Historically-significant ancestors

Categories: WikiTree Help | Projects

When you go back more than a few hundred years many of us start to share the same ancestors, and many of them are historically-significant. The mission of WikiTree is to create a single, shared family tree. This means that all the descendants of an ancestor need to share one ancestor profile.

These large-scale collaborations can be very difficult. The method of cooperation needs to be very different than it is for living people and modern family members. Our Wiki Genealogist Honor Code is a foundation for this cooperation, but it's not enough for ancient and historical ancestors.

Contents

Management by project

Projects are acting somewhat like Profile Managers for the relevant profiles. Rather than having hundreds of managers for historically-significant ancestors, individual members of the project become the managers and take responsibility for leading the editing and maintenance on each profile, while the project as a whole works out controversial issues. For more details, see the policy on management by project.

We now have 16 projects. Some of them are:

They are open to anyone who wants to collaborate on these profiles, and we encourage you to join. Just follow a link above.

Some suggested future projects are:

If any of these would interest you, please contact Lianne.

Expedited merging for 200-year-old ancestors

Merges generally require the consent of both Profile Managers. However, many historical ancestors have accumulated hundreds of duplicates. The normal back-and-forth of merge proposals, merge approvals, and merge confirmations is unwieldy and leads to serious complications with redirects.

Therefore, profiles of people born more than 200 years ago can be merged by WikiTree Supervisors and individual management may be removed. [1]

Style guides

As our projects work through the issues, we are developing style guides for how the names appear, what belongs in a biography, and how the other elements of the profile pages are used. We are also developing the usage of categories.

See Styles and Standards.

These ancestors can still be in your family tree

You don't need to be a manager to have an ancestor in your family tree. In fact, you may not even want them on your Watchlist.

You want to be a manager or at least on the Trusted List for profiles of close family members. You're likely to have information you want to add and when someone else adds or changes something you want to hear about it in your Family Activity Feed.

But you might not want to monitor all the changes to the profile of King Charlemagne, for example, even if he's an ancestor of yours. Those changes would crowd your Activity Feed so it's harder to watch the profiles you care most about. Charlemagne will still be in your family tree and when you walk up your ancestry in any of our Family Views he'll be there (assuming all the parent-child connections are in place).

List of Profiles marked with HSA

Master pages for Historically Significant Ancestors



Australian Convicts and First (mainly European) Settlers

Dr. Thomas Arndell, Surgeon of the 1st Fleet; George Bannister, 1st Fleet convict; Owen Cavanough, 1st Fleet seaman; William Dring, 1st Fleeet convict; Matthew Everingham, 1st Fleet convict; Ann Forbes, 1st Fleet convict; Robert Forrester, 1st Fleet convict; Thomas Gosper, 2nd Fleet convict; Elizabeth Everingham nee Rimes, 2nd Fleet convict; Catherine Edwards, 3rd Fleet convict; Mary Ann Gosper nee Hipwell, 3rd Fleet convict; Thomas Huxley, 3rd Fleet convict; William Yardley, 3rd Fleet convict; Richard Woodbury, 1806 convict

US Presidents

1st President George Washington 2nd President John Adams 3rd President Thomas Jefferson 4th President James Madison 5th President James Monroe 6th President John Quincy Adams 7th President Andrew Jackson 8th President Martin Van Buren 9th President William Henry Harrison 10th President John Tyler 11th President James K. Polk 12th President Zachary Taylor 13th President Millard Fillmore 14th President Franklin Pierce 15th President James Buchanan 16th President Abraham Lincoln 17th President Andrew Johnson 18th President Ulysses S. Grant 19th President Rutherford B. Hayes 20th President James A. Garfield 21st President Chester Arthur 22nd President Grover Cleveland 23rd President Benjamin Harrison 24th President Grover Cleveland 25th President William McKinley 26th President Theodore Roosevelt 27th President William Howard Taft 28th President Woodrow Wilson 29th President Warren G. Harding 30th President Calvin Coolidge 31st President Herbert Hoover 32nd President Franklin D. Roosevelt 33rd President Harry S. Truman 34th President Dwight D. Eisenhower 35th President John F. Kennedy 36th President Lyndon B. Johnson 37th President Richard Nixon 38th President Gerald Ford 39th President Jimmy Carter 40th President Ronald Reagan 41st President George H. W. Bush 42nd President Bill Clinton 43rd President George W. Bush 44th President Barack Obama




  1. ↑ Trusted List status may also be removed by Supervisors if they deem it necessary. Roger, the organizer of the European Aristocracy project, in particular, has removed people from profiles he is managing. The intention is most certainly not to keep you from having full access to your ancestors' profiles! Please let Roger know if you'd like to be put back on the Trusted List for a set of ancestors; he will make you go through a very brief rigmarole in which you assure him that you understand about the importance of the direction of merges (which must go only into final profiles), and then add you to whatever you're interested in.


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