Tell us about a brick wall you were able to break down.
When starting with genealogy, my Italian grandmother told me that a sister and a brother of her father, Antonio D'Alessandro, migrated to Canada. I found this interesting and soon started to search for them. But I didn't find them. Once in a while I searched again, unsuccessfully. Last year I printed two family trees for my grandmother's 90th birthday, to show her what got me distracted every holiday. But those Canadian relatives were still missing! I wrote to the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 and they easily found some very helpful records, that allowed me to proceed on my own. I found the husband of my great-grandaunt and all nine children of my great-granduncle. I was lucky and found a recent obituary with photograph, that allowed me to find and contact descendants on Social Media. This was such a nice experience and my grandmother was so happy to see photographs of her aunt and uncle for the first time!
What are some of your interests outside of genealogy?
My other big hobby is Live Action Role-Playing, for which I'm sewing fantasy and historical clothes. I sew clothes and made accessory for Vikings, Late Middle Ages, Landsknechts in early Renaissance, and I even sewed a Belle Epoque dress after a photograph of my great-great-grandmother Dorothea Luise Lautensack from about 1895.
I also love baking and I'm collecting books and film replicas, especially of the Harry Potter films.
How long have you been on WikiTree and what do you spend the most time doing?
I registered in 2018 and got active in 2019. I spend the most time adding profiles from my research or working for the projects. I also enjoy the annual Challenges such as Clean-a-Thon, where I help to improve Italian profiles.
For the Germany Project, I proof read all translated German help pages. We are nearly finished to translate them all. Hopefully this will help to get more German genealogists to participate on WikiTree.
I'm the new Team Leader of the Italy Location Categories, which is part of the Italy Project. My vision of the future is to have categories for all towns of Italy and to have added geographical categories to all existing Italian profiles. We will be looking for volunteers.
What brought you to WikiTree?
I was looking for a free, non-commercial project, where I could share my research. WikiTree seemed to be more accurate than other projects and I very much liked the idea of one big single tree without duplicates. This was exactly what I was looking for!
What is your favorite thing about WikiTree?
The community is awesome, it is so great to work together with others, to help others and get help if needed. And I found many relatives on and through WikiTree: two new relatives with whom I had a lot of lovely and interesting exchange and even a cousin of my father whom I previously unsuccessfully tried to contact on Social Media. The cousin bait really works!
If you could improve one thing about WikiTree, what would it be?
It would be great to have more European genealogists on WikiTree, without losing the important collaboration.
What is an example of how WikiTree has helped you with your genealogy?
I'm still adding my researched relatives to WikiTree. This also helps my own research, as I use the opportunity to do a little more research on married-in women for which I often didn't research their birth and death records yet - Clean up problems, merge duplicates in my own database and solve questions.
When uploading a Gedcom of my Swiss relatives, I unexpectedly got a match. Turned out, there were two families in my distant tree who migrated to Kansas around 1892. For one family this was noted in Switzerland, but the other just disappeared. I was lucky and these families are well documented on Find A Grave, which led to 400 more relatives in my database in just three weeks! Of course I will yet need to source them and add them to WikiTree, but this raised my awareness that relatives who just disappear from record, could turn up overseas.
Any tips for someone just starting out on WikiTree?
WikiTree has quite a learning curve, so don't worry and take your time to explore the features and find out how it works best for you. WikiTree has lots of great help pages on nearly every topic, not only in English but also in some other languages.
