Can I use a On-Name-Study Project to collect Heads of lines?

Question

I have a long list of U.S. Rowley immigrants that have no ties back to their home country and I'm sure each of the other researchers from other countries has a head of their line they haven't been able to get past. I would like to identify each of these lines in some way in the Rowley etc. Name Study. What is a practical way to do this? This could allow me to compare Y-DNA as it becomes available for each line or branch. Some of the branches I've checked, like William Henry, have links back to Henry, but aren't proven. The list [Rowley-8, Rowley-2359, Rowley-38, Rowley-1657] took an hour to compose, comparing my database with WikiTree. Once the Heads are identified, it would be nice to keep track of them and have their DNA together to study. ( I obviously could not add more than one name on the WikiTree ID/URL level, so I picked the most prominent one.)

Answer 1

You could make a subcategory, such as

[[Category:End of Line, Rowley Name Study]]

or whatever you want to call it, and put it on each Head.  Then, if you did extend the line further through research, you take this category off Joe Bloggs Junior and put it on Joe Bloggs Senior.

The first time you put it on a profile, it will be red.  You click on it, and on the page it takes you to, type [[Category:Rowley Name Study]] and save.

Take a look at my Haywood Name Study's category page to see how it looks:
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Haywood_Name_Study

Comments

Haywood is a great example. thank you. Now for hard question. Is there any way to add a comment along with each name on the 2nd half where the list of names is?

---

Ok, I added [[Category:Head of Line, Rowley Name Study]] to both Rowley-5 and Rowley-38. In neither case did it come up red and let me go to another page to enter the Rowley Name Study. Instead I got an error on the top of the page that the category was unknown and should I save it anyway? I said yes. Was that was supposed to be what happened? And what do I need to do so that it will come up on the project page?

---

Hi.  You need to name your category

[[Category:Head of Line, Rowley Name Study]]

not just [[Category:Head of Line]]

I think that may be why it didn't come up red and is why you got an error banner at the top of the page - because it looked like a category (that wasn't created yet and therefore not in the list) rather than a subcategory.

You also should not put it on profiles which are PPP without discussion with the project first.

I could not find your category on Rowley-5.

---

No, sorry, you cannot put a comment on each profile, especially on the category page.  If you want to do comments, you will have to create a special freespace page and link it.

---

To put your profiles on the project page, you will have to link them individually, such as [[Rowley-38|Thomas Rowley]].  A category will only put them on the category page.  Or you could do the freespace page mentioned above and link it to the project page.

---

I don't think adding categories requires "communicate first" even on PPP profiles.  It's not a significant change.

---

*shrugs*

Maybe I just prefer to err on the side of paranoia...