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Happy Wednesday WikiTreers!

Here’s this week’s WikiTree news as well as some of our favorites picks from around the genealogy community.

Happenings Around the Tree:

Profile of the Week: Baseball legend Babe Ruth (1895-1948).
Question of the Week: Are there any baseball players in your family?
Member of the Week: Juha Soini leads the Finland Project, helps improve our shared tree as a Data Doctor, and generously helps new members as a Mentor.
Challenge of the Week: Data Doctor analysis has discovered 50,000 marriage-related errors and suggestions to investigate. Together we may be able to clear them all by Monday.
WikiTree’s Canadian projects are active and energetic. See the updates from the British Columbia, Ontario, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia projects.
Shirley Dalton is leading a group of WikiTreers who are finding surnames for profiles with unknown last names. Can you help?
Quick Tip: If you need an introduction to WikiTree or a refresher, see the 10 simple steps on How to Start Climbing Our Tree.

Happenings Around the Genealogy Community:

The Ancestor Hunt has complied 1,010 free online historical photo archives for the U.S.
Check out the new searchable records FamilySearch added last month for several countries including England, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa and many others.
NEHGS is offering free access to all online databases until July 17. If you have ancestors from New England, don’t miss this opportunity!
Family History Expos is presesnting an online virtual genealogy conference October 15-October 20. For details, visit their site.
The Legal Genealogist, Judy Russell, wrote this week about copyright and the online photo.
Got Dutch? Read up on the June issue of Dutch Genealogy News.
Genea-Musings blogger, Randy Seaver, used WikiTree and other sites, to see if he’s related to Benjamin Franklin. Check out his post to see if he is. Are you?

Don’t forget to check GeneaWebinars and ConferenceKeeper for upcoming genealogy webinars, online meetings, hangouts and events.

Keep calm and source on!

Hi WikiTreers!

Here are a few things happening around the community this week:

You now have a GEDCOM home page for uploading, downloading, and viewing your GEDCOMpare reports. It’s My WikiTree > GEDCOMs on your pull-down menu.

Profile of the Week: Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942), author of Anne of Green Gables, from the Canadian History Project. See your connection.

Question of the Week: What’s the most unusual name you’ve found in your family tree? When we asked this question in February it generated over 200 amusing answers and comments.

Challenge of the Week: Messy merged profiles. Sometimes duplicate ancestor profiles get merged but the biography and sources aren’t consolidated. Can you help clean up a few? Your contributions will appear on this leaderboard.

Member of the Week: Leanne Cooper, who gave this presentation introducing WikiTree. “I love that WikiTree is such good cousin bait,” she writes in her interview. “I have had many people contact me about the profiles that I manage, often to provide me with additional information. I’ve connected with many distant cousins through WikiTree.” See your connection.

A Wiki Genealogist is never bored! Guy and Danielle need help with the Quebecois Project; Jamie is growing the LDS Project; Leigh is looking for WikiTreers with Irish Roots.

And in other news:

In case you missed it, Cindy Lesure was invited and accepted a Leadership role this month. Along with Carole Partridge, Debi Hoag, and Project Coordinator Vicky Majewsky, Cindy is part of what we’ve been calling the “Fantastic Four” who are currently managing the various moving parts of our “new member” process, i.e., Greeters and Messengers. They’re doing a great job of staying on top of everything that needs to happen to welcome our guests and new members and make sure their questions and concerns are answered.
The Switzerland Project has now become a full-fledged project with Keith Hathaway and Paula Johnson leading with Mark Geesey acting as Project Coordinator.
Leader Jackie Girouard is working on the Louisiana Project and doing a bit of reorganizing with administrative support from Liz Shifflett. Jackie’s goal is to make the Louisiana Project structure look a bit more like the structure of other state projects.
Guy Constantineau and Isabelle Rassinot are working together to translate key portions of WikiTree to French, and they are presenting it in a new portal: Portail Francophone.

Onward and upward!

Every week you can find two new connections in our Connection Finder.

Each Tuesday, we showcase a WikiTreer in a Meet our Members feature on our blog and they also get spotlighted in the Connection Finder for that week.

This week it’s Jeanie Roberts.

Jeanie joined our community in May of 2014. She’s a great asset to our Puritan Great Migration project and is the Project Coordinator for our Native Americans project.” She admires her Puritan ancestors for “their bravery in crossing a very large ocean in a very small boat for a destination for which they knew very little, to create a new life for themselves and their children.” Check your connection.

We also highlight what we call an Example Profile of the Week. These profiles are top-notch and meet the styles and standards criteria that the community has agreed upon. The notable whose profile is used as an example is also featured in the Connection Finder for that week.

Spotlighted this week is Captain Myles Standish (ca. 1584-1656), military leader of the Plymouth Colony, from the Mayflower Project. See how you are connected.

And of course you can always see your connection to our current connection anchors, Queen Elizabeth II and AJ Jacobs.

Follow the tag connection_finder for weekly updates on connections.

Hi WikiTreers!

Here are a few things happening around the community this week:

You can now click to GEDmatch one-to-one DNA comparisons directly from WikiTree. We are continuing to work with GEDmatch to empower genealogists to piece together the human puzzle. Click here for your DNA Ancestor Confirmation Aid and look for “[compare]” links.

Question of the Week: Do you have an ancestor who was aboard the Mayflower? Click here to check with your Mayflower Passenger Relationship Finder.

Member of the Week: Jeanie Roberts is active in the Puritan Great Migration and Native American projects. She admires her Puritan ancestors for “their bravery in crossing a very large ocean in a very small boat for a destination for which they knew very little, to create a new life for themselves and their children.” Your connection to Jeanie.

Profile of the Week: Captain Myles Standish (ca. 1584-1656), military leader of the Plymouth Colony, from the Mayflower Project. Your connection to Myles Standish.

Do you have a veteran in your family? Join Sarah Heiney’s challenge to add Military Service sections to as many profiles as possible.

Leaving out the opening <ref> or closing </ref> tag in a source footnote is one of the most common and frustrating Newt mistakes. Help us fix them in this week’s Data Doctor Challenge.

Our automatic data validation checks have been expanded, e.g. to include <ref> tag mistakes 🙂 and now include more helpful explanations.

Hi WikiTreers!

Here are a few things happening around the community this week:

Jamie Nelson has created a new app that shows you a list of your brickwalls, i.e. where your ancestor trails dead-end.

Clean-Up Challenge of the Week: Location errors. Join our group effort to improve as many location names as possible by Monday. One of us gets the bragging rights for doing the most, but we all win with a cleaner shared tree.

Question of the Week: What’s the highest military medal or civilian honor received by one of your ancestors?

Member of the Week: Greg Lavoie, who’s active in the French Roots Project. He’s currently focused on the Presidents of France, French Notables, and Ancestry of Catherine de Baillon sub-projects. Check your connection to Greg!

Profile of the Week: A. A. Milne (1882-1956), author of the beloved stories of Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh. Your connection to the Hundred Acre Wood.

The UK has an active community of WikiTreers. Reply to Maria Maxwell if you have an interest in the United Kingdom Project or any of its subprojects. Susie MacLeod is organizing volunteers to cover English counties.