Week End Chat (Jan 8-10, 2016) - ALL MEMBERS INVITED!!!

Question

This is an ongoing "Chat" post that can be added to throughout the weekend.  All members of WikiTree are encouraged to join in, especially first-timers!

 

Do you have any ideas to share?

 

Broken any New Year Resolutions Yet????

 

Have you witnessed any famous events?

 

Have you broken through any brickwalls through WikiTree?

New people, say Hello and introduce yourself!

Have you learned anything new or uncovered any techniques to improve profiles more easily?

G2G Pilots, Mentors, and Leaders... any fresh Tips for us?

Any special plans?

Any subject you want to chat about...

* Fads/hobbies when you were 18?

* What do you do other than Wikitree?

* Heard a funny one?

* Do you do anything to help people or animals that are less fortunate?

* Say something! (You know you want to!):D 

Answer 1

Hi Gang

Everyone should be back in the saddle after the holiday season. Hopefully, it was a pleasant time for all.

I've noticed a number of new members introducing themselves lately. I hope they will participate in our weekly chats.

Kudos to the Wikitree team for all the nice upgrades recently.

 

I got a new camera from Santa so Vincent, you can expect lots of new photos once I figure out how to use it (I think I can take pictures of Martians mooning us with it!).

 

What's new with everyone?

 

 

Comments

Wouldn't that be "Martianed"?  :D

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I got a new camera too. Is that what the little green spot was? A martian? I thought the cheese on the moon was just getting a little moldy.

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You'll have to post some pics with your new camera!

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Moon pie and an RC Cola.....yum...   :)

Answer 2

Hi Everyone -- Welcome to all the New Members - Hope you are enjoying the site.

Refresher Course - Lots of activity here recently --

Pre-1700 Profiles – Tips/Tricks Suggestions

The pre-1700 is a little tricky and takes some work.  As you know, the main objective is only one profile per person – with best possible [http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Sources sources]. see Source Style Guide. For help with numbered references, see Footnotes.
 

A.  BEFORE CREATING OR EDITING PRE-1700 PROFILES, THE PROJECT INFO NEEDS TO BE IDENTIFIED AND IN PLACE

 

B.  SEARCH FOR DUPLICATES (Many exist already – many w/dups date/spelling discrepancies, etc.)

Upper RH menu – find, then people search http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:SearchPerson

1. Name Specific – sort by birth (show merging options) – check for dups
2. Surname Specific – Search last name only, sort by birth – check for dups
3. Propose a merge on all dups to “lowest number w/correct spelling of Last Name
4. Pre-Merge – Post name variations and discrepancies on the “Merge into” profile; add source information
5. In merge notes “reference the profile ID containing the pre-merge info.

C.  CONTACT PROJECT/PROFILE MANAGER(S) BEFORE EDITING (Profile Posts/Trusted List Request)

 

D.  FINAL PROFILE CLEANUP – CONTAINS PROJECT INFO; EXPANDED BIO; SOURCES, ETC.

 

On Pre-1700 profiles – each profile must be assigned  To a Project.  Each Project usually has a list of specific guidelines to adhere to.  If you can’t determine the project from available information, then it needs a G2G Request so it can be “Assigned  to a project”.  If “there is none and you are the profile manager” you are good to go (but it still needs to adhere to basic pre-1700 Guidelines Best Practice and Sourcing..

The items that need to be answered with a source:--- Birth; Marriage; Death; Children
WikiTree is a “Free” community.  Ancestory Trees and other Public Member Paid Sites are not a viable “Source” and need to be changed.   If you have an Ancestry account, please access and find the “actual source” for these three items  and insert this under your reference area or within the Bio area – also any birth records for .children, etc.

  If you don’t have ancestry, search for clues.elsewhere. and include on the Bio and/or references. (Perhaps a “Research” or “Discrepancy” section)

In a nutshell:
(1) Join the appropriate Project   

(2) Become familiar with the Project’s requirements and goals, determine locations and categories, etc. http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:England
http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:United_Kingdom#Goals Goals]

(3) Write up your Bio and Include your sources, add project info, templates, etc.  Conform other members of the family to the project’s requirements..

You can read about the [http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project_FAQ Project FQS] here and follow the links to other subjects. Project searches can be found on the upper RH menu “Find” “Projects”
 

A bit long - thanks for reading.

Regards, Sandy

Comments

Super advice Sandy...thank you!

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Thanks Sandy ,

You  really should post this somewhere, and than maybe the greeters or mentors could add a link to this in the welcoming messages :)

Answer 3

It's a little chilly here in Nederland so I think I'm gonna head south for a while and enjoy a bit of warmer weather in Spain.  I hope to spread the word for Wikitree in the small town where I'll be.  It has been a small town for several hundred years and is actually a remnant of a nearby village of the Greeks from 500 BC.  There are 16 original families so it can be reckoned that most of the locals are somehow related to one another.  I'll give an update on how that works out in a few weeks.  I should also add that almost everyone there has a tale of a long ago relative that immigrated to America.  We even had one visit my mother-in-law a few years back and claimed she was related to her grandfather, too bad there wasn't the Wikitree back then.  :(

Comments

Man...I'm jealous!

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It's pretty nice down there with all the old stuff and what not but there's also some behind the times things like electricity wires on poles (in some places) and you almost of necessity need an automobile.  But it is indeed much warmer, yihaa!!

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Here in Alabama, there are wires on poles and there is absolutely no "almost" about needing a car, plus it's not even all that warm.  8 years ago, when I moved here, I thought that the south would be warm ... WRONG!!!  The only real difference between here and Virginia (and even New York) is that there is no snow to speak of and what little there is melts the same day, but the price we pay is that summers are much hotter than farther north.

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Look at the bright side, you probably don't have any mice (the rattlesnakes keep them under control).  :D

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That's what you think!!!  A year and a half ago, it cost nearly $5,000 to repair the damage done to my car's wiring and electronics from the rodents that nested in the engine compartment.  The shop said mice were the most likely ones, with possibility of squirrels or chipmunks as alternate culprits.

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$5,000?  Makes me wish I were a mechanic, your mechanic.  :D

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Oh, Vincent, it was a major headache for my mechanic.  It's a foreign car, so parts had to come from the dealer - that's who made lottsa big bucks on this, not my mechanic!  There were also several iterations of the repair process.  Each time they thought they were through, a week or a month later, something else would go bad and it turned out to be from chewed wires that had not been found earlier.  The biggest item was some thingy-dingy that's the main computer control box for the whole car.  That alone cost $1300 and had to come from the dealer, plus after it was installed the car had to be towed to the dealer (the closest dealer is 30 miles away) to be programmed before the car could run at all.

I was very fortunate - this whole thing turned out to be covered by my insurance and the adjuster was wonderful.  From the start, he expected that there would be more things turning up later - each time my mechanic called him, he just said fine, go ahead and do it, and they paid.  One of the after-things was that I needed a new radio and they didn't make the same radio any more (the car is 13 years old).  I didn't need anything fancy, but the adjuster said I'm entitled to one of similar quality as the original, so I now have this fancy shmancy thing that I can't even figure out how to work.  It was in some kind of demo mode and cycled through all the different things it can do over and over but I couldn't make it actually stay as an FM radio.  Also, did you ever hear of a car radio that has a remote control???????

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Oo I would love to go to a warmer place , so jealous here as well :P

Survived bicycling from and to school with our seven year old this week , people were ice skating on the streets and sidewalks in some parts of Holland so it was quite chilly indeed ;) 

 

 

And Gaile that really sounds bad , in the Netherlands we have Steenmarters (Stone Martens ?) demolishing many cars and sometimes houses as well , they live in the cavety walls and are running around between the ceilings and upper floors, so a major disaster if  they pick your house to live in, every night we can hear and see them running , playing and fighting in our street, they are protected animals here , so nothing we can do about them ....

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The parts had to come from the dealer?  You mean he couldn't produce these parts himself?  :D

Where else do you get parts?

I had a BMW in the 80s.  One day a little red light came on indicating a problem with the electrical system.  I opened the hood and removed the brushes from the side of the alternator for an inspection.  They were worn and needed replacing.  I didn't feel like bothering with that so I took the car to the dealer.  He said I needed a new alternator for $600.  I said "No, I only need brushes (which are about the size of a Zippo lighter and snap on the side of the alternator).  He told me they don't "rebuild" alternators, yet this is how good automobiles are designed to be able to replace parts that are easily worn out and not the whole alternator.  In other words, he was suggesting that if a light bulb burns out in a million dollar chandelier you wouldn't replace the light bulb, no sir, you'll need a whole new chandelier.  I didn't leave my car there.  I found a parts dealer myself and replaced the brushes very easily in about 2 minutes for $10.

A few years later with the same auto I had a problem with the switch for the starter.  I went back to that hated dealership and again was told it would be $600 for this time an ignition switch (something about BMWs and Tampa, Florida and $600).  I went to a hardware store and for a dollar I bought a doorbell and put it up under my steering wheel with the ignition wire connected).  That worked fine and saved me $599.  Although one time I do remember jumping in my car and forgetting to unlock my steering wheel, started the car and after going a bit and needing to turn with a locked steering wheel could have possibly been a problem, (but thankfully wasn't).  :)

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Vincent, sweetie pie, I don't know how to break this news to you - it ain't the 80's no more!!!  Cars have computers that control everything in them now.  It's a whole new layer of "middleman" between the driver and the mechanical parts.  The thingy-dingy that died did so as the result of the short from the chewed wires.  From what I know about computers, the damage was probably isolated to a single chip or a single circuit board inside the thingy-dingy, but you can't fashion replacement parts from other stuff.  The chips hold software and the circuit boards hold chips and pathways between them - you can't find equivalents to that stuff in the inner workings of a doorbell.  The dealers have us over a barrel now.

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Like I said, Love to have you as a customer!  :D

Probably you drive a Rolls Royce, an Aston-Martin or a Tesla, if that's the case, I'm likely running my mouth without knowing what these things cost.  My practice has been to take a car that was well-kept but a couple of years old and drive it until it needs a big repair and then just junk it for scrap or sell it for anything I could get.  Over here anything more than 5 years old is almost worthless in value.  You can write off a loan against income so everyone with any kind of decent income makes use of the tax advantage of having a shiney new one.  :)

Answer 4

I chipped a brick wall, yesterday, through a contact from Findagrave, who told me my great great great grandmother remarried. I found her death certificate under the new name which listed her parents (mother with no maiden name). Then I found a synopsis of the new husbands civil war pension, that listed her by maiden name. Of course it's only a chip, because now I can't find anything about her father's parents, except an Ancestry tree. It's early, I may yet ferret it out. I need to go to Pennsylvania. Is it springtime yet? (wishful thinking)

Comments

Extra ice cream & pie for you!!!!!!!

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Crossing the Delaware in the winter?

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They have bridges now. I don't have to row anymore. I did sit on an anthill at Washington Crossing, bout the summer of '62. I was protesting! Mom, Dad, I do not want to go into one more historic museum.

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I bet the ants in that anthill protested, too - they couldn't have been too happy about being sat upon ... that must have made you appreciate the value of going into historic museums!

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I also broke through a brick wall this weekend -- almost by accident! While looking for sources to verify that the two profiles in a proposed merge were really the same person, I stumbled upon a batch of records that gave me a solid basis for assigning a LNAB to one of my "LNAB Unknown" 4G grandmothers. (I also found parents for her, plus at least one set of probable grandparents, but I haven't added them yet.)

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Most Excellent Ellen!

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I had something this afternoon that was beyond brick wall - I had considered it more like lost cause, after having given up nearly a year ago.  Today, someone went in to a profile in my "adopted" gedcom, entered a birth date guess, and added the DateGuess template, which resulted in the profile's privacy instantly turning red.  I had planned to give it one more try before abandoning it, so I was not happy to find that I'll now have to remove that date guess before I can orphan it.

Anne came to the rescue - she found several records, including the real birth date and the death date!!!  Ain't she the greatest???????

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Thank you Gaile

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Hurray for Anne!

Answer 5

Thank you Doug for starting this chat this weekend. Some of you folks may notice that I am not on here as much anymore and there are many reasons for that, not the least of which is my father was rushed to the hospital the week before Christmas. He is back home now and doing better but not totally out of the woods yet. They discovered a heart problem and he has to see a doctor for that and he is scheduled for another chest x-ray next month and what happens next will depend on the results of those visits. In the meantime we are all spending more time keeping an eye on him. Other than that we did finally get some snow here in Northeast Ohio but it is melting now with the very warm winter we are having. It is going to get cold this weekend (Sunday) but even lake Erie has a lot less ice on it than last year, less that 1% compared to 5.4% a year ago.

Comments

Prayers your way Dale...my wife is going through major health issues with her parents now, as well.

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Best of health to everyone!

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All my good wishes....

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Best wishes for your father, Dale.

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I hope your father is better soon.

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Thank you all for the well wishes for my father. I will relay them to him tomorrow afternoon when we are going to have a "Christmas" celebration after lunch.  I was checking the relationship, just for fun, and noticed that except for Chris Burrow all those that replied so far are connected to me thru him, so that will mean that a lot of relatives he never met are rooting for him.

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 Best wishes for everyone from Holland as well ! 

Answer 6

Fridays seem to come round pretty quick and its another Weekend chat. as for new year resolutions, I don't usually do them, but am trying to more "focused"  and try not to have unfinished projects and the like. But then life happens doesn't it. I  have plenty to keep me busy, but its nice to chill out now and again...... watch TV with a beer or cider.

Wikitree has had a few additions over the week including some distant relatives in the Barker family in Kirkby Stephen, Westmorland, England, George Morphet and Mabel (Barker) Morphet. This is from something I vaguely remembered when I was around age 12, in 1965. It was a major topic of conversation with relatives at the time. I chatted with my Dad about it and I had recalled things more or less correctly.

 It seems Mabel met an unfortunate end at the hands of her husband. George. My uncle Albert Tyson was a police officer at the time and had given us his recollections of this happening in the past. more research is needed - I am sure it made the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald at the time. there are not many relatives left  to ask these days.

I also find that the Barker family is somewhat complicated with several Christopher Barkers and one being married 3 times. That will keep me busy(amused).

Have a good weekend everyone.

PS The Cumberland & Westmorland Herald is one of the few newspapers published as a broadsheet as opposed to tabloid format.and is an excellent local newspaper. My family subscribes so my Dad keeps in touch with "home"

Comments

Sounds like you're having fun Chris and indeed the repeated names and more than one marriages for sure keep us busy, but well if you love the puzzles and most of us do I guess, it's great to try and solve them :)

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Have had some help in sorting out the Barkers, thanks to my entry on Wikitree.....

Answer 7

Hi All,

I'm working on a brick wall of my own trying to find Mary Tracey somewhere in Ohio. I'm going to get her daughter's obit and see if Mary is listed in it. More money down the genealogy hole.

Betty

Comments

Are you safe in Oregon from those people that are in the news?

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Everyone is safe from the militia in Oregon. They merely want to let people know that the United States Government shouldn't own so much of Oregon's land and charge grazing fees to the owners of the land. By the people is becoming an antiquated notion.

Betty

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We have that same problem here, the government wants me to pay to park my own auto in my own street.  Just ain't fair is it?  :D

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Indeed. Time to get back to when people were the government. I'll bet I'd never charge myself to park on my own street.

 

Betty

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I did have the choice to not park in the street.  But I did, I do and I pay.  :)

Answer 8

Happy Weekend! I hope to work on my DNA matches- maybe get a little closer on some of my Southern USA Brickwalls! :)

Also hope to work on a couple profiles on WikiTree! I love WikiTree as I receive more email/queries from profiles I manage here than any other venue where I have ancestors and messages posted. 

The only thing that drives me absolute nuts though are profiles I manage showing up as matches on My Heritage!!! NO, I am not going to spend time confirming my own work!!!! I spend my few precious minutes researching! I also do not like merging profiles on WikiTree multiple times. There should be a way to STOP a possible existing profile when it is uploaded from a GEDCOM. I am always concerned I will lose the documentation that goes with the profile, plus it is time consuming and takes away from the little time I have for research. Anyone else have these "issues"? I say we turn them into opportunities to improve the process! WHO can write a rule to scan a gedcom prior to the actual upload to the system, then a rule to select the profiles which potentially already exist on WikiTree, then another rule to send these possible profile matches back to the GEDCOM owner  with the task to  "review each of these profiles and manually enter if they are not existing profiles".

Hmm, Too many rules, right? 

This little character looks like he has the smarts to create all the rules!

Oh Well, Happy Working in the Tree this Weekend!

 

 

Comments

Sounds good to me!   :)

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I ignore most of my "Smart Matches" and email from MyHeritage, including the messages offering me the info from a WikiTree profile that I created. When I see that someone has created a Smart Match with a profile for a reasonably close relative, I sometimes am inspired to look them up so I can contact a new-found cousin, but more often than not I find that it's somebody who has a family tree of 122,000 people (or thereabouts), making me conclude that we probably are completely unrelated. That feature has been a disappointment.

Answer 9

First time I joined this chat my youngest son is going to the U.S on the 18th January it's his first visit he is going to New York and Los Vegas. Any amazing places any one can recommend he visit? Its our summer in Australia and really hot this year, I told him to rug up ( even though he is 31 that's what Mums do:) but not sure if the weather is as it should be this time of the year in America it seems when I see your weather it's a lot warmer then usual.

Comments

For Vegas: I can never forget standing on Hoover (Boulder) Dam and looking down at how far it was to the bottom.  Also the Grand Canyon is so near he should see that while he is that close, it is so much bigger (and deeper) than you could imagine, like something from another planet.  :)

For New York just being there is pretty cool.  He'll see things he's seen in a thousand movies and understand the setting.  I liked going to the top of the Empire State Building and when you get off the elevator (which is very old and rickety), you can see down through the gap 100+ floors.  Wow!

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Thanks Vincent it all sounds wonderful I will let him know

Answer 10

Hi All,

I am very excited that my sister and my 1st cousin have come to WikiTree.

They are both great family historians and I am so happy to have them here.

Comments

Did you have hog jowls and black-eyed peas for New Year's?  :D

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I had Hoppin' Johns. They were delicious. Me hubby is a Yank so he doesn't get much Southern food. He likes the Hoppin' Johns but not grits. His loss.

Betty

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I needed to look up Hoppin' Johns in Wikipedia.  South Carolina is a bit north and east of where I'm from (which is seen as a bit suspicious I should add - :D   )

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Actually, we had fried chicken, smothered cabbage, black eyed peas and cornbread. Yum Yum!!!

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That sounds great, it's been ages since I've had a real piece of fresh hot cornbread with butter.