey Players]] in the person’s bio/notes. A category page will instantly be created and anyone else who creates a page for a professional hockey player will be able to add them in the same way.

If you want to keep a personal category for special people in just your family, one way to do it would be a category like [[Category:Select Family Members of Joanna Tolson]].

Another cool thing about category pages is that you can add a description to the top of them. For example, Joanna might want to explain the meaning of her “Select Family Members of Joanna Tolson” page and why people are listed there. To add this description, however, you need to have special “Super” editing rights at WikiTree. Ask me about this when you want to add a description and I can help.

Top WikiTreer Joanna and I have been talking about the issue of what to do with Catholic confirmation names on WikiTree.

She has this whole line of French ancestors deep in her family tree named Joseph and Marie. This has caused her great consternation when it comes to navigating between them. How do you know, at a glance, which family member is which? Is it Joseph the grandfather, or Joseph the father, or Joseph the son, or Joseph the grandson, etc., etc.?

I just looked at her Watchlist. She has 154 men named Joseph Pitre in there. Uh … I didn’t even realize how was this bad was for her until just now. I’m sorry, Jo.

Because of some recent improvements, mostly suggested by Joanna, it is getting easier to tell one Joseph from another. When you’re on a family tree page you can see full middle names, birth dates, and death dates. However, in searches and automatic matches you can still only see middle initials and birth and death decades.

The difference in name presentation is because of privacy issues. You can only view a particular person’s family tree page when you have Trusted List access to them, but anybody can do a search. Therefore, we can list full info on a family tree but not in search results. At some point we will make searches sophisticated enough to know whether the user doing the search is in a particular person’s Trusted List or not, or if that particular person is unrestricted, but for now that’s not possible.

On profile pages, when you have Trusted List access, of course, you can see a person’s full information. But even here on profiles, it’s not clear how confirmation names should be entered and presented.

How should confirmation names be entered and used so that it’s easy for a person like Joanna to preserve this important information yet still tell people apart?

An obvious solution would be to add new Confirmation Name fields and display them everywhere we display a name. But as Joanna knows I’m hesitant to do this. We already have eight fields for names:

Prefix
Proper First Name (i.e. full, formal first name)
Preferred Name (i.e. colloquial version of first name)
Other Nicknames
Middle Name
Last Name at Birth
Current Last Name (or last name at death)
Suffix

Moreover, we’re considering adding a third last name field. Joanna and others have pointed out that last names often have alternate spellings, especially as you go back in history. This field could also be used when women married more than once and therefore had more than one married name.

The disadvantage of adding new fields is complexity. The more complexity you add for advanced users the more difficult or daunting the site becomes for newbies. It’s very important to me that WikiTree be accessible to new and casual users, since most of us want our family members to view the site and participate even if they don’t want to devote a lot of time and energy to family history.

An idea I had this morning is for confirmation names to be put in the Nicknames field. When we added that third first name field I meant it to be for any kind of alternate name, so I think this would fit. Perhaps we could rename the field to make it more inclusive.

I’m not a Catholic and I don’t have experience with how confirmation names are used. In modern American usage, I think, they’re usually put after a middle name, right? How about in genealogical and historical records?

Thoughts? Does anybody know how other family tree sites and software packages organize confirmation names?

A-1 awesome WikiTreer C-G Magnussen has been pioneering the use of categories on WikiTree.

Those of you familiar with Wikipedia or another wiki may know how categories work. Anyone can instantly connect pages under the umbrella of any category they choose. For example, I could create a category called “Whittens from Fitchburg, Massachusetts” and add my family members to it. I simply go to the Edit page of a family member and enter this anywhere in the main body of the Bio/Notes: [[Category:Whittens from Fitchburg, Massachusetts]]

Without doing anything else, this page is created: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Whittens_from_Fitchburg%2C_Massachusetts

I can even proceed to make “Whittens from Fitchburg, Massachusetts” a sub-category of something like “Whitten Families” or “Families from Fitchburg, Massachusetts” or both.

C-G’s current interest is Italian immigrants to Sweden so he’s been working on this: http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Italians_in_Sweden.

Categories are potentially very powerful tools for wiki genealogy but they haven’t been optimized for our WikiTree use yet. For example, the links on the category pages appear as file names (aka WikiTree IDs) instead of names, e.g. Whitten-1 instead of Chris Whitten.

Today C-G asked about this: “When I add the category info in the Bio Notes it isn’t showing on that profile unless you have permission to edit. I wonder if the information about what categories a person belongs to should be listed automatically somewhere on the Profile page!? I know I can add the category links manually.”

I think this is a good idea. Does anybody else have input?

WikiTree finally has its own search engine for people.

This should make it much easier for new users to quickly see if someone is already on the worldwide wiki family tree. It will also make it easier for WikiTreers to quickly jump to one of their own family members. Instead of clicking around your family tree or scrolling down your Watchlist, you can just type in the first name and last name.

This could be a big step for WikiTree is another way. When you search for someone and don’t find them, you can add them with one click. In other words, if you search for “Joe Schmoe” and he’s not on WikiTree yet, you just have to hit the “Add Joe Schmoe” button and he’ll be there the next time someone searches. Of course, he’ll be nothing but a name with a blank page at first, but hopefully the original user and future users will add more and connect him to the tree.

Joanna Tolson and I have been talking about the under-utilized Memories sections. This is the area on every profile page for personal messages and stories related to the person.

She wrote, “Perhaps we can start a discussion on how to make the Memories field more attractive to WikiTreers. I know I enjoy anecdotal asides in my research when I come across them. Someone is more than a name, date and place when there is a little story attached.”

I agree 100%. Genealogy is one thing. Family history can be so much more. WikiTree is designed for showcasing the richness of individual lives and relationships — memories, stories, photos — but a lot of that is neglected.

How can we encourage more people to use the Memories sections?

Joanna came up with these Memory-Inspiring Questions. Now she’s talking about e-mailing out an interview form for all her relatives to fill out.

Any other ideas for promoting this sort of thing?

Here’s another interesting issue that Fay and Joanna brought up.

At the risk of sounding insensitive, Fay asked about what would happen “if some 80 year old comes in here and makes a massive tree then kicks the bucket?”

First, some background for new WikiTreers who might be reading this. WikiTree’s unique privacy and permissions system is based on “Trusted Lists”. Every profile (usually of a person, but it could also be for a pet, place, event, etc.) has its own Trusted List. Anyone on the Trusted List has full permission to view and edit the profile’s data.

One person on the Trusted List is designated as the Profile Manager. This is usually the WikiTreer who created the profile. The manager gets the request when someone new wants to join them on the Trusted List.

So, what happens if the Profile Manager dies? For that matter, what about the less morbid and probably more common scenario where a Profile Manager forgets about WikiTree when they change their e-mail address? Access requests start to bounce.

I’m ashamed to say I don’t have a good answer for this yet. The best I can say is that if you suspect a situation like this you can contact me personally and I’ll try to resolve it.

We will need a policy for this. Maybe it can be based on a certain amount of time going by without a response to an access request. If the Profile Manager ignores requests (for whatever reason) the request could go to someone else on the Trusted List. If there is nobody else on the Trusted List, it could go to me.

Any thoughts on this?

Fay and Joanna brought up a bunch of issues in their comments to my “Upload pdf files as images” post. I don’t have good answers to some of them and decided I should try talking them out with you.

Here’s one that I puzzle over. Joanna wrote, “I’ve come across bunches of people with birthdays like this (August 4, 1824/1825) and guess what? Yep, I gotta pick ONE year because WikiTree doesn’t let me put both years in. Sometimes I find ‘born aft. 1692′ and can’t add that either. GIVE ME SOME LEEWAY, CHRIS! You’re so inflexible with history.”

One thing WikiTree does have, that I haven’t seen on any other family tree tools, is a “certainty status” radio button by each field. That is, you can mark a date as certain, uncertain, or intentionally blank. This way if you’re not sure if a birth date was, say, 1824 or 1825, you can choose one and mark the field as uncertain.

Another thing you can do is use the free wiki space section to explain this in more detail. For example, you might write, “The birth date is marked as 1824 but it could also be 1825. It’s based on the self-reported age of 66 in the 1890 census …” or whatever.

All fine and good, you say, but how come the date field doesn’t just allow text like “1824/1825″?

My reasoning: real dates, even guesses, make automatic matching easier. Text fields vary so much (”about”, “abt.”, “circa”, “ca.”, “around”, etc.) that they’re tough to match.

In another post Fay and I talked about how to know whether one John Denman is the same as another John Denman. Birth and death dates, of course, are an important part of this. Our system will be able to compare “1825″ with other dates, but a text field that says “1824/1825″ or “abt. 1825″ won’t be interpreted.

We’ll also be working on other ways to use dates. You might want a timeline for your family. Or maybe you’d want to call up a list of all your family members who were born in the 1820s. Who knows. Having real dates will make all this easier.

That said, our system isn’t perfect. Handling of dates can and will be improved, I’m just not sure how yet.

In addition to the “about” and “after” type dates that Fay mentioned, I’d like WikiTree to be able to handle decades. You should be able to say someone was born in the 1820s if that’s all you know. Forcing you to choose a date like 1825 when you really have no idea of the exact year is far less than ideal.

Anybody have suggestions? Have you seen other tools that do this sort of thing especially well?

Progress continues, thanks to constant feedback from WikiTreers.

One new addition that might interest you: you can now upload Adobe pdf files to your profiles of family members, places, things, etc. They function just like images. Simply click “upload image” on any page. You can then associate the pdf with as many profiles as you like, add a title, location, date, and/or comments.

We’re still hard at work on our “gedcom” importing program. Those of you who use other family tree programs will easily be able to import your current work to WikiTree so there’s no duplication of your efforts. If you do have a gedcom file (and you do if you use just about any other family tree software or website) and you’re willing to help test the new import process let me know.