RTC - Guides

Profile managers: Sandy Patak [send private message] and Antonia Reuvers [send private message]

Background

Child mortality was very high before modern medicine and survival rates was low in some countries, areas, and classes throughout history. This project was created to help improve the many profiles of children added to WikiTree who sadly died early or never lived at all. There is usually limited information and sources to use to improve these profiles, and many are left with only an unknown name, birth and/or death date and no biography. Here are some information about what can be added to these profiles.

How to Add Sources

Make sure there is at least one reliable source added to the profile, if none can be found add a research notes header and explain where you have looked for sources, and that none can be found. Add the Unsourced template and if possible specify a country/state/county. Also, see, for well-sourced biographies.

Biography

Write a biography, however short, start with the basics, when and where the child or baby was born, who the parents were, where the birth and/or death happened. You might not know much about the child but a lot can be found looking at the rest of the family. What profession did the parents have, did they belong to a certain religion or culture? How many children did the parents end up having? What number was the baby/child amongst its siblings, was a younger sibling named after them? Where did the family live, what was life like there? If a death cause was given it can be explained here, along with any information about the burial.

Naming conventions. WikiTree has specific naming conventions and they can be viewed here.

If an infant died before he or she could be named use what is on their death record according to their conventions, otherwise use Unnamed Infant. Do not use Infant Boy, Baby Girl, etc. There is a Sex at Birth field for this.

Unmarried/No children

Make sure to mark them as unmarried, and that they had no children of their own. This helps separate them from a sibling born with the same or similar name and birth year. If a child died before puberty it is safe to say there is no descendants and unlikely a spouse. However depending on time and place children as young as 12 could have been married and had children only a few years later, before their 18th birthday. In these cases please review all sources available and make your own judgement about the likeliness of there being a spouse or a child. Please write your observations in the bio. This is how you set "no children" and "no spouse" on a profile.

How to set up the unmarried/no children status

1. From the edit-page for the profile click "add/remove spouse", scroll down to the bottom of the add spouse page, click "[Name Surname] had no spouse"
2. On the edit page under Children: [add/remove child] , check the box by “No Children” and save your changes.

Categories

Add the parish category where the child was born, died or lived and if possible the cemetery category if this is known.

How to Find Profiles

WikiTree+ allows for a lookup by age at death. See the help page, text search section. You can also filter out profiles that already have the Died Young sticker. Here is an example search string for the text search:

Here are the profiles for age0-age10 without the Died Young sticker:

(you might have to keep clicking "next" to get to a list of Open Profiles)

Age0 | Age1 | Age2 | Age3 | Age4 | Age5 | Age6 | Age7 | Age8 | Age9 | Age10

How to add a photo/source image

If you wish to add a photo or source document you can do so via the "Images" tab => Click here to upload it => Choose file => Select the file on your computer => Add the source of the file => Add Title, Location and Date => Choose if the file is a Photo or a Source => Upload Image

On the following page you may set the image to be or not to be the primary image, that means if it should be the profile picture or not. You may also add other people to the same image by adding their WikiTree ID under "People & Things in the Image:" and then clicking "Save changes to image details". Particularly useful for records which includes more than one person. This will link all WikiTree ID's to the same image and lets the image show up on all profiles.

Stickers

See the RTC - Stickers and Categories Page for more information.