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US Black Heritage Project Categories

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US Black Heritage Project
USBH Profile Improvement Teams

Contents

Project Categories

Some of the main top-level categories for the project are linked below:
African-American Family History USBH Heritage Exchange
&
United States of America, Slavery
US Black Heritage Project
Maintenance Categories
US Black Heritage, Resources by State
African-American Cemeteries United States of America, Black Churches
African-American Notables African-American Military History


Categories to Add to Each USBH Profile

We'd like every USBH project member to be adding categories to each USBH profile they're creating. For Heritage Exchange profiles (slavery-related), please follow the process for Documenting Enslaved People in WikiTree - the directions on that page include the categories to add. For other profiles, please include at least one location category and any of the profile creation cycle maintenance categories that are appropriate ("US Black Heritage Project, Needs Sources", "US Black Heritage Project, Needs Biography", and "US Black Heritage Project, Needs Profiles Created").
Location categories generally include anything with a county, township, or town name in the category title - categories like "Atlanta, Georgia" or "Fayette Township, Lawrence County, Ohio" as well as cemetery categories. You can add categories for locations where a person was born, married, or died and anywhere they lived for a significant part of their life. It's fine to add more than one location category to a profile. Please add the most specific location you know of - a town, township, or city if possible. If you only know the county and not a more specific location, you can use the county category. Please do not add profiles to state categories.

Why are location & maintenance categories so important?

Location categories have many possible uses, including:
  • Eventually, to connect our Heritage Exchange profiles with the rest of our profiles, we will need to be able to find profiles from the same county where the HE profiles are. We generally need them in location categories to do this.
  • There is a lot we can do with WikiTree+ to help state teams and individuals find profiles in their focus counties or counties of interest to work on. For example, we can find profiles from Gallia County, Ohio that need sources added, that have Data Doctor suggestions, or that need family member profiles created.
  • Connectors can use WikiTree+ to more easily find profiles to use to make connections to the main tree. For example, they can look for cconnected profiles with the last name Austin in Wythe County, Virginia if they know that there are Austins in Wythe County in the tree of the profile they're trying to connect.
  • Anyone can click on a category from a profile they're interested in and find other people living in that same location who may be related.
Maintenance categories are the main way our project coordinates work to get a profile to a relatively "complete" state. Many USBH profiles that have no categories have only one or two sources and since they're not in our maintenance categories, they are probably not going to get worked on in any of our sourcing sprints or other events. Unconnected orphaned profiles are not likely to get worked on in events like the Connect-a-thon, Family Tree Size One weekend sprints, etc. because they're not in the maintenance categories that project members work from in these events. See the US Black Heritage Project Maintenance Categories help page for full information about the project's maintenance categories.

How to Request New Categories

If a category you need does not exist, here is how to request that an experienced WikiTreer create it. Categories should only be created by experienced WikiTreers who have been trained to create that specific type of category.
  • Any category can be requested in the G2G forum. Make sure to use the tag "categorization" and if it's a category that is specific to the US Black Heritage Project, also use the tag "black_heritage".
  • If you need a USBH category to be created that is part of an existing category stream and you are a member of the project, you can ask in the Google group or in the #category-requests channel in the USBH server on Discord.
  • If you need an African-American cemetery category created, you can add the Category:US Black Heritage Project, Needs Cemetery Category Created to a profile in that cemetery. The cemeteries team works on this category about once a week. This should only be used for cemeteries where the majority of the burials are African American.
  • For location category requests, please only request categories that are the types of locations included in the approved United States of America's Regional Categories list - state and county categories should all already exist, but some municipalities, townships, and unincorporated places may not have categories yet. The categorization team avoids creating categories for census-designated places which are created by the census bureau and may not correspond to names used by local residents. Most county Wikipedia pages have a Communities section (example) that lists locations within the county by location type - you can use this to determine what type of location you're dealing with. If you are doing a deeper dive on a small African American community that does not fit into the guidelines for a location category, we recommend starting a One Place Study for the location - these can be for locations as small as a single building and a category for the location will be created by the One Place Studies leader as part of the set-up process when you first sign up.

2024 Focus on Categorization

At the beginning of 2024, about 45% of the profiles with the {{African-American Sticker}} have no categories at all - this is over 116,000 profiles, including over 67,000 orphaned profiles. In 2024, we'd really like to see that improve, with project members getting into the habit of adding location & maintenance categories to every new profile and some project members working on categorizing older profiles. If you'd like to help with adding categories to older profiles, here are a few WikiTree+ searches you can use to find profiles to categorize:
  • Profiles you have created/managed: For profiles you created, use this WT+ search, replace Melick-229 with your own WikiTree ID in the search box on the list, then click the blue "Get Profiles" button. Do the same thing with this search for profiles you manage.
  • Florida: Right now, Florida has the lowest connection rate of any state. Let's get maintenance categories on these profiles so that we can work on improving and connecting them in our sprints and events.
  • Your favorite state: use this WikiTree+ search, replace Florida with the name of any other state, then hit the blue "Get Profiles" button.




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