US Southern Colonies News Page - 2022 Archive
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The News Page serves as the Newsletter for the US Southern Colonies Project. It went live on 29 October 2020 and shows current and previous months. This archive page includes 2022 postings. See the News Page for the most recent posting.
~ Liz Shifflett, News Page Editor (the "I" in the articles), from 29 October 2020 to 31 December 2022.
Contents |
December News
Managed Profiles Needing Attention
- Did you know the Project’s Managed Profiles Team monitors all edits and comments to project managed profiles? While the team attempts to immediately address issues identified, some issues are too big to resolve quickly. So the team keeps a list of open issues identified during monitoring.
- Each month, the Managed Profiles Team highlights a few profiles from the list needing attention. Project members are invited to review the list, and tackle some of these difficult issues.
- Review the list at US Southern Colonies Managed Profiles Needs_Attention.
Who's Ready for Bingo?
- Friday Night Bingo begins on 9 December - one game at noon Eastern Time (5 pm UCT) and a second game at 6 pm (US EST/11pm UTC), repeated every other Friday (opposite Friday Night Date Night).
First Thon of 2023 is a January Connect-a-Thon
- Mark you calendar for the 13-16 January Connect-A-Thon. Keep an eye on G2G for the registration post: Thon Connect-a-Thon Challenges announcements
Got a topic you'd like to see covered on the News Page? Post a comment!
November News
Managed Profiles Needing Attention
- Did you know the Project’s Managed Profiles Team monitors all edits and comments to project managed profiles? While the team attempts to immediately address issues identified, some issues are too big to resolve quickly. So the team keeps a list of open issues identified during monitoring.
- Starting this month, the Managed Profiles Team will highlight each month a few profiles from the list needing attention. Project members are invited to review the list, and tackle some of these difficult issues.
- Review the list at US Southern Colonies Managed Profiles Needs_Attention.
Tip for tracking profiles for your ancestors
- If you're connected in WikiTree, in the dropdown menu under "My WikiTree" in the mini-menu at upper right of a profile page, click "Family Activity Feed" (which defaults to your Watchlist) and then click "Ancestors". This will show changes to profiles in your tree (lineal and collateral). What an eye-opener! WikiTree is continually making improvements, so it's easy to miss some things. I recommend to new people a lot to take the time to explore the links in the dropdown menus under the entries in that mini-menu. I think I now need to recommend also that folks click any tabs found toward the top of pages! (Kind of like the old computer games, where clicking on anything and everything helped you advance in the game!)
2022 Source-a-Thon
- If you were one of the 647 participants in the 2022 Source-a-Thon, held 30 September to 3 October, who sourced a whopping 63,445 profiles - THANK YOU! Both for your work during the thon and for contributing to our Virtual Southern Colonies Team.
- Congratulations to everyone who participated, with special congrats to Pip Sheppard, Sandy Patak, and Kathy Zipperer, who were the top contributors for their respective teams. Pip and Sandy were also sourced more than 1,000 profiles each - only six people did that during this thon - and ranked 2nd & 3rd overall.
- The 22 members of our Virtual team sourced a total of 4,578 profiles, which puts us in 4th place - normalized, we would have come in first!
Name WikiTree ID # Team Virginia
FieldsButter-100 152 Southern Super Sweepers Billie
KeaffaberBright-1984 6 Virginia Appalachian Sourcers Chris Brady-1418 151 Virginia Appalachian Sourcers Eleanor
ColsonHolmes-16158 111 Southern Super Sweepers Sandy
PatakCraig-4574 1137 Virginia Appalachian Sourcers (co-captain) Mags Gaulden-7 6 Cornbread Catchers Mollie King-14976 2 Mid-Atlantic US Part Deux Anne Massey-4724 77 Virginia Appalachian Sourcers Jennifer
JordanMerritt-4138 89 Cornbread Catchers LaMyra Morton-7125 55 Missouri Cousins Liz
ShifflettNoland-165 31 Virginia Appalachian Sourcers Gary Pinson-796 38 Southern Super Sweepers Helen Rice-8480 17 Southern Super Sweepers Mary Richardson-7161 20 Cornbread Catchers Pip Sheppard-2686 1256 Southern Super Sweepers Sue
KnifleySmith-241759 461 Virginia Appalachian Sourcers Kathy
ZippererStuewe-5 213 Northwest Terriers Cathie Stumpenhaus-1 170 Southern Super Sweepers Becky
Thames-SimmonsThames-675 204 Virginia Appalachian Sourcers Bill Vincent-18 319 Virginia Appalachian Sourcers Tara Wildes-118 58 Cornbread Catchers Jackie Younge-80 5 unaffiliated Total 4,578 Virtual US Southern Colonies Team
- Want more stats? Check out
- G2G wrap-up
- Stats by team & user
October News
Congratulations to our own Sandy Patak - Project Coordinator of the Colonial Teams & Team Leader for Georgia - on adding the Project Leader (PL) badge to her collection on 12 September. Sandy remains active with us, has signed on as PL for the West Virginia Project, and is now a co-leader of the Appalachia Project, which she started in June. She is going to be busier than ever! And still she finds time to help with articles for the newsletter - albeit this one she wrote for the Appalachian News, and I am shamelessly stealing it & adding info about presentations by US Southern Colonies' co-leader Scott McClain. Congratulations Sandy & thank you for your continued support!
Mark your calendar for November 4th at 4 for Sandy's presentation & November 5th at 3 to catch Scott's events.
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November 5th is WikiTree Day!
"November 2008 is the closest thing to an official opening of WikiTree that we can put on a calendar", which is when the first public registrations started. And 2012 marks "The Pivotal Year for Collaboration". ~ History of WikiTree
WikiTree Day will be a virtual anniversary party with presentations about all the opportunities WikiTree offers, videos about the different projects on WikiTree, a live interview with founder Chris Whitten, panels covering various aspects of collaborative genealogy, games, door prizes, and much more!
As part of the event, WikiTree is including a free genealogy symposium with a variety of speakers on different genealogical topics. The symposium starts Friday, November 4, at 8am EDT (noon UTC) and runs non-stop for 24 hours, ending at 8am EDT (noon UTC) on Saturday, November 5, when we officially kick off WikiTree Day!
- The Appalachia Project will host Denton King, singer and songwriter, for a discussion of Music in Appalachia and the culture of the mountains on November 4th, 4-5 p.m. (USA Eastern Time). It's listed as "I'm an Appalachian - Music Culture of the Mountains" on the Symposium Schedule. Mark your calendar to join the Appalachia Project on November 4th, and check the Symposium Schedule for other presentations you might be interested in.
- Scott McClain is on the schedule for WikiTree Day itself, November 5th, with back-to-back videos about projects he co-leads, starting at 3 with the Puritan Great Migration Project, followed at 3:15 with the US Southern Colonies Project, which covers a significant number of colonial settlers both north and south! See the schedule for November 5th for other events you might be interested in.
You can attend any event without registering, but only registered members are eligible for door prizes (if you're not yet a member of WikiTree, click here - it's totally free & pledged to stay that way).
September News
2022 Source-a-Thon
Source-a-Thon registration is open! Sign up now to avoid the rush :D
Include which team you'd like to be on in your answer to the G2G registration post. For a list of teams, see the Current teams section on the Source-aThon help page.
The Source-a-Thon starts on Friday, 30 September at 8 am Eastern Time (US - noon UTC) and runs until Monday, 3 October at 8 am ET (noon UTC).
Did you know... FamilySearch registration is free? You probably did. But did you also know that while you need to be signed in to view most pages in FamilySearch, the relatively new "Discovery" page for a PID (person's ID) is viewable without being signed in? Keep in mind that anything you find on the Discovery page is considered unreliable. You'd need to sign in to see what information, if any, is supported by a reliable source. Still, if you're like me and have to sign in anew every couple of hours, being able to see what information the PID might have without signing in can be a real timesaver.
I'll use one of my ancestors as an example - Francis Furgason. Someone shared a FamilySearch url for him recently - https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LT9R-H16 - and thanks to WikiTree's FamilySearch template, I was able to easily convert that to text links for the PID, the sources page, and the Discovery page. From his profile (as of 31 August):
- FamilySearch PID for Frances Ferguson (28 April 1760–March 1834)
- FamilySearch Person: LT9R-H16
- FamilySearch Person Sources: LT9R-H16 (3 sources as of 31 August 2022 - death records for son Locket)
- FamilySearch Person Discovery: LT9R-H16
- All you need to know about the PID is the AFN (Ancestral File Number), in this case, LT9R-H16, then replace the xx's with the AFN in the following coding:
- * {{FamilySearch|LT9R-H16}}
- * {{FamilySearch|LT9R-H16|sources}}
- * {{FamilySearch|LT9R-H16|discovery}}
- * {{FamilySearch|LT9R-H16}}
- For the name & born/died information, I copy that from the top of one of the PID pages and tweak the formatting a bit (adding "FamilySearch PID for" in front, putting the dates in parentheses on the same line, and closing up the spaces around the en dash, if there are any). The Discovery page found at https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/LT9R-H16/frances-ferguson-1760-1834 yields
- Frances Ferguson
- Frances Ferguson
- 28 April 1760–March 1834
- which becomes : FamilySearch PID for Frances Ferguson (28 April 1760–March 1834)
Once you sign in to check the sources, you can add a note about them to the second bullet. In Francis's case, his PID provided a reliable source for him being the father of Locket. However, that reliable source - his son Locket's death record - provided a wealth of information about Francis's son. See this change page for the difference it made to the biography for Locket's profile!
How does activity impact awareness?
- This article first ran in November 2021, but I thought it was worth a reprint. I mentioned that I didn't have anything to share in that issue because I hadn't been as active as usual.
- I have found that WikiTree is one of those things that the more you put in, the more you get out. For instance, participating in G2G - if you don't "uncheck" the box to get notified if the discussion gets a new post - will increase your participation, or at least your awareness.
- Did you know there's a Weekend Chat? It's like a block party for WikiTree. You've missed the 26-28 August Weekend Chat, but jump in next weekend - you can find it under tag/weekend_chat - weekend_chat
- Tags are a great way to focus your G2G participation. You'll get notices in daily and weekly e-mails about your followed tags (if you haven't "deselected" the option to receive those e-mails). For your list of followed tags, click Special:Following. For general information, see Help:Tags.
- Are you a member of a project? If not, join one! If you are, check in to see what tasks you might be able to help with.
- Many projects have challenges. Participating in a challenge is a great way to increase your participation. See challenges for current challenges.
- The weekly WikiTree Challenge can be a bit daunting, but you can always pick one of your own ancestors to work on for the week, or the month. If they were living in the United States in 1850 or later, you can probably find them with the names of others in the household and their near neighbors in the census records available at FamilySearch. You can also check to see if there's an applicable project that might have a Reliable Sources page or other resource guidance that could help get you started. Build out your ancestor's family, adding siblings & their spouses/children. I have made some amazing connections with new-to-me cousins who shared information about our shared ancestors that was also new to me!
- Speaking of Cousins... there's a new feature. Did you see the Announcement? If you follow the announcements tag, you probably did. If not, check it out here. If you missed the announcement about the cousins app, you probably also missed the announcement about WikiTree's Google Calendar - a great place to see what challenges start when.
Enough food for thought? Have some ideas to share, or requests for future articles? Post a comment!
August News
Did you participate in the Connect-a-Thon? The last of three Connect-a-Thons for WikiTree's Year of Family Connections was held 15-18 July.
If you were one of the 624 participants - THANK YOU! Both for your work during the thon and for contributing to our Virtual team.
Name WikiTree ID # Team SJ Baty-260 55 Southern Super Sweepers Chris Brady-1418 396 Virginia Connectors Billie
KeaffaberBright-1984 22 Virginia Connectors Virginia
FieldsButter-100 135 Southern Super Sweepers Lela
HowardCook-14501 2 SouthWest Sunshiners Sandy
PatakCraig-4574 2044 Virginia Connectors
(co-captain)Laura DeSpain-617 29 Mighty Oak Branches Mags Gaulden-7 12 Cornbread Catchers John Griscom-30 106 Southern Super Sweepers Janine Isleman-1 33 Cornbread Catchers Ashley Jones-102730 23 Virginia Connectors Mollie King-14976 50 Mid-Atlantic Part Deux Pamela
ParkerMcCaleb-261 130 Cornbread Catchers Lynn
RobinsonMcCurdy-322 399 Virginia Connectors Anne Massey-4724 42 Virginia Connectors Sherrie Mitchell-17863 109 Virginia Connectors LaMyra Morton-7125 468 Team Missouri Liz
ShifflettNoland-165 105 Virginia Connectors Kelly
KleyPopp-547 218 Cornbread Catchers Helen Rice-8480 6 Virginia Connectors Pip Sheppard-2686 684 Southern Super Sweepers Sue
KnifleySmith-241759 671 Virginia Connectors Beth Stephenson-2354 44 Nor'Easters Marsha Sturdivant-606 44 Cornbread Catchers Glenn Tuley-92 2 Nordic Noir Bill Vincent-18 376 Virginia Connectors Tara Wildes-118 37 Cornbread Catchers Kathy
ZippererStuewe-5 207 Southern Super Sweepers Total 6,225 Virtual US Southern Colonies Team
- With 6,225 of the 87,731 connections made that weekend, we would have been in the top 5!
- Want more stats? Check out
- G2G wrap-up
- Stats by team & user
- CC7 histograms (for each user)
July News
Team News
- Mary Richardson, Project Coordinator for the Membership Team, thanks all of the members who replied to the 6-month check in, which she completed on 25 June.
- Sandy Patak, Team Leader for our Connectors Team would like to remind everyone of the upcoming Connect-a-Thon (15-18 July) - sign up here if you haven't already. Sandy shared that the Connectors Team is working with the Colonial Teams for the July Connect-A-Thon:
- Help the Southern Colonies Add and Connect to the Global Tree. Add passengers from the Southern Colony Ships to WikiTree: Each Ship Category has a Space Page with a list of Passengers that still need added.
Sticker News: The US Southern Colonies Member Sticker has a new parameter for "team":
- {{Member
- |Southern Colonies
- |team=[[Space: US Southern Colonies Colony of Virginia Team|Colony of Virginia Team]]
- }}
WikiTree Livecasts
- Have you caught any? They're advertised in G2G, like this post about the 22 June livecast on WikiTree projects. You can also check for G2G posts tagged livecasts and announcements
- One of the comments in the G2G post about the projects livecast (which you can watch here if you missed it) noted that the livecasts are included on WikiTree's Google calendar.
- The projects livecast was the first one I'd been able to catch. Many of you know that I've been on WikiTree a long time (since 2012), yet I've found that I always learn something when WikiTree posts things like this (I learned a LOT when the New Member How-Tos were released a few years back!) - and the project livecast was no different...
Did you know... about Category: Family? I didn't, but now that I do, I've added our category US Southern Colonies Family Studies to the subcategory Category: Family Projects. What do y'all think, should I add it to Category: Descendant Studies too?
And finally... another "Build Your Own Newsletter" challenge. Do you have a Revolutionary War hero in your tree who served in Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas or Georgia - or know of one you'd like to share? Please post a link to him (or her!) in the comments. I'll start with one of mine:
(You can easily grab the coding I just used from any profile by clicking on the "Link" option following the scissors at the top of the person's profile. The pop-up text for it says "Copy Wiki Link".)
Happy 4th of July to everyone celebrating!
June News
Arborists Team News, from Team Leader Shirley Dalton
Just a note to let you know what the project's Arborists Team is doing. We've all been busy elsewhere on WikiTree, but work has been done to clean up pending merges and some new ones have been proposed. From the oldest member of the Team, Susan McNamee, to the newest, Jamal Whittaker, we've all been helping to prune our Tree. I've been spending a lot of my time in 17th Century Virginia, tracking down duplicates and other DataDoctor Suggestions such as "father too old or not born." Surprising how many examples of this type of error pop up in the earlier records.
Connectors Team News, from Team Leader Sandy Patak
For the June Connector's Challenge, something a little different: Prep for the July Connect-A-Thon
- US Southern Colonies Connector's Challenge for June is to pick a location, pick a family line, or pick a Southern Colonies Group (Quaker, Huguenots, Irish, Scottish, etc.) and start a list for whom you would like to work on during WikiTree's July Connect-A-Thon. Also, collect sources on Family Search or our Southern Colonies Project Source Page.
What's in a name? Maybe not what you think!
A post on a project-managed profile last month had me looking for information about colonial naming practices... here's a copy of the resulting post:
- I went looking for a source for naming patterns & found a fascinating post about middle names worth sharing: https://genfiles.com/articles/middle-names/ - everything Bob posts is really well researched.
- I found some pages about naming patterns that should probably be read with a salt shaker nearby (not sure "take with a grain of salt" suffices for some of them, but still... pretty interesting). As Bob says in his post about Naming Patterns: "I generally discourage fellow family researchers from making hypotheses based on the names parents give to their children. There are articles all over the internet explaining that families of some particular time and place followed some specific set of rules in naming their children. But I’ve never seen an article that offered any sort of evidence for those claims."
- So grab that salt shaker and check out the following:
- https://genealogical.com/2019/02/04/clues-in-names/
- https://www.genealogy.com/articles/research/35_donna.html
- https://www.findmypast.com/blog/help/traditional-scottish-naming-patterns
- http://genealogytrails.com/lou/lasalle/naming.html
- https://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/walker/29775/ (I found myself mentally muttering "source please" while reading this one, although the urge was there for most of the others too!)
- http://udel.edu/~tdoherty/naming11s.pdf - this one states a practice that I've found leads many astray (thinking the previous wife was the mother): "When a wife or husband died, it was common to give the first child of the same gender from the next spouse, the given name and surname of the departed spouse." although in my experience, it's usually just the given name
- https://familytreemagazine.com/names/naming-traditions/jan-2012-naming-practices-feature/ (there's a hard-to-see "no thanks" for the window that obscures the page)
- See also the search results for images
- Cheers, Liz
- P.S. Bob also has an article about one of my soapbox issues (the fluidity & meaning of Sr/Jr in colonial America): https://genfiles.com/articles/senior-junior/
Need an example of Sr/Jr in the records not being for father/son? One passage from Cavaliers & Pioneers offers an example of Sr/Jr used for two people who were not father/son and also shows the fluidity of Sr/Jr for a pair who were. From the profile for Judith (Soane) Thweatt, who was born c1680:
- "On 24 November 1651 HENRY SOANE patented 297 acres, James City County (Patent Book 2, p 351) lyeing on the E side of the Chicohominy River, comonly know & called Hoggs Land; Transport 6 persons: HENRY SOANE, SR., HENRY SOANE, JR., JUDETH SOANE Senr., JUDETH SOANE Junr., JOHN SOANE, ELIZABETH SOANE. (Cavaliers & Pioneers, Vol 1, page 222)"
- The "Judeth Soane Senr." and "Judeth Soane Junr." are mother and daughter - Senr. is a Soane by marriage (wife of the Henry listed as Sr in the record) and their daughter, born a Soane.
- In 1651, Henry and his namesake son are identified as Sr and Jr in the patent record. Later, the son might be found in the records as Sr, after his father had died (or moved away) and his own namesake son has come of age (who would then be identified as Henry Soane Jr in official records).
Clear as mud, right? If you need help, post a comment to the profile if it's managed by the project & if it's not, post a question from the profile to G2G, tagged southern_colonies
US Southern Cololnies Project Editing Guidance
The post about Sr/Jr led to a suggestion that the article on Middle Names be added to one of our project pages. Both that article and the one that addresses Sr/Jr are now included in the project's Editing Guidance. What? You didn't know we had editing guidance? Check it out! (Or stop by for a refresher.) We also have an Example Profile, which has a "What it looks like in Edit View" section.
- NOTE - The editing guidance was significantly re-written in February 2023 and the sections mentioned are not included in the current guidance. To see sections from the guidance prior to the rewrite, see this page. ~ Noland-165, 10 February 2023
May News
The main event in April was Connect-a-Thon! Did you participate? The final count: 84,388 by 676 people on 33 teams (see the numbers by participant & by Team/Team Member).
US Southern Colonies Project did not field a team, but I know a lot of us participated. If you did, post a comment with your team & contributions so we can build a virtual team and see how we did. Update - The following table includes everyone from the project who participated.
| Member | # | Team |
|---|---|---|
| Sandy | 1,623 | Virginia Connectors |
| Liz | 50 | Virginia Connectors |
| Kathy | 461 | Southern Super Sweepers 2 |
| LaMyra | 411 | Team Missouri |
| Beth | 155 | Musty Dusty |
| Cathie | 65 | Southern Super Sweepers 2 |
| Renee | 23 | Southern Super Sweepers 2 |
| Leila | 4 | Northwest Terriers |
| William | 32 | Virginia Connectors |
| Pamela | 12 | Cornbread Catchers |
| Terri | 13 | Germany Genies |
| Patricia | 36 | Southern Super Sweepers 2 |
| Ashley | 12 | Virginia Connectors |
| Victoria | 31 | Southern Super Sweepers 1 |
| Porter Fann | 27 | Southern Super Sweepers 1 |
| Helen | 30 | Virginia Connectors |
| Chris | 627 | Virginia Connectors |
| John | 6 | Southern Super Sweepers 1 |
| Marsha | 56 | Cornbread Catchers |
| Pip | 682 | Southern Super Sweepers 2 |
| Virginia | 280 | Southern Super Sweepers 1 |
| Sherrie | 113 | Virginia Connectors |
| Emily | 10 | Tree Bolts |
| Bill | 387 | Virginia Connectors |
| Allice | 14 | Toddlin' Tortoises |
| Total | 5,160 | Our Virtual Team is #5.5 |
And I just have to give a special shout-out to our very own Sandy, Colonial Teams Project Coordinator & Team Leader of Georgia and Connectors Teams. She placed SECOND overall! And she was co-captain of the Virginia Connectors, which finished in first place!
As always, the biggest winner was WikiTree!
April News
Colonial Teams: With the Equinox just past and Easter coming up, we turned toward the role religion played in the American colonies for this month's theme. Sandy Patak, Project Coordinator for Colonial Teams, selected the following profiles to exemplify the theme.
- Province of Maryland: Fr Andrew White, considered the Apostle of Maryland, was banished from England due to Gunpowder Plot related activities and made his way to Maryland in hopes of converting the Piscataway Indians into Catholicism. Read his Profile to find out what he was the first to do in all of the original 13 English colonies.
- Colony of Virginia: Jean Baptiste De La Chaumette was a well-to-do Huguenot who, like many, emigrated from France to the West Indies before coming to the Southern Colonies. Shumate, his anglicized name, settled in the County of Stafford with over 200 acres of land. What does a Tavern and a Key have to do with his death? Read the Profile for details.
- Province of North Carolina: Christopher Nicholson was a Quaker child living in Massachusetts Bay whose father drowned. Did Christopher have anything to do with his father's death? Read his Profile to learn about the torture he and family endured before fleeing to the Province of North Carolina.
- Province of Georgia: Did you know that the English cleric John Wesley, notable for Methodism, spent time in the Province of Georgia? He was a missionary to Native Americans but ran into trouble on a separate matter: a lawsuit. Read his Profile to find out why he was sued in Georgia.
Connectors Team: It's Connect-A-Thon April! Have YOU registered for the April 2022 Connect-A-Thon yet? If not, here's your chance. Work on our list of US Southern Colonies Unconnected Profiles during the Thon. All US Southern Colonies Project Members are welcome to help us connect to the main tree.
Sign up now so you'll be all set when the Connect-A-Thon starts on Friday, 22 April (at 8 am / 0800 Eastern USA time). It will run until 8 am (EDT) on Monday, 25 April. The current sign-up post does not have a deadline, but it's usually a few days or so before the start of the thon.
- Thanks much to Sandy Patak, Project Coordinator for Colonial Teams and Connectors Team Leader, for providing the information for this month's News Update.
March News
- Theme: Ireland/Irish Immigration into the US Colonies
- Colony of Virginia: John O'Sullivan, an Irish Catholic whose family forfeited their baroncy to escape Ireland to the Colony of Virginia.
- Province of Maryland: A distinguished fortune-seeker named Charles Carroll came to the Province of Maryland from Ireland. He succeeded in accumulating a mansion, sixty thousand+ acres of land and an heiress, Mary Darnell.
- Province of South Carolina: Read about George Galphin, who was one of the many Scots-Irish that emigrated to the US Southern Colonies and married a Creek Indian woman while building Silver Bluff, SC.
- Province of Georgia: Scots-Irish Revolutionary Patriot, Alexander McCullar, arrived, at age 14, just prior to the US Revolutionary War and fought along the Savannah River before becoming a Southern Pioneer.
- If you're interested in getting a team effort going to improve profiles, post to a Colonial Teams page (see the list here). Or you could work individually on profiles.
- To help get you started:
- Province of Maryland, Immigrants from Ireland
- Colony of Virginia, Immigrants from Ireland
- Province of North Carolina, Immigrants from Ireland
- Province of Georgia, Immigrants from Ireland
- Continuing with WikiTree's Year of Connections. Help us add more Irish Immigrants with our "Oglethorpe's Forty Convicts" mini project. OPEN to all US Southern Colonists Project members!
- Thanks much to Sandy Patak, Project Coordinator for Colonial Teams and Connectors Team Leader, for providing the information for this month's News Update.
February News
Member Check In
The 6-month project member check in is over. Thanks to all who answered me. ~ Mary Richardson, Membership Project Coordinator
Looking for something to do? Check out this new project page, where you'll find lots of links to help you find project profiles in need of attention:
Questions? Contact Ken Spratlin, our new Project Coordinator for Managed Profiles, announced 6 January in the Project's Discussion Google Group. Ken is also Categories Team Leader.
Team News from Sandy Patak
- Connectors Team - Virginia is for Lovers so this month the Connecting Team is inviting all US Southern Colonies members to help out sharing the love by connecting one (or many!) of the Unconnected Profiles for Virginia. Many to choose from with over 3000 unconnected during the US Southern Colonies time period: click here for unconnected profiles listing "Colony of Virginia".
- Colonial Teams - Share your love of the US Southern Colonies by inviting a WikiTree friend to join one of our Colonial Teams. The focus is on the pre-1776 profiles of the everyday men and women born and living in the colonies.
- Province of Georgia Team - It is Black History Month in the United States and our Team (in coordination with the US Black Heritage Project) are adding Slave Holders and Slave Profiles from the 1860 Census of Murray County, Georgia (a bit out of our timeframe, but the families often date back to the colonial period). To help, visit the Documenting Enslaved People in WT page before beginning.
Did you know....
- ... how to get a "count" of stickers in use? A recent G2G discussion (here) prompted me to share the summation that Aleš Trtnik posted, edited from being about the 1776 Sticker to being about the US Southern Colonist Sticker. Aleš noted that "None of the numbers is perfect."
- Link to "Parameter usage on profiles" on template page [ Template: US Southern Colonist Sticker ] contains parameters from the Biography, which can often be very useful. But it is missing unlisted profiles and profiles with private bio. It is updated daily and you can check the numbers for a few months back to see changes:
- The "Special:Whatlinkshere" link ("Pages using the template" on the template page) returns the actual usage, including Space pages, the Template page,... It is up to date all the time, but it can be hard to estimate the number of profiles.
- The number on Automated:Template_Index is actually the same number as the Whatlinkshere one, but is updated a few times a week. But it is useful for comparing templates.
- The G2G question was about the 1776 Sticker. Did you know that as of 29 January 2022, there were more than 9000 profiles in the "1776 Project Needs Template:1776 Review" category (since deleted),[1] which is described as being "for profiles that are using the deprecated Template:1776 sticker. To remove profiles from this category, review the usage of the 1776 template and update it to the new {{1776 Sticker}} format. Please note the careful review of the parameters are needed! [note: brackets were removed from references to the deprecated 1776 template, so that it can be deleted] ~ Noland-165, 27 December 2022
- Of those, more than 200 appear to be either managed or "stickered" by the US Southern Colonies Project - discovered by using the "WikiTree+ Search" options reached by clicking that link on the [now deleted] category page (it's in the upper right-hand corner, just before the [Navigate] link) and adding US Southern Colonist to the Text search.
- Correcting the problem (changing the 1776 template to the 1776 Sticker template) can be tricky & the 1776 Project has some specifics as "Project Recognition for profiles and members". If you have additional questions, contact the 1776 Project for guidance or post in G2G, tagged stickers & 1776.
- News Posted as a Comment, 8 January 2022
- Just saw a G2G post for if you have questions about the Winter 2022 Connect-a-Thon:
- And a reminder that the deadline to register - at https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1341478/have-you-registered-for-the-winter-2022-connect-a-thon-yet - is 12 January!
January 2022 News
Happy New Year 2022 - WikiTree's Year of Family Connections
Best wishes to all for a wonderful 2022 and to WikiTree for another successful Challenge Year. As you might know, WikiTree is "making 2022 our Year of Family Connections" (see the G2G announcement post for more information).
January 2022 Connect-a-Thon
The January Connect-a-Thon - the first of three Connect-a-Thons planned for 2022 (with the only other thon being the "ever-popular Fall Source-a-Thon") - takes place 14-17 January.
If you haven't yet signed up for the Winter Connect-a-Thon, head over to the G2G Registration question and post an answer. If you want to join a particular team, say so in your answer (see this page for a list of teams). As noted on the Help: Connect-a-Thon page, the cut-off date for registering is midnight on Wednesday, 12 January.
What's involved? Here's a a brief bit from the Help page's Participation Instructions:
- Since tracking connections is somewhat complex, for this challenge we just count the number of parents, siblings, spouses and children you add to existing person profiles. Often these will be "collateral" relatives that members neglected to add when adding their family tree. Each relative you add increases the chance that an individual's tree will intertwine with our global tree.
The Help page also includes a section on Where to work from, which is where I first learned about the maintenance categorization hierarchy for "Needs Profiles Created". For details about the category (which has close to 10000 profiles), see the category page. You'll find subcategories for Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia under Category: United States, Needs Profiles Created.
Challenge 1
WikiTree's 2022 WikiTree Challenge 1 is Jimmy Wales. If you'd like to participate in the challenge "to uncover as much as possible about his family history in one week", that's a separate registration (see this G2G post). The week-long Challenge 1 starts 5 January. I didn't see a cut-off date for the weekly challenge, but if you're interested, posting sooner rather than later is probably a good idea.
Your Own Watchlist
Whether or not you join a Connect-a-Thon or a Weekly Challenge this year, you can still work on reducing the number of unconnected profiles by checking your own Watchlist (click Special:Unconnected). You can do a quick check on any profile to see if it's connected - go to the bottom of a profile & if it has the paragraph with the weekly connections (e.g., "12 degrees from...", below "Matches and Merges"), then it's connected.
Building "outward" - adding siblings, spouses, and in-laws - helps make connections whether or not your lineal ancestors are connected. It also is a great way to help cousins you may not yet know find you!
Finding Unconnected Profiles
Click here for links to Unconnected Reports for Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia posted by the project's Connectors Team page. Post a comment there if you're a project member and would like to join the Connectors Team. To become a member of the US Southern Colonies Project, answer our G2G welcome post (see the link on the project page).
Happy 2022 and Best Wishes for a great WikiTree "Year of Family Connections"!
- Footnotes
- ↑ Wording updated January 2024, in order to remove the link to the category so that it could be deleted.
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