England Project Newsletter - July 2023
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~ 2023 Mid-Year Newsletter ~
You can find past newsletters in our Newsletter Archive
Hi everyone,
It's the middle of 2023 already and we'd like to share with you the latest news from the England Project.
Thank you again for supporting the England Project and our goal to improve the evergrowing number of English profiles of WikiTree!
Best wishes,
England Project Leadership Team
Join the Mighty Oaks for the July Connect-a-Thon
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The Mighty Oaks will again be entering one or two teams into the July Connect-a-Thon. The event starts Friday, July 14, at 8 AM EDT (12pm UTC) and runs until Monday, July 17, at 8 AM EDT (12pm UTC). Will you join us? Don't forget to sign up here: July Connect-a-Thon G2G Registration post. Whichever team you end up participating in, have fun and happy Connecting! And our thanks to Janet Wild for taking on the newly created Thon Project Coordinator role.
Good luck everyone! And don't forget, registration closes at midnight EST on Wednesday, 12 July 2023.
Heraldry and Coats of Arms
A new help page about English Heraldry and Coats of Arms was recently launched to help those working on profiles of people who were titled and/or armigous. Thanks Jo Fitz-Henry for creating this page for us (and all the others you have!). It is a tricky topic and this overview will be very helpful in our quest for accurate profiles.
Monthly Challenges
Each month, the England Project organises a project challenge aimed at improving English profiles. The challenges are designed as fun, team-building activities for our project members.
We choose a different theme each month. In May, we hosted a Coronation Tea Party Challenge, in honour of the coronation of King Charles III, and June's theme was "We're all going on a Summer Holiday!", as we improved the profiles of people who lived in our favourite seaside locations!
The theme for July is "Unknowns". Our goal is to see how many profiles with unknown names we can fix during the month. You can read more in the #project-challenges channel in the WikiEngland Discord server or in the email sent in Google Group at the start of the month. All England Project members are welcome to join!
New Team - Tangled Families Team
In other news, we recently amalgamated 3 of our teams - the Arborists, Unknowns and Gedcoms - into a new England Tangled Families team!
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The team is part of the Profile Improvements Team and we are grateful to Fran Weidman for taking on the role of Team Leader. This fast-growing team is already in good shape to take on and solve even more family tangles. Any Notable English and Project Protected Profiles, who need special attention due to their prominence, will continue to be looked after by our Managed Profiles Team. The Tangled Families Team are free to sort out all other cans of worms. :)
English Managed Profiles
The England Project now manages (or is on the Trusted List of ) 1143 profiles; an increase of 30 profiles since the beginning of the year. Of these, 96 are Living Notables (up from 82 at the beginning of the year). Thanks to Ros Haywood for looking after this group of profiles. The late Queen Elizabeth still attracts a fair number of requests to go on her Trusted List (TL) - about the same number as her son Charles III. We are also seeing TL requests for Prince William for the first time (but not Prince Harry). As with all of our living notables, the TLs of the profiles of Royal family are limited to those members of the England Project's Managed Profiles Team who are actively working on those profiles, or first cousins of that person.
The Managed Profiles team has recently re-examined the pedigree of the Eldred family of Suffolk, one which was widely believed to be sound, and found that it was based on a genealogical fraud from probably the 1950s. Many profiles from that pedigree are now in the loving care of the Disproven Existence Project. A similar fate befell a pedigree of over 30 profiles of the Cooke family of Essex and Suffolk, which is widely found on other internet sites without any primary sources.
New Topic - Edwardian Actresses
A fabulous new Topic has been created for Edwardian Actresses by Ros Haywood. There are already 67 profiles gathered together, they're all Notables, with CC7s going from 2 to 6000+! A great piece of work and an excellent reminder about how useful the creation of Topics can be. Contact Ros or Marjorie (Humphrey) Gibbon if you have a particular area of interest or idea that you would like to bring to life.
Membership Update
The Project Leaders are in the final stages of our mid-Year check-in with all members. Thank you everyone for your replies!
We have received good feedback about the work our members do the England Project. The vast majority of our members are happy to continue supporting the project and many said they were proud to be a member. The project continues to grow year-on-year, even though a small percentage of our members have chosen to leave us due to changes in their interests or priorities.
A number of members have chosen to switch project teams to reflect how their interests have changed over time - to those we say thank you for your past contributions and look forward to you contributing in your new teams!
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We have had 34 new members join since 1 January 2023. 26 Trailers have graduated from OT1, 8 have graduated OT2 and 1 pre-1500 preparation (also known as OT3). We have 21 active Trailblazers and we thank them for all the time they willingly volunteer to guide our new project members through the Orphan Trail. They are currently working with 41 Trailers!
Our achievements in numbers
Nothing speaks more about how well a team is doing than some good old fashioned statistics! Thanks to Steve Whitfield, Roy Walmsley and Nic Donnelly the information we can now gather about our project is better than ever. The charts below highlight the impressive impact we are having as a team on the England branch of the tree.
Half way through 2023, we are able to look back through our England and County statistics to see the progress we are making.
Our tables illustrate that each week, we are sourcing, fixing, identifying 'Unknowns' and connecting significant numbers of profiles. At the same time as we make improvements, every day new profiles are added to Wikitree that need correcting; and algorithms are being devised on an ongoing basis to identify more profiles that need attention.
The headline figures in our England table may seem daunting, but we break them down into more digestible chunks that are picked off by our County Teams; our Profile Improvement Teams focus on specific problem areas; and we organise challenges through which make inroads into different types of profile that need our attention. By working together to improve the tree, collectively we are having a material impact.
They say a picture tells a thousand words so we have collated our data into graphs to highlight how well we are doing.
New Profiles
For the past 6 months, an average of over 10,500 new England profiles have been created per week. On 1 July, the cumulative total of profiles with a birth, marriage or death in England stood at 3,689,418 which represents over 10.5% of all Wikitree's profiles.
Over the extended weekends of January 13-16 and April 21-24, many of our members competed in Wikitree's Connect-A-Thons as part of our Mighty Oaks Team. With Thons straddling 2 weekly periods, we saw spikes in new profiles as shown in the graph below.
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The third Connect-a-Thon for 2023 is scheduled for July 14-17 which will give another welcome boost to our profile count.
"Unknown County" Profiles
Not all England births, marriages and deaths can be allocated to one of our recognised counties. This might be because the only information we have about an individual is that he or she was born, married or died in England. Alternatively, a village, town or county may have been input into a location field in a way that is recognised by Wikitree's system as an England profile but which can't be allocated to a county. Both these types of profile are placed in a 'county' we have named 'England Unknown County'.
Our 'March Challenge' was to reduce the number of 'Unknown County' Profiles. With a month-long focus on correcting poorly formatted locations, 34 members participated in the challenge and collectively improved the location fields of over 32,000 England profiles - a phenomenal team effort! As you can see from the graph below, during the month, we made quite a dent in the percentage of England profiles recorded as 'Unknown County'.
Several members continued to focus on improving location fields after the March Challenge. We started the year with almost 9.25% of our profiles in this 'Unknown County'; the figure now stands at below 7.9%.
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"Unsourced" Profiles
The current system for identifying and counting Unsourced profiles has its limitations. (For more detail see Understanding England and County Statistics.) Nevertheless our week on week Unsourced statistics are collated on a like-for-like basis and a comparison of the numbers gives a useful indication of trends.
Many of the profiles corrected in the March 'Locations' Challenge were created in Wikitree's earlier years and not only had poorly-completed location fields but were also unsourced. During the challenge, many profiles were labelled as unsourced and allocated to one of our counties for further attention. The reduction in Unknown County profiles in March therefore triggered an increase in Unsourced profiles, which is reflected in the graph below.
Following this surge, over the last 3 months, we have seen a healthy downward trend as members have found and added sources to profiles. The current percentage (2.12%) is now slightly below the level at which we started the year (2.14%).
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Impressively, since the start of the year, at least one source has been added to over 16,000 England profiles that were flagged as 'Unsourced'. Over and above this, many other profiles that don't appear in the statistics have also been sourced in the process of us tidying up old Gedcoms, identifying Unknowns, researching Tangled Families etc.
Unknowns
To qualify as an 'Unknown', the word Unknown has to appear in one of the profile name fields.
About 6000 of our 'Unknowns' are people whose first name hasn't been identified (although, to be more precise, a significant number of these have a known first name but have been incorrectly entered into the name fields as eg 'Unknown Elizabeth' or 'Unknown Mary').
There are about 35,000 profiles with a Last Name At Birth of Unknown, 99% of which are females whose maiden name hasn't yet been discovered ..... and for those of you who are up for some really serious detective work, there are over 1,000 people in the England database entered as “Unknown Unknown’ with neither a first name nor a Last Name at Birth established!
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‘Unknowns’ expressed as a percentage of our total profiles has steadily decreased since the start of the year, and over the next few weeks we are hoping for a further decline. Our July Challenge is to identify as many of our current 'Unknowns' as we can. Thanks to some fantastic development work by Roy Walmsley, a new Unknowns Report has been created to help you find profiles by county for different time periods, separated into orphaned and managed profiles. (The two types of profile require different processes to correct them. If you have any questions, ask on Discord and one of our members will help you.)
Please join in the challenge and work with other England Project members to improve our tree.
Suggestions
At a headline level, our Suggestions numbers are increasing. The reported figure at the start of 2023 expressed as a percentage of all profiles was 3.97%; the figure now stands at 4.72%. However, as explained below, the increase is misleading as it is driven by 'behind the scenes' coding changes to identify additional opportunities to improve profiles.
Thanks to the efforts of our members working on suggestions, the England branch of the tree is undoubtedly healthier. In the first six months of the year, just shy of 75,000 suggestions have been fixed, a staggering number!
By way of background, the weekly Suggestions Report contains a myriad of possible problems with profiles ranging from impossible scenarios (e.g. a mother who died years before her supposed child's birth) to relatively minor formatting issues such as a missing "=" sign in a biography heading. Some suggestions are much more genealogically important than others. Albeit a subjective assessment, we have broken down the different types of suggestion into clusters, with the ones we consider to be the highest priority in the left hand grouping in the chart below.
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In the first cluster (Gender, Dates, Relationships, Names and Locations), we have seen a marked underlying reduction of ~22% of issues over the last few months. However, additional queries highlighting new location field suggestions have clouded the picture. In April and June, new search routines added over 8,000 new location suggestions (typically containing one of our counties but missing the word "England").
The second group (Biography, References and Templates) affects how individual profiles look. At the start of April, changes were made to the way messy Gedcom files were identified adding over 12,500 profiles to the 'Gedcom junk' suggestion code.
The third cluster (Categories, Privacy, Links, DNA) has grown considerably over the last three months as profiles were searched for 'broken' links (typically to external websites), adding 24,000 new suggestions to the total.
If our total suggestions figure (174,000) were adjusted to recognised these 34,500 new location, 'Gedcom junk' and 'broken links' searches, the like for like suggestions percentage would be around 3.5% of our current profiles compared to 3.97% at the start of the year, so hats off to all those working on suggestions over the last 6 months for their impressive efforts to improve the tree.
To help us in this important area and for more insight into the different types of suggestions, refer to the Data Doctors Team Page.
Unconnected Profiles
At the start of 2023, under 90% of England profiles were connected to Wikitree's main tree. That figure has improved by over 0.5% as illustrated in the chart below.
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So far this year, almost 38,000 profiles (single unconnected people and 'loose branches') have been connected to the main tree, an impressive average of almost 1,500 per week.
If you enjoy the challenge of connecting, why not join our Connectors Team for advice and encouragement as we strive to reduce the number of unconnected profiles in our tree.
Handy Hints & Fun Stuff
- Have you bookmarked these two handy pages? Who is Who in the England Project and What is Where in the England Project. If not, you should! They are the easiest way to navigate who is who and what is where for the England Project.
- Explore how the new Category Activity Feeds recently introduced could help you with your geneaology, one place studies and more!
- Forgotten how to do something you learned long ago on the Orphan Trail and can't work out where look? This handy page has links to all the basics, and more: Orphan Trail Trailer's Index. Included is a new useful page about the basics of Heraldry and Coats of Arms for England.
- Who doesn't love a good image on their special profiles? Copyright is such tricky topic but luckily for us, there is this page with heaps of great links to find just the image you are looking for: Galleries and Collections which have given Permission for use of Images.
WikiTree Day 2023
Do you have feedback?
- Login to request to the join the Trusted List so that you can edit and add images.
- Private Messages: Contact the Profile Managers privately: I. Speed and England Project WikiTree. (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.)