England Project Newsletters Sandbox

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Thank you, everyone, for supporting the England Project in 2024!

Here's our latest newsletter with an update on this year's achievements and highlights.

Many thanks for contributing to our goal of improving WikiTree's many English profiles and we look forward to continuing to work with you all in 2025!

Best wishes, England Project Leadership Team

Contents 1 Membership and Orphan Trail 2 Project Challenges 3 Profile Improvements Teams 4 Counties Teams 5 Managed Profiles and Living Notables 6 Categories Team 7 Recent policy changes 8 England Locations Database 9 2025 Calendar 10 Our achievements in numbers 11 Do you have feedback?

Membership and Orphan Trail

We currently have 378 England Project members.

During 2024, the Orphan Trail has 31 new OT1 graduates and 12 new OT2 graduates. Once again, congratulations to our new team members and their trailblazers!

Currently we have 20 members progressing through the Trails with 8 OT1 and 13 OT2 members waiting for trailblazer assignment, which our dedicated trailblazers will reduce in the coming weeks.

A huge thank you to all our incredibly motivated trailblazers for their support throughout the year and continuing to be a pivotal part of the England Project with two new trailblazers joining in 2024 Celia Marsh and Mary Lois Koler.

If becoming a member of the England Project is for you, please follow the link Joining the England Project.

Project Coordinators for Membership: Kathy Nava and W Robertson.

Project Coordinators for the Orphan Trail: Hilary Gadsby and Malc Rowlands.

Project Challenges

2024 has been a very successful year for England Challenges, we are so fortunate to have so many willing team members that will try their hand at anything.

We started the year with connecting notables, moved onto unmerged matches and then ran the first of two challenges for Neill Reed, based on his work on members of the Royal Society of Musicians.

The following two months covered missing birth locations and a mini notables CC7 combat.

June saw our biggest success story, when Steve Whitfield ran another ‘Unknown Counties’ challenge. We had about 50 England team members participate, which was our best result ever.

To coincide with the general election, we had a suffragettes challenge in July, (our thanks to Marjorie Gibbon for this), followed by a connecting challenge for football managers.

We ran a ‘This is your Life’ challenge in September, working on profiles created by Stephen Corkey, and in November we concentrated our efforts on improving profiles created during the early day of WikiTree. Our final challenge, which is still running, involves finding English roots for British Home Children.

There are already some new interesting challenges in the pipeline for 2025, but if you have an idea for something completely different, then do please get in touch, we will openly welcome all suggestions.

Project Coordinators for England Challenges: Carol Keeling and Fran Weidman

Profile Improvements Teams

Profile Improvement work underpins almost everything the England Project does as a whole, but the Profile Improvements Teams welcome those who like to focus on a specific area of improvement while working on the tree:

• BioBuilders
• Connectors
• Data Doctors
• Sourcerers
• Tangled Families

New this year, the England Project Maintenance Categories Explained was built in part to make it easier for Team members to find profiles to improve, but also to make it easy for the entire project to indicate the elements lacking from profiles as they work on cleaning up the tree.

Project Coordinator Celia Marsh

Counties Teams

Some members focus on specific areas of the tree as members of our Profile Improvement Teams; others join one of more of our County Teams from where they try to improve 'their' county. Each county is separately reported in the England and County Statistics Reports.

The reports details each county's figures expressed as a percentage of its total profiles. The table below shows the impressive quality levels that are being achieved by our top-performing teams and give a realistic indication of what we can aspire to across the project.

Our cumulative top performers are:

Sourcing			Connecting			Fixing Suggestions			Identifying Unknowns
Sussex	0.03%		Sussex	2.73%		Nottinghamshire	0.28%		Lancashire	0.33%
Nottinghamshire	0.06%		Cornwall	4.66%		Oxfordshire	0.29%		County Durham	0.38%
Middlesex	0.39%		Kent	4.83%		Sussex	0.51%		MIddlesex	0.40%
Surrey	0.41%		Oxfordshire	4.96%		Huntingdonshire	0.90%		Sussex	0.40%
Bedfordshire	0.42%		Rutland	5.38%		Lancashire	1.39%		City of London	0.41%
Bristol	0.57%		Gloucestershire	5.89%		Northamptonshire	1.39%		London	0.46%
County Durham	0.62%		Hertfordshire	5.91%		Cambridgeshire	1.49%		Surrey	0.48%
Cumberland	0.63%		Dorset	6.38%		Rutland	1.51%		Nottinghamshire	0.50%
Gloucestershire	0.70%		Bristol	6.45%		Cumberland	1.57%		Oxfordshire	0.51%
Kent	0.71%		Middlesex	6.45%		County Durham	1.60%		Yorkshire	0.52%
England overall	1.69%		England overall	8.50%		England overall	2.46%		England overall	0.90%

The counties in which we seen the greatest improvements this calendar year (calculated as a percentage of total current profiles) are:

Sourcing		Connecting		Fixing Suggestions		Identifying Unknowns
Middlesex		Devon		City of London		Sussex
Leicestershire		Cheshire		London		Devon
Suffolk		Lancashire		Somerset		Worcestershire
City of London		Buckinghamshire		Suffolk		Bedfordshire
Lancashire		Leicestershire		Kent		Leicestershire
Westmorland		Cambridgeshire		Sussex		Shropshire
Huntingdonshire		Herefordshire		Cornwall		Westmorland
Staffordshire		County Durham		Cambridgeshire		Buckinghamshire
Worcestershire		Kent		Warwickshire		Huntingdonshire
Yorkshire		Worcestershire		Herefordshire		Cheshire

All of our historical counties have achieved improvements in three or four of our quality measures in percentage terms but there are 5 county teams that deserve a special mention. County Durham, Leicestershire, Worcestershire, Kent and Sussex have all reduced each of their figures in net terms from the start of 2023.

Managed Profiles and Living Notables

A section of the England Project covering Living Notables was created in March 2024, and led by Project Coordinator Ros Haywood. The Living Notables section includes actors such as Dame Judi Dench, musicians such as Sir Mick Jagger, authors such as Alan Bennett, sports stars such as David Beckham, King Charles III, and many more.

The profiles of English Living Notables are only visible to the rest of WikiTree when they have been through various eligibility tests run by the England Project and the Notables Project, including the number of Wikipedia pages in other languages. Currently, the Project manages 203 Living Notables, covered by 8,112 other-language pages including French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, and Welsh.

The Managed Profiles Team was kept busy sorting out a number of tangled families and profile for non-existent people. These investigations typically involve multiple members of the team and collaboration with other projects, such as Puritan Great Migration and Southern Colonies. A real variety of individuals and families were worked on in 2024, including:

• William Juxon, Archbishop of Canterbury
• Ben Jonson, playright
• Queen Anne
• Carpenter family of Marden, Wiltshire (a real tangle!)
• Gregory Clement, regicide
• Henchman family (a combination of Welsh and English research)

The team was also kept busy with various administrative tasks, such as monitoring changes to the project's managed profiles to make sure any edits are well-sourced and consistent with the project's profile standards.

Categories Team

The Categories Team continues to work to maintain the category structure specific to England, working with England Project members on adding congregation and cemetery categories, and liaising with colleagues in the Categorization Project and in the other nations of the British Isles and Ireland where necessary. This year we have added specific guidance on Quaker Monthly Meetings, following discussion with the Quakers Project; and added guidance on census categories. The complete guidance on setting up new categories in England is here: Categorisation in England

Our very own Roy Walmsley is currently leading on a project to compile a list of standard locations in England, which we hope will eventually replace the Family Search drop down suggestions for the location fields on profiles. He is using the place categories as one of his sources. In conjunction with the county teams we are therefore reviewing all of the location categories in each county to ensure that they are indeed places, and not parishes, hundreds or registration districts. This work will carry on into the new year.

Recent policy changes

WikiTree's site-wide policies

Jan 2024: Introduction of the new Pre-1700 Self Certification process: see G2G announcement

Apr 2024: Updates to WikiTree's policies on the creation of profiles of living people: see G2G announcement, Help:Privacy Policy, Help:Invitations and Help:Anonymous Placeholder

Sep 2024: Introduction of a new process for handling Problems with Policies: see G2G announcement

England Project's England Profile Standards

Mar 2024: Clarifications to the section on "Locations and Location Fields" about the use of Great Britain and United Kingdom.

May 2024: Updated guidance to make it consistent with the site-wide policy that church names should not generally be included in the location fields: see Help:Location Fields.

Dec 2024: Adopted proposal for dealing with post 1974 counties: see Counties in England

England Locations Database

When we enter place names in the location fields of a profile, we are currently offered a number of helpful (and sometimes not-so-helpful) suggestions in drop-down lists. These suggestions are generated from an external database; they limit the number of location misspellings and give a degree of consistency in the way fields are completed. The ‘drop-downs’ can also be a source of frustration; the database contains a number of errors, has duplicates that give no hints for differentiation, and suggests locations that don’t meet Wikitree’s standards.

In early November, developers Riel Smit and Ian Beacall announced that they had created a new locations database for Wikitree that could replace the current system. Their plan is to roll out the new system on a country by country basis. A number of members from the England Project volunteered to help with implementation.

This is a very ambitious project. There are over 80,000 locations in England and for the new database to work effectively we most load a comprehensive list of English place names (in a way that recognises the changes in county borders over time); we require location co-ordinates (for Wikitree’s mapping systems to work effectively); the database needs to ‘disambiguate’ places in a county that share the same name (for example, there are multiple locations in Yorkshire called ‘Scholes’); and we must add bespoke ‘locations’ such as Registration Districts that are specific to the England Project.

Fortunately, a number of external databases have been identified (the British Gazetteer of Place Names, the Office of National Statistics Index of PlaceNames, and the GeoNames database) that contain information that will help us populate large sections of the new system.

Critically, our project is blessed with talented members who have both a good understanding of the geography of England and the technical expertise to bring everything together. For the challenge of ambiguous place names, our current Location Categories give us a great starting point. Our categories are currently undergoing a review to ensure that they are complete and accurate. The team is now over two thirds through the list. In addition, we are also liaising with the administrators of the Gazetteer of British Place Names to correct errors (usually location co-ordinate errors) in their dataset.

Before implementation, the database will need checking. County teams will be asked to help check their own counties, but no doubt we will need support from other members across the project. It is anticipated that the main development work will continue into the New Year, and that the system will be ready for checking, perhaps by the end of January.

We hope that you agree that this will be a big step forward for us and would like to thank everyone who has been involved so far. We will keep our members posted as the project progresses.

2025 Calendar

Here's the schedule for the 'Thons and other events in 2025:

• Jan 17-20 – Winter Connect-a-Thon
• Mar 6-8 – RootsTech
• Apr 11-14 – Spring Connect-a-Thon
• Jul 18-21 – Summer Connect-a-Thon
• Oct 3-6 – Source-a-Thon
• Nov 2-8 – WikiTree Week

The England Project's monthly challenges begin at the start of each month. Watch out for the announcements in the Google Group and on Discord on the #project-challenges channel!

Our achievements in numbers

Many members will be familiar with the charts that we use to illustrate the rhythm of the annual cycle in our project. They show the growth and ongoing improvements in quality in the England branch of the tree. The graphs have been updated for this newsletter and continue to paint a very positive picture, highlighting the outstanding collective achievements of our Project Team.

New Profiles

Once again, this year over 500,000 England profiles have been added to the tree. On 21 December 2024, the cumulative total of profiles with a birth, marriage or death in England stood at 4,444,324 which represents 11% of all Wikitree's profiles. This is up from 10.7% at the start of this year and 10.3% at the start of 2023.

This year, we have averaged just under 10,000 new English profiles per week, 3% down on 2023 levels. The three Connect-a-Thons, which ran over the extended weekends of January 19-22, April 12-15 and July 19-22 gave a good boost to our numbers.

"Unknown County" Profiles

Not all England births, marriages and deaths can be allocated to one of our recognised counties. Often, the only information available 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 types of profile are placed in a 'county' we have named 'England Unknown County'.

This year's June Challenge was to reduce the number of 'Unknown County' Profiles. The challenge was very successful with 48 England Project members participating. Collectively, we improved the location fields of about 46,000 profiles, 44% more than in March 2023 when we ran a similar challenge. Our achievements have been summarised in a review.

The impact of the 2023 and 2024 challenges can be seen on the chart below. At the start of 2023, almost 9.25% of our profiles were in the 'Unknown County' pot; the figure now stands at 5.39%!

On 21 December 2024, 3,434 of 'England Unknown County' profiles contained something more than 'England' or 'England, United Kingdom' in a location field (referred to as 'Identifiable Locations'), but 1,770 of them are in fact properly formatted. (They are either ancient counties such as Wessex and Mercia; or relatively new counties such as Humberside and Cleveland that haven't yet been added to the table of recognised counties.) This leaves just 1,664 profiles Identifiable Locations to be improved. This is down from about 120,000 in March 2023, which is staggering!

There are about 238,000 profiles in which a location field is simply "England" or "England, United Kingdom". Some of these location fields can be improved, with research. A Locations Clean Up Page has been created for members who enjoy this sort of a challenge.

"Unsourced" Profiles

Wikitree's current system for identifying Unsourced profiles has its limitations; there is a considerable number of profiles not sourced to Wikitree standards that aren't picked up in the current Unsourced count. (For more detail see Understanding England and County Statistics.) That said, our Unsourced statistics are collated on a like-for-like basis and give us a useful indication of an increasingly healthy tree.

Initiatives such as a 'Locations' Challenge, or preparations for the Source-A-Thon can result in a number of poorly sourced profiles being identified and labelled; some members use a tool called Biocheck to find profiles that need properly sourcing. This can generate short-term increases in our Unsourced number, as seen on the chart below, which tracks the progression of our efforts to source profiles over the past 2 years. The dramatic improvements in the autumns of 2023 and 2024 were the impact of the 'Source-a-Thons'.

This year's event ran from October 4-7. The Mighty Oaks Team put in a fantastic performance with 37 of our members sourcing 7,416 profiles; with members from other teams also adding sources to English profiles.

Since the start of the year, at least one source has been added to 41,126 England profiles that had been flagged as 'Unsourced' (an average of 806 per week). 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

Our 'Unknowns' count currently stands at 39,840 which represents just 0.90% of England profiles. In December 2022, 1.17% of England profiles were 'Unknowns". In 2024, we identified 3,546 Unknown profiles, an average of 70 per week. The Unknowns Report is updated weekly to help those of us who enjoy the challenge of working on Unknowns, segmenting them by county for different time periods.

Suggestions

One of our most impressive achievements this year has been the reduction in Suggestions. This year, we have fixed over 120,000 Suggestions; an average of 2,346 per week. New suggestions are created each week but not only are England Suggestions down from 3.62% of profiles to 2.46%, but they have also reduced in absolute numbers from 142,000 to 109,000.

From time to time, we see an increase in flagged profiles as new routines and algorithms identify suggestions that were previously missed, which explains the marked rise of Suggestions in summer 2023. Since then, we have been on an very positive trajectory.

The weekly Suggestions Report contains a long list of possible profile issues ranging from impossible scenarios (e.g. a mother who died years before her supposed child's birth) to relatively minor formatting problems 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 three clusters shown in the chart below.

In the first, highest priority cluster (Gender, Dates, Relationships, Names and Locations), we have seen a significant reduction over the past 18 months. Location suggestions in particular have been dramatically improved.

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. We have seen marked progress in this second group.

The third cluster (Categories, Privacy, Links, DNA) grew considerably in 2023 as profiles were searched for 'broken' links (typically to external websites), adding 24,000 new suggestions to the total. This category has seen the largest reduction in volume.

If you want to help the project in this important area and for more insight into the different types of suggestions, refer to the England Data Doctors Team Page.

Unconnected Profiles

At the start of 2023, 10.2% of England profiles were unconnected to Wikitree's main tree. That figure has steadily improved and now stands at 8.5% as illustrated in the chart below.

To date this year, 75,485 previously unconnected profiles (single people and 'loose branches') have been connected to the main tree. This represents 1,480 connections per week, higher than last year's average of 1,402 per week.

For members trying to reduce the overall England count, the Unconnected Lists have their limitations in that these lists include many profiles that aren't England profiles.

A new page has recently been created so that members can work on profiles that will have the most impact in reducing their own county or England as a whole.

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.

Thanks to all members who have worked over the last 12 months to grow and improve the England branch of the tree. Your efforts are very much appreciated.

Do you have feedback?

We would love to hear if you have any feedback on our newsletters or the project more generally. Please put your feedback or suggestions in the comments section below. Thank you!

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