EP BTT Wikitree+
Wikitree+ is a powerful tool which allows us to search for profiles in the Wikitree database. It can be found here:
This page has been created to help England Project Members use the Wikitree+ search facility.
When I initially tried to use Wikitree+, I was at a loss as to where to start. Over time, I have found it an increasingly useful tool.
Talking to other members, I have found that I was not alone in struggling with some of the basics, so the instructions below are designed to help members to navigate through the initial stages, before leading them through simple and then more sophisticated queries.
If anyone has questions, finds these notes confusing or has suggestions as to how they can be improved, please contact me.
Contents
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The Basic Sign In
You might find it useful to work through these instructions with 2 tabs open (this page and Wikitree+) or a printout of this page with Wikitree+ open. It is by entering the terms into the search boxes and seeing the results produced that you start to get a feel for how things work. The terms highlighted in black italics can be cut and pasted into the search box.
When signing into Wikitree+, the first step to take on the home page is to click on Suggestions to collapse the menu. (Shown next to the red arrow on the screenshot below).
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The second menu option Search is where we will be focusing. It allows you to interrogate the Wikitree database to find profiles that meet your criteria.
Clicking on Search expands this section to reveal 5 boxes (highlighted on the screenshot by 5 coloured arrows).
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To illustrate how these boxes work, we will start with a simple query through which some important points are highlighted and the basic features of the search section are explained.
In the Text box (3rd arrowed box down, coloured yellow), replace the words 'Ljubljana Trtnik' with your Wikitree ID (eg Whitfield-2424)
Click on the Blue Get Profiles box
A list of profiles will be produced for which you are Profile Manager. (If you are Profile Manager for more than 500 profiles, you will see at the top of the screen "Found: More than 500 profiles ......." and you will need to increase the Max Profiles (4th arrowed box down, coloured pink) by changing this to say 5000 (and if you have a particularly large Watchlist, increase it to 50000. Wikitree+ might be a useful tool for getting your Watchlist below the recommended 5000 maximum!)
The number of profiles generated by this search is unlikely to correspond with the figure you see from your actual Watchlist (as per the dropdown on a Wikitree page). There are several reasons for this:
- Wikitree+ is not searching the live system; you are working with data that is between 3 and 10 days old. A ‘data dump’ is carried out every week in the early hours of Sunday morning UK time. This produces a snapshot of profiles that is typically accessible some time between Monday afternoon and Wednesday and will be unchanged until the following week's data dump is loaded. (In contrast, your Wikitree Watchlist is always accurate as this is from the live system.)
- Your live watchlist include profiles with 7 different privacy levels. Wikitree+ searches do not bring up Unlisted or Private profiles. (Note - this is correct on this specific search but other searches may bring up these profiles; needs further investigatiion Whitfield-2424 08:10, 15 May 2023 (UTC))
Straightforward searches
To get a 'feel' for Wikitree+, it is useful to do a few straightforward searches to understand what is displayed. By starting simply, we see examples of profiles we might want to exclude, and develop an appreciation of the need for more sophisticated search terms. As we progress, we will explain how to tailor searches to give you only the profiles you want to see.
Enter Manchester in the search box and you will see a huge number of profiles containing the word Manchester (eg Manchester as a surname; people who were born, married or died in Manchester, Lancashire, or Manchester, Massachusetts; profiles categorised as Manchester; profiles managed by someone with the surname Manchester etc). Citations within a biography are searched but the rest of the biography is not, if the only place that Manchester appears is in the text of a biography, it will not be found by a Manchester search.
To refine your search, there are special terms you need to use to focus the search on different fields or types of field.
- If you only want to search for the place Manchester, the search term location=Manchester searches for the word Manchester anywhere in a birth, marriage or death field. Note that these searches bring up places called Manchester outside England. We will see how to refine this search later.
- To search for people with a Last Name at Birth of Manchester, enter LastNameAtBirth=Manchester and to search Last Name at Birth, Current Name and the Other Last Names fields enter AllLastNames="Manchester" (This is useful as it brings up all surname variations if a woman married more than once.)
Note that Wikitree+ is not case sensitive; it doesn't matter what case is used. When I use capital letters in this note, it is just to help readability or to highlight elements of a search.
The Basic Principles of Multiple Searches
We can combine 2 or more search terms to produce more specific lists.
- Location=Manchester LastNameAtBirth=Smith
If you enter two search terms in the search box, the system looks for results that meet both the criteria you have entered, so this search produces results for people who were born, married or died in Manchester AND have a Last Name at Birth of Smith.
Further terms can be added to refine the search. Orphan is the term we use to restrict results to orphaned Profiles.
- Location=Manchester LastNameAtBirth=Smith Orphan
(If you are thinking "Wont this also give me people with the name Orphan?", well done! It will, but in practice, this doesn't cause problems.)
It doesn't matter in which order these three criteria are entered; you still get the same result
If you wanted only to find managed profiles (ie excluding orphaned profiles) you change the search 'string' to
- Location=Manchester LastNameAtBirth=Smith NOT Orphan
It is important to put the NOT criteria at the end of the string. (Try not NOT Orphan Location=Manchester LastNameAtBirth=Smith and you'll see what happens)
You can add more than one "NOT" search term, but the "NOT" elements must always be at the end of the string.
In the above search, you will probably see profiles for people born in Manchester, Ontario. If you add NOT Ontario at the end of the string, these profiles will be excluded.
- Location=Manchester LastNameAtBirth=Smith NOT Orphan NOT Ontario
There are several Manchesters around the world. Rather than using multiple NOTs to exlude different location, to search for people who lived in Manchester in England, we can refine our search by including both Manchester and England in the search term.
We can change our search to
- Location="Manchester England"
The quotation marks are important. If we don't wrap up Manchester and England together in quotation marks, the search is for profiles in Manchester AND England profiles. Location=Manchester England is searching on 2 separate criteria (a location of Manchester; and England (in any field) so the search delivers people born in a Manchester anywhere in the world, with the word England in one of the many fields being interrogated, such as (at the time of writing this note) Susie (Snow) England who was born in Manchester, Illinois, United States.
This relatively simple Location="Manchester England" search produces a list of profiles most of which will be for people who were born, married or died in Manchester, Lancashire, England; but some results are probably not what we are looking for. (As an example Thomas Jones is on the list because he was born (and married) in England and died in Manchester, Essex, Massachusetts Bay Colony. The search Location="Manchester England" looks in all 3 location fields for the words Manchester and England; the two words don't need to appear in the same location field.
To get round the fact that the three locations field are all searched with the 'Location' search, we need to be more specific in our search criteria, with an instruction to search each field for "Manchester England". To search the birth location field, our search would read birthlocation="Manchester England" and we extend this principle to search the three location fields separately. However
- birthlocation="Manchester England" marriagelocation="Manchester England" deathlocation="Manchester England"
gives us a list of people who were born, married AND died in Manchester, England so we need to add the term OR between the three different criteria to reveal people who were born, married or died there. The string reads
- birthlocation="Manchester England" OR marriagelocation="Manchester England" OR deathlocation="Manchester England"
If you wanted to exclude places or types of profile from a string of search terms, you have to add NOT at the end of each phrase. For example, if you wanted to exclude orphaned profiles from the search above, you would need to add not to each of the three criteria. The string would read:
- birthlocation="Manchester England" NOT Orphan OR marriagelocation="Manchester England" NOT Orphan OR deathlocation="Manchester England" NOT Orphan
Other Basic Features
There are some other options, not yet covered, that can be useful when you want to work on a list of profiles.
- Sort By (first arrow down, coloured green). The default output for lists is creation date, but you can change this in the drop down box. The terms are self explanatory.
- Page Size (second arrow down, coloured blue) The default is 10 profiles per page.
- Format (fifth arrow down, coloured red) The default is Html (ie on screen display).
- 'Excel' outputs can be particularly useful as you see more output fields than you see on screen (eg marriages). This can help if you want to sort or do more detailed analysis on a list of profiles. Note that the download to Excel will only be the first page of what you can see on your screen, although if you set Page Size to 'Maximal' you will get 20,000 profiles on your spreadsheet.
- 'Separated Values' allows you to download 100,000 profiles, but you will then need to convert the output to eg Excel.
Tips and Magic Words
'Location Table' Searches
An facility has been built into Wikitree’s system that picks up a greater number of Lancashire profiles. Some additional poorly-formatted profiles are picked up in a ‘Location Table’ meaning that eg ‘Lancashire, UK’ is recognised as being ‘Lancashire, England’ even though England doesn’t appear in the location field.
The search query that picks up this wider range of locations for a birth is
- birthcountry=England birthregion=Lancashire
If this is extended to marriages and deaths, the search term reads:
- birthcountry=England birthregion=Lancashire or deathcountry=England deathregion=Lancashire or marriagecountry=England marriageregion=Lancashire
This is the search that is used in the weekly statistics for each county.
Profiles that have been identified as eg born in England, but for which a county has not been identified, can be found using the search term
- birthcountry=England birthregion=UnknownRegion
These profiles are a combination of poorly-formatted location fields and profiles where the location is simply "England"
"Privacy"
If you only want your search to include profiles you can edit, use the search term Privacy=Open
“Created by” and recent amendments
You may come across family where the profiles are all unsourced; or where the locations have been poorly formatted. This is often an indicator of a profile manager who has consistently created profiles with the same common issue that needs correcting. To identify other profiles created by the same manager (even if they’ve subsequently been orphaned), the search term is the equivalent of
- Created=Creator_Whitfield-2424 (the last element being the Profile ID of the person you want to search)
To find profiles you (or another Profile Manager) have amended in the last 31 days, use
- changesmonth=Whitfield-2424 (the last element being the Profile ID of the person whose activity you want to review)
For profiles created this year, you can use the term
- created=created_2024
(This can be adapted for other years)
Searches by date or period of time
There are various terms that can be used to narrow a search down to specific dates or time periods. Examples of the terms are given below, but the terms can be amended for other dates and periods, as you would expect.
- Dates=19cen people born in the 19th century
- Dates=B1901 people born in 1901
- Dates=D1901 people who died in 1901
- Dates=1850s people alive in the 1850s
To search for people born in the 1840s eg after 1841, search terms can be combined
- Dates=1840s not Dates=1830s not Dates=B1840 not Dates=B1841
To search for people born in the 1840s or 1850s
- Dates="1840s 1850s" not Dates=1830s
No birth or death date
- Dates=B0 profiles without a birth date
- Dates=D0 profiles without a death date
For more complicated date searches see Complex Queries below
Category and Template Searches
To search for profiles in a category the search term CategoryFull. A CategoryFull search will reveal all profiles in a category name, but note that anything that is not a letter or number (ie a symbol or a space) is represented by an underscore; so searching for the category “Manchester, Lancashire” would require the search term
- CategoryFull="Manchester__Lancashire" with two underscores
And the category “St Elphin's Church, Warrington, Lancashire” would require the search term
- “CategoryFull=St_Elphin_s_Church__Warrington__Lancashire”
Alternatively, CategoryWord can be used to pick up a word in a category name:
- CategoryWord="Elphin"
picks up profiles in categories containing the word Elphin
- CategoryWord="Elphin" CategoryWord="Warrington"
requires both Elphin and Warrington in the category names in the profile and will pick up profiles categorised as “St Elphin's Church, Warrington, Lancashire”
Templates can be searched using the search term TemplateText eg
- TemplateText="St Helens, Lancashire One Place Study"
Other Magic Words
The Wikitree Plus Help Page – Search section contains a table showing various search terms that you might find useful.
Complex Queries
These are not for the faint-hearted! They are 'SQL' queries that are more complex than the 'Magic Word' queries used above. It is important to put the 'Magic Word' elements at the start of a search to narrow down the section of the database that the SQL query is then going to interrogate. The required order is 'Magic Word'; SQL; then any 'not' conditions. To exclude an SQL term, the 'not' element, is part of the SQL string (see Separating out Unknown County profiles for an example).
Marriage Searches
The Help Page gives ways of searching for birth and death dates but there is no equivalent search term for marriages. There is a way of searching for marriage by date.
To find marriages in Lancashire that took place on 25 December 1901, the search term is
- MarriageRegion="Lancashire" sql="([Marriage].[Marriage Date].AsString Like '19011225')"
Numbers can be replaced with a ‘wild card’ asterisk to expand the selection. For example, to find all Lancashire marriages that took place in December 1901, the search term is
- MarriageRegion="Lancashire" sql="([Marriage].[Marriage Date].AsString Like '190112**')"
Between 2 dates, the search term is
- sql="([Marriage].[Marriage Date] in 14991231..19731231)"
Multiple marriages can distort some queries (there is only one field for the marriage location in the database but for multiple marriages, this field contains several locations, which mades the logic particularly challenging). These search terms allow us to filter marriage searches by the number of marriages:
- sql="([Marriage].[Marriage Location].LineCount =1)" returns the profiles with one marriage.
- sql="([Marriage].[Marriage Location].LineCount > 3)" returns the profiles with more than 3 marriages.
This query identifies a profile with a marriage in Cheshire, one of multiple marriages, which is "England Unknown County" but the location contains more than "England" or "England, United Kingdom"
- female open Marriagecountry=England Marriageregion=unknownregion marriagelocation=cheshire sql="([Marriage].[Marriage Location FTS].AsString like '*?England*') And ([Marriage].[Marriage Region FTS].AsString = 'UnknownRegion')"
Identifying Profiles with possible missing Married Names
This query picks up women who have married but whose Current Last Name is the same as their Last Name at Birth. This may be correct if their husband had the same name as them; but in many instances, the Current Last Name can be amended to their married name.
- Gender=female sql="(([Default].[Last Name at Birth].AsString =[Default].[Current Last Name]) AND ([Marriage].[Marriage Location].LineCount > 0))"
Searching before and after dates
Another SQL enables us to search profiles on, after, or between specific dates. Please note that if the dataset on which you are searching is over 200,000 profiles the search puts too much strain on the server and won’t work.
This can be useful for looking at whether or not a ‘post 1974’ county has been used before the county came into existence on, in this case, 1 April 1974. The search term for Greater Manchester Births pre-1 April 1974 is
- birthRegion="Greater Manchester" sql="[Birth Date] < 19740401"
(If you were doing ongoing maintenance on this group, you would possibly include ‘open’ as a search term to exclude Public Profiles.)
To select profiles between a minimum and maximum date (To illustrate the example below is to find people born between 15 December 1865 and 16 November 1866)
- 1860s birthRegion="Lancashire" sql="[Birth Date num] in 18651215..18661116"
Note that in this example, there is a requirement to add 1860s in the query (i.e. people alive in the 1860s) as
- birthRegion="Lancashire"
creates a data set of over 200,000
Searching for Locations with 2 words
A location seach of eg
- deathlocation="West Sussex"
not only brings up "West Sussex" profiles but also gives me profiles with a death occurring in eg West Firle, Sussex and West Chiltington, Sussex. This search string will show only profiles with a death occuring in West Sussex.
- deathlocation="West Sussex" sql="[Default].[Death Location].AsString like '*West Sussex*'"
This formula works for birth locations by substituting 'death' for birth, but for marriages, use the following formula.
- marriagelocation="West Sussex" sql="([Marriage].[Marriage Location].AsString like '*West Sussex*')"
Searching for older (or newer) profiles
To search by creation date, the following formula can be used. The example below shows Warrington, Lancashire profiles created on or in 2016.
- Warrington Lancashire sql="([Bio].[Created Year].AsNumber <=2016)"
Separating out 'Unknown County' profiles
Unknown County profiles could be simply 'England' in the location field; or there could be something in the location field that is poorly formatted (and therefore easier to allocate to a county). The searches below are for people who died in Lancashire, but the birth location is England, Unknown County.
This search identifies the profiles with more than 'England' in the birth field
- open deathregion=Lancashire deathcountry=England birthcountry=England birthregion=unknownregion sql="not([Default].[Birth Location].AsString = 'England')"
Work in progress
Using ? as a Wild card
- female orphan England deathlocation="Cheshire" sql="[Default].[Death Location].AsString like '*?Cheshire*'"
Another example
- open birthcountry=England birthregion=unknownregion sql="[Default].[Birth Location].AsString like '*?shire*'" not yorkshire
There are now two other queries to find profiles based on creation date or the date of the last amendment (to be better integrated into this page)
sql="([Bio].[Created Date].AsNumber > 20240701)" Returns profiles that were created after certain date.
sql="([Bio].[LastEdit Date].AsNumber In 20240601..20240701)" Returns profiles that were last saved in a certain date range.
- Login to request to the join the Trusted List so that you can edit and add images.
- Private Messages: Send a private message to the Profile Manager. (Best when privacy is an issue.)
- Public Comments: Login to post. (Best for messages specifically directed to those editing this profile. Limit 20 per day.)
- Public Q&A: These will appear above and in the Genealogist-to-Genealogist (G2G) Forum. (Best for anything directed to the wider genealogy community.)
Francesca Murphy