We had a very nice second month building biographies. As a group we built 60 new biographies (three times as many as last month.) Great job. Thank you all.
If you didn't get a hint from the question title. This month we're going to feature surnames that begin with the letter "A". (Andersons, Adams etc.) These can be from anywhere across WikiTree, not just your own watchlist. Offer some random kindness and deck out a profile for someone. Or improve an orphan somewhere. Places to look for likely candidates: America's founding fathers and "needs narrative/bio". These will have minimum sourcing but will need further research to create good biographies.
See the first month's thread for how to participate, and last month's thread
Here are the details:
It is easy to get in a groove creating profiles, tracing ancestries, adding sources, and making connections on WikiTree, and in that groove, forget to build a profile to its fullest. Many profiles on WikiTree, even from our best members, have sources but no substance-what do those sources tell us? What has your research revealed? Who was this person? That's what the biography section is for and this Biography Builders challenge is a personal growth challenge to encourage members to create biographies for the profiles they work on, not just find connections and sources.
Each month, we'll set a theme to the challenge, asking participants to create biographies for different people in their family tree or from certain projects and categories.
Those who participate can challenge themselves to do a little more on each profile by working through our checklist of what makes a profile "complete." We know no person will ever be completely researched, and so no profile will ever be completely done, but there are certain points in building a profile where you hit logical stopping points and can "call it" at least for awhile. Each time you do this, you can share that profile in that month's thread as an example for the community as well as have a chance to get thoughtful feedback on other things that might make nice additions.
Each time you hit a milestone in your participation you'll get a template for your profile to show others you've been making WikiTree a better place to share family history. The first template is placed when you've completed 10 profiles for Bio-Builder challenges. The numbers are cumulative, so it could be the first month you participate that you hit that mark, or it could be 5 months later. It's up to you. Just number your profiles as you go and put them in the Builders thread.
Here's our ideas for what to put on your profile:
Data Section:
birth date/place
names of parents
marriage date/place and spouse name
death date/place
Biography Section
- Written sentences stating the facts above, adding inline sources to each fact.
- As a general rule, biographies should be in your own words. Paraphrase and rewrite, don't copy/paste.
- Baptism, burial, military, and other life events with inline sources.
- Something to "humanize" the person, such as career or avocation with sources.
- List of children with at least one pertinent fact.
- Explanatory remarks, if needed (i.e. Disputed persons sections, Research Notes, Disambiguation, whatever needs extra explaining).
- Photos or pictures, background. Not a must, but nice (If you own the copyright or if they are in the public domain).
- Categories/Project templates.
- Connection to the Global Tree.
- Search and initiate/complete merges with duplicates
- Links to persons and events, perhaps from Wikipedia.
- Historical context as related to the person's life.
- Sources, Sources, Sources, cited inline.
Places you might look for information: Family Search; Find-a-grave; Gengophers.com; google search for the person and their spouse together; look for a genealogy on the family; check for a town or county history to see if the person is mentioned; from the profile ID drop down menu use "Research"; if you have subscriptions to pay sites check those; check for printed ancient town records in the place where the subject lived. Of course if they are related to you, you may have even better information, like birth, death, probate, land, bible records etc.
Have questions? Post them here as a comment.
This challenge will run until mid September.
