Thank you to everyone who participated in April's Sourcerers' Challenge. We had two new Sourcerers in April. The April Top Sourcerer was Carolyn Martin with 620 sources logged, the most in any month by one Sourcerer to date. Awesome work, Carolyn! We had a total of 34 Sourcerers in April with 2022 sources added, making our total for 2016 9550 sources, and the total since our challenge's inception 17654 sources. What an incredible crew you all are. Thank you!
Robert Keniston remains the All-Time Top Sourcerer with 3075 sources added during our challenges. What a feat, Robert. Thank you :-)
The sources you all are adding are fantastic. Remember, your sources need to be cited as close to the Chicago Manual of Style or Evidence Explained as you can manage, or they cannot count towards your tally (the pre-formatted citations given on sites like FamilySearch are just fine, too!). That means, if there is a link to the work mentioned, you must include it. If it is a page from a book, the page needs to be included so others can easily see where you found the reference. The more specific, the more useful the source.
We can also do a bit more while adding sources, like clean up the gedcom leftovers or help the formatting from older profiles. Sources are important, but if you can't find them among all the other stuff, they aren't helping as much as they could.
Onto May's challenge:
You only need to answer the post once, and just edit your post to add your new profiles, continuing in a comment on your answer as necessary. Please number your contributions (a number every ten or hundred works just fine). It helps us tally at the end of the month much faster. See last month's challenge for examples.
* All profiles improved must come from the Unsourced categories or be already present on WikiTree and unsourced-you cannot create new profiles and add sources just to up your tally. The hope and goal is to improve the numbers already on WikiTree that need sources. Adding sources will help merges happen, too, which will improve our tree. Showing folks what sources you're using helps newer researchers see just what's available out there for us to access. Another great source of unsourced profiles is to check out orphaned profiles.
* The tally is of profiles improved, not sources added. That said, if you can add a number of sources to a profile, all the better. Maybe we'll switch things up and see how many sources added y'all can do one month.
* If you attempt to add sources to a profile and just cannot find any, please add a note under a section like === Research Notes === giving where you tried to find records and you can sign it with the four tildes (~~~~) so the date is applied as well. Something like "Looked for John in the US Census records for 1900-1940 and couldn't find him on FamilySearch or Ancestry" would be fine. Or, "Searched google for an obituary and didn't find one." That way the next researcher knows where to start.
* If the only source on a profile is "Ancestry tree" or "Geni.com" it can count as unsourced, and you can add better sources to it to count in your tally.
* If you find a match and can merge a profile into an already source profile, that counts, too. You still found a source, plus you eliminated a duplicate. Awesome!
We are now actively in our May Challenge, which will run through May 31st. Ask any questions here in the thread, otherwise, GO!
