Profile Overview

Profile manager: Ian Beacall [send private message]

Profile Overview gives a visual overview of a group of people: a person's ancestors, descendants, or relatives (parents, siblings, spouses, children), or a portion of your watchlist.

Note: Due to updates and new features, many of the images here may be slightly outdated. Sorry.

It looks like this →

First screen.

To check out some ancestors of a profile, put the WikiTree ID in the box, choose the number of generations of ancestors you want to view, and click 'Ancestors'. Then wait... The more generations you ask for the longer it takes. Fortunately, you can enjoy the zen wonders of a shaking tree as you wait...

"It is a happy little tree." -Lucy

The result may look something like this:

Ancestors view.

The image above is after clicking on Josiah Wedgwood's box. You can see lines coming from his box connecting him with his parents, wife, and daughter. Looking closer at Josiah...

Josiah's profile with categories, a project box, and a sticker.

... you can see his categories, project and a sticker. The image above is after clicking 'Bio' at the bottom, and you can see his bio in a pop-up box. The other bio button shows the wikitext version of the bio. Here's the wikitext version of the sources in a pop-up window:

Good sources!

These pop-up windows can be closed by double-clicking on them or clicking the 'x' in the top right corner of the window. Clicking the 'x' on the border of the profile closes all the pop-ups for that profile. On a PC, these windows can all stay on the screen, and they're draggable. On an iPad, they appear one at a time and are not draggable.

Clicking on the button next to a name filters the profiles according to their connection to that person - the person's descendants (and their spouses) and ancestors remain while the rest are hidden:

Filtered.

You can see the path up to the focal profile from Thomas Wedgwood (bottom left).

In the top-left corner, you can see the person's relation to the focal person...

Three ways to express a connection.

Here, 'G4GP' means that Gilbertus is Charles Darwin's Great-Great-Great-Great-GrandParent. [Edit: Now changed to 'F' and 'M' rather than 'P'] Click the button and it changes to 'MMFFFF', meaning that Gilbertus is Charles's mother's mother's father's father's father's father. Click it again and you get the Ahnentafel number (some people like this).

As on WikiTree pages, you can click (the WikiTree ID) to copy the WikiTree ID to your clipboard:

Copied the WikiTree ID to your clipboard.

The relatives view may look something like this (if you zoom out):

Relatives view

You can see the parents, spouse, siblings, and children. A black line points from the heading to the focal person.

You can log in to the WikiTree API with the same address and password you use to log in to the main site. The button in the top right-hand corner takes you to the API login page.

Log in!

Logging in includes your private profiles in your results, gives you access to your watchlist, and may even speed up your experience a little. Logging in takes you here:

Log in to the WikiTree API.

You can see the WikiTree URL in the browser, so you know this is secure.

After logging in, you have access to your Watchlist, so you see this:

Check your watchlist.

Unfortunately, calling too many profiles from the WikiTree server at one time can cause problems, so there's a limit here: see the app for how many profiles can be called at one time. A watchlist view may look like this:

Watchlist view.

Look at the top right of the border of this image. →

A PM box (right, top); and links (top, right; right).

You can see a box with 'PM' in it. This shows that I am the profile manager. Also, at the top, there are three buttons with arrows, the one pointing up opens a new window with an Ancestors view, with this person (Catherine) as the focus. The number of generations is set by the box at the top of the page. The one pointing down is for a new Descendants view, and the other button opens a new window with a Relatives view of Catherine's family.

Every profile has three buttons on the side: links to the excellent apps Bio Check, Fan Chart, and Topola. Click a link and each of these apps run automatically for the profile you're on.

Some profile boxes have a brick wall at the bottom. The brick wall represents a... brick wall.

Brick wall.

Half a blue wall means the father is unknown; half a pink wall, the mother is unknown. A full purple wall means both parents are missing.

New features

1. A source count. This counts inline <ref> tags and starred sources in the sources section. It doesn't count 'First-hand information' if the profile subject died before 1900, or sources without a star in the sources section. As many people enter citations/sources in non-standard ways, and many people think that 'ancestry.com' is enough for a citation, you may disagree with the source count. If you hate it, let me know... Maybe I'll remove it in the future. In cases where the code thinks there are no valid sources (rightly or wrongly), the 'sources' button is highlighted in red. If it is red, maybe you should at least take a look and consider whether what you have is enough. You can see the number of sources in the bottom menu in the image below.

Source count and Family member count

1. Counts of (and links to) siblings, spouses, and children. This should appear not too long (maybe up to 30 seconds) after the page loads. You can see this in the image above, where it says 'Family'. Hover over one of those and you'll see links to their profiles (see below). (Tapping does the same on iPad.) (I was wondering if it would be better to make these links in-app links - i.e. have them make the person the start of a new Profile Overview search. What do you think?)

Links to family members' profiles

1. Downloadable data. You can now download the data from the current view as an Excel file or a .csv file. I hope someone finds it useful. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work in Chrome or Firefox on iPad, so if you want to do this, and you're on iPad, use Safari.

Download the data.

End bit

As with all the apps, this is just for information. There is no input. You can see the bio and source of each profile on this page, but you can't edit them - you need to go to the actual profile for that (but of course the names in each of these profile boxes are links to the actual profile, which will open in a new window).

Comments, questions, bug reports, etc. are all welcome - here, on Discord, or by email.