Saturday, June 11, 2022

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- What Genealogy Search/Research Did You Do Last Week?

 It's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun! 


Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music here) is to:

1)  What genealogy search/research did you do last week?  Did you have a research goal or plan?  Tell us about one or more search/research session.

2)  Write your own blog post, or add your response as a comment to this blog post, in a Facebook Status post or note.

Here's mine:

As many of you know, I was in the hospital having an angiogram (on 26 May) and a quadruple heart artery bypass operation (on 30 May) for most of the last two weeks.  

That didn't stop my mind from going a mile a minute on my family history work.  In the hospital, I was handicapped by having only my iPhone and my laptop which does not have an up-to-date RootsMagic file or most of my genealogy record files.  I could access email, Internet, Facebook, Feedly and Twitter on a daily basis either in bed or sitting in a chair in the hospital room.  I even wrote a few blog posts while at the hospital.

I came home on Tuesday night (7 June) and have been here ever since, trying to sleep, rest, recuperate, and not fall down or eat food with sodium or fat or sugar.  Boring, but it has to be done.  At least my Padres have been winning!

One of my blog posts since I came home was Rabbit Holes With Randy -- Six Degrees of Randy Seaver From WikiTree, posted 8 June 2022).  In that post, I complained that there were not enough descendants in WikiTree for many of my 3rd great-grandparents, based on a descendant chart created in WikiTree's profile for 3rd great-grandfather Abraham Kemp (1795-1864) of Ontario, Canada.  I have hundreds of his descendants in my RootsMagic file.  If they were in WikiTree, then other researchers who may also be descendants - my cousins! - might be helped in their research.  And they - in turn - might contact me and offer more information about their ancestral families.

I decided that I shouldn't complain without doing something, so I made a GEDCOM file of the descendants of John Kemp (1768-1864) - the father of Abraham Kemp - in RootsMagic.  So my goal for the week was to add the information in the GEDCOM to the 30 million other profiles in WikiTree.  This sounds easy - just upload the GEDCOM, right?

Well, it isn't.  WikiTree requires that every person in an uploaded GEDCOM to be matched against all of the other person profiles in WikiTree.  The user has to go through the information provided for every person in your GEDCOM and it will not be uploaded until the user has completed that task.

For many matches, they provide "suggested matches" and the user has to click to either "Match" or "Reject the Match" of each suggestion.  The user is left to judge if the suggest match person is the same person as the person in the GEDCOM.  I consider birth and death dates and places, parents names, spouse's name, children's name, etc. in my evaluation.  If a Match is accepted, then the user is encouraged to compare the information for the GEDCOM person to the WikiTree person and accept or edit the WikiTree profile information based on the information available.  

If there are no suggested matches for a GEDCOM person, or none of the suggested matches are not the GEDCOM person, the user can check the "completed" box for the person on the GEDCOM list to move on to the next GEDCOM person.  

My GEDCOM file for 6 generations of descendants of my 4th great-grandfather John Kemp had 1081 persons in it.  On WikiTree, as of today, I have confirmed 70 matches so far, and have rejected 343 suggested matches.  I have completed matching, rejecting and editing 456 of the GEDCOM profiles so far so I am well on my way to completing this task.  

I have spent about 12 hours doing these accept/reject matches and editing information to date, so I have another 15 or 20 hours to go.  This is really not genealogy fun for me, but it's one way to get more information into WikiTree.  One other way is to add new profiles one-by-one, entering vital event data, sources and notes as required.  

I'm pursuing this in about one hour sessions several times a day in order to finish the task and get some rest, food and exercise, and maybe even write more blog posts.

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Copyright (c) 2022, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

9 comments:

Linda Stufflebean said...

Randy, You are very dedicated to take on all that work adding people to WikiTree. It sounds a bit overwhelming!

David Fernley said...

I started the laborious process of entering all my paper based research onto Mac Family Tree. Although this is going over old ground, I'm amazed at how many new insights I'm getting into my ancestors. Maybe because it's because I'm looking at the information differently. I wish I'd done this when I started in earnest six years ago. Well done on the recovery Randy.

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

Glad you're back, Randy!

Here's mine. I got a lot of work down the past two weeks. https://mytrailsintothepast.blogspot.com/2022/06/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what.html

Grandpa Landmeier said...

I was concerned, but did not know the reason for your absence. Take care good friend.

ByAPearl said...

This is a summary of my week.
https://geneajournalsbyapearl.wordpress.com/2022/06/11/sngf-last-weeks-genealogy-search-research/

Liz Tapley said...

Here's mine:

https://gatapleytree.blogspot.com/2022/06/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what.html

Janice M. Sellers said...

Glad to see you are back, Randy!

Here's mine:

http://www.ancestraldiscoveries.com/2022/06/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what.html

Linda Stufflebean said...

Here's mine: https://emptybranchesonthefamilytree.com/2022/06/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-197/

Diane Gould Hall said...

Well, my friend, no research for me. I spent my last week tracing the steps of Mayflower ancestors, with 30 other Mayflower descendants. Great fun, and certainly genealogy related. I do hope to blog about my experience in the next week. My poor blog has been sorely neglected this year.
Thanks for sharing this experience with Wiki tree. Sounds like a lot of work. Glad you have something to keep you busy as you slowly recover and become the best version of you. You’re still my inspiration.