Hello WikiTreers!
Week 38 of the WikiTree Challenge for Melanie McComb has wrapped up. It was a whirlwind week full of collaboration, profile additions, free-space page creations, and incredible discoveries! Team members once again took on the challenge and wow'd us with their activities.
Challenge participants added 119 profiles to her branches. There were 20 direct ancestors and 99 nuclear relatives added to WikiTree. Four of these direct ancestors were beyond Melanie's brick walls and completely new to her! With such difficult record sets to search in, this was amazing!
Altogether, more than 30 members made 1,481 edits to her ancestor profiles. Many did research, while others worked on profile narratives, looked up articles, added categories, and contributed in other ways.
Here are some highlights from our discoveries:
- Patrick Dougherty, Melanie’s 3rd great grand uncle, was an interesting man. He was an “old and highly respected” resident of Emyvale. He came from a family of longevity, with his father living to be 101. Patrick was 93 when he died. He had emigrated from Ireland in 1840. When he first moved to Emyvale it was a vast wilderness, without the usual amenities. When it came time to build a larger church Patrick trekked the three miles through rough terrain repeatedly to a sawmill three miles away and carried the loads of lumber back on his back.
- Thomas Corcoran born 1880 was known to be married to Bridget Duff. Instead of his mother being a Bridget also, she turned out to be proven as Alice Reilly. A really stubborn brick wall down! This should open up an entirely new line for Melanie!
- Eva (Bodnar) Schild was known to have married Abraham Schild before 1890. What wasn’t known was that Abraham’s mother’s maiden name was Scheke! Esther (Scheke) Schild was born about 1840 in Austria. Her son Benjamin was a tailor. Her son Abraham, Melanie’s direct line, was a book binder. Another difficult brick wall broken!!
- Matilda Siegel’s brother Isidor was one of the mysteries on Melanie’s tree. Melanie knew that he migrated from Romania to the United States with his sister Rebecca in 1903. His whereabouts after that were unknown. We had an entire group of people scouring records and dissecting the information about the many Isidors in the area. It turns out he married in 1911, to Clara Rohrlich. Clara was also native of Romania. Isidor and Clara had at least two children, Harry and Bertha, in New York. He was part of the trio that earned the newspaper title "Swindlers Got Fortune By Frauds," which may explain his desire to stay off the grid later.
- Our team put together a lot of Space pages this week! Sometimes we only have one or two. This week we have nine! With the common names making it difficult to tell the records apart, it sometimes came down to which address they lived at, or the lot they lived on. There are also a lot of baptism records listed that should help with future research.
Team Captain: Maddy Hardman
MVP: Paddy Waldron
Top Bounty Hunter: Paddy Waldron
For more information see the challenge scoring explanation and check out the week 38 statistics to see a summary of all contributors.
If you missed the wrap-up LiveCast and want to see Melanie's reaction to our endeavors, you can view it at any time on YouTube.
Quotes:
- “That was my way of giving back (helping others), because I knew you would all do such an amazing job. And this is just the greatest gift you can give anybody!”
- “Now you’ve given me all these stories, and new things to look for...the journey continues, it will never end.”
- “It’s always such a blessing to be able to remember my family. We keep their memories alive by talking about them, and their stories.”
