What are some of your interests outside of genealogy?
Not much lol. I dally in a bit of gardening and baking, and I love to cook. My hubby is a herb farmer so I always have a variety of fresh herbs. And of course, I love spending time with my family. I work from home on a freelance basis so I have lots of free time for WikiTreeing.
How long have you been on WikiTree and what do you spend the most time doing?
Firstly, there’s greeting. I love doing that. The gang is fantastic and irreplaceable. They’re like my online family.
I am currently undertaking the PIP Voyage. Debi is my guide and she’s amazing. I have learned so much from her. My favorite part must be citations and formatting.
I’ve been involved in the South Africa Project for a while now where I get to add sources to unsourced South African profiles, and recently met another awesome WikiTree’er who has been mentoring me through error suggestions and I’m starting to make my way through errors on open South African profiles.
I joined the Cemeteries Project and maintain two local cemetery pages. I do take photo requests if anyone would like pics.
I joined the Notables project when I added Princess Charlene’s profile, but that will not be viewable until after she passes, and I hope that won’t be for quite some time.
I’m also on the Ambassadors project and promote WikiTree at every opportunity. I’ve been on WikiTree since 2013.
What brought you to WikiTree?
I was googling an ancestor one day and saw a WikiTree profile. I can’t even remember now who it was. I instantly loved the idea of a one world family tree with only one profile for each person. I also loved the ease of collaboration.
What is your favorite thing about WikiTree?
The one world tree and collaboration without a doubt. I love the RootsSearch tool and the maps feature, although really the more I learn about WikiTree the more I love it. The community is awesome.
If you could improve one thing about WikiTree, what would it be?
My answer would have been the descendants view but then I recently found Topola Genealogy Viewer. WikiTree is full of wonderful people contributing freely to our shared family tree. It makes me enormously proud to be a part of that. I wouldn’t change anything about WikiTree. Together we can do anything.
What is an example of how WikiTree has helped you with your genealogy?
WikiTree has helped me immensely in my research. The collaboration is unbeatable and so valuable. It’s also a great way to organize my research and I love the way you can add anything to the bio and personalize it. I also love that you can link to any other WikiTree profile in the bio, even if they are unrelated. It helps to tell a much fuller story about a person’s life since they all lived at the same time in the same places – their lives would have interacted. I’m more interested in going sideways in my branches rather than straight up. I love connecting branches.
Any tips for someone just starting out on WikiTree?
Don’t be shy to ask questions. Your greeters are a great place to start, they can point you in the right direction. You have to have a familysearch.org account, that’s essential. Take your time, accuracy is key. Start with learning how to source, add them to your profiles and when you’ve added everything that you can from familysearch post your question to G2G and link your ancestor’s profile so that others can see who you’re taking about and what you’ve got. When you’ve been on WikiTree for a while and decide that you’re seriously interested in taking your research to the next level find a project that specializes in what you’re interested in, WikiTree has loads of great projects from bio building, to data doctors, greeters, location based projects and one name studies… there are so many I couldn’t remember them all.
