Madison
County Genealogical Society
Minutes of the Meeting – April 12, 2018
The April 2018 meeting of the Madison County Genealogical Society was held at the Edwardsville Public Library on Thursday, April 12, at 7:00 pm.
President, Robert Ridenour, called the meeting to order.
GIFT
MEMBERSHIPS AVAILABLE
Do you have a family member that is
interested in (or even obsessed with) genealogy? A membership in the Madison
County Genealogical Society would be a very thoughtful gift. A gift card will
be sent to the recipient of any gift membership.
The following memberships are available:
Individual/Family Annual Membership $25.00
Patron Annual Membership $35.00
Life Membership $300.00
Contact our Secretary, Petie Hunter, at petie8135@att.net,
about a gift membership.
April
Meeting
On April 12, 2018, David Axtell
presented a program titled The
Wonderful World of Wikitree. David showed us how he uses
WikiTree to build an online family tree, including DNA test results.
David was born in
Nebraska, grew up in South Texas, lived and worked in Colorado for 60 years,
and moved here in 2012 to take care of his brother, who taught biology at SIUE
for 54 years. He has degrees from the University of Colorado in Chemistry and
Chemical Engineering. David spent two years in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, West
Africa, as a school teacher. He worked in Colorado,
mostly as an Environmental Engineer and Computer Programmer. He is now retired,
but volunteers with an international social service organization called Service
Civil International (SCI).
David’s ancestors first
came to America in 1642, settling in the Boston area. They played a strong part
in the Revolutionary War. His great-grandfather was one of the first
Congressmen from California, and later became Territorial Governor of Utah,
then of New Mexico. His grandfather was an ordinary farmer from Ohio.
Not too many years ago,
I discovered this neat program called WikiTree. I asked around the group a
little bit but no one seemed to know anything about it, so I decided to give
you a presentation on WikiTree. Why would I want to introduce you to WikiTree?
First, it is a really good family tree application. Secondly, it is totally
free. And thirdly, it is international; it is not just for the United States,
it is for the entire world. There is only one other program that I know of that
is international, like WikiTree, and that is one called Genie, which comes out
of Israel and it has a subscription fee. There are some basic things you can do
with it that are free, but if you want to do anything useful with it, you have
to pay a subscription fee. I think that WikiTree is superior for that reason.
To take full advantage
of WikiTree, you have to register. It does not cost anything to register, but
they want to know who is using it. There are a few things you can do with it
without registering: you can look up people to see if there are any public
records for them. One thing about WikiTree is that you can make records public
or private so that you can control who sees what is in the database.
There is an “honor
code.” The honor code says, “I will not tell anyone else what I find on here
unless it belongs to my family or is something I can communicate to other
people.” If you pledge the honor code, that allows you more access to records.
You can do things because they know that you will not publish whatever you find
and give it out to other people.
When you go to
WikiTree.com, the first screen gives you choices of many things you can do in WikiTree.
If you need an explanation of something, just pick on the title and you will
get one.
One of the things that
WikiTree requests you do is to document your sources. The whole idea behind
WikiTree is that they are trying to create an international family tree, i.e., relate everybody in the world, if possible. The whole idea
is that you have a collaborative family tree. You put your family tree into
WikiTree, and see if any of your ancestors correlate with any of the other
people who are on WikiTree. You can then join them together so that they are
the same person. Then you will have access to the family tree of all the other
people that come from that particular person.
Every profile on
WikiTree has a privacy level; and they have a trusted list for that particular
person. People who are on the trusted list can see all the information on that
person. If you are not on the trusted list, all you can see is the name of the
person and perhaps what year they were born and what year they died. The trusted
list incorporates the honor code, but there are seven different levels of the
trusted list. You can put in your relatives or you can put in someone else’s
relatives that you wish to access, if they will allow you access.
All the information is
put onto a server somewhere that will continue to exist so you will not lose
your information. If you get out of WikiTree, your information will stay there,
unless you request it be deleted.
If you are willing to
help other people track their ancestors, you can sign up as a genealogist and
that gives you more access to more files.
The “Honor Code” is a
pledge community members make to each other.
The last time I
downloaded something, they had 17 million profiles, 4 million of them with DNA
test results.
Let us put somebody’s
name in here and see what happens. Anybody care to volunteer?
Elias Hamilton.
Three matches for Elias
Hamilton, but none of them were the one of interest. This is the type of thing
you can do if you are just a visitor, i.e., you have not joined WikiTree.
Every week they have a
profile of some famous person; and you can check and see if you are related to
them or not.
They have Clean-a-Thons
where they have people who volunteer come in and clean up records, or try to
coordinate different records.
They have the top
family names of each day. They have groups where the members all have something
in common, e.g., Titanic passengers, people from Illinois, etc. You can start
your own group if you want to.
When you register as a
member of WikiTree, you give an email and a password and you are asked to sign
up for the “Honor Code.” If you lose your password, you can have a new password
sent to you. When you join, it gives you a registration number that stays with
you for your entire time in WikiTree. Your registration number is usually your
surname followed by a number that indicates how many people of the same surname
are members.
When you become a
member, you put in your personal data, when your family has anniversaries, DNA confirmation,
etc. you can put in a GEDCOM file. You can add people. You can search for
people, for text, etc. There is a very large help file that gives you all kinds
of information on how to do things.
You can add DNA
information to WikiTree through GEDmatch.
You can display family
trees in various formats, including what is called a dynamic tree.
WikiTree has different
rules for things before 1700. You have to take a “course” from WikiTree before
they will let you post information from before 1700.
You can get a list of
people connecting you to famous people, e.g., Queen Elizabeth, John Jacob
Astor, using Global Connections.
This presentation was very well received and
provoked many questions and comments.