RLP 307: Build Your Family Tree at WikiTree with Betsy Ko

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro. episode 307, build Your Tree at Wiki Tree with Betsy Ko. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder Accredited Genealogist Professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join, Diana, and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (42s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro

Diana (48s):
Hi. Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (50s):
Great. I’ve been making a lot of progress on my portfolio. I’m so excited. My portfolio for certification. How about you?

Diana (59s):
Well, I’ve been working on my research plan for John Cline and I think I told you sometime over the weekend that I was kind of disappointed because I couldn’t find him on the tax list, but I finally found him. And so this is such an interesting tax list. This is Sangamon County, Illinois, and it is organized by the original Patentee, but the land description. So it’ll go through, you know, 17 four and then 18 four and 19 four, which is the township and the range. and I could not figure out how it was organized and I was like, what the heck? What is going on here? There’s no rhyme or reason for this. And then I finally clued into that and I found my John C.

Diana (1m 42s):
Cline, but he was in the wrong township. His land was actually 28, but they’d written down 29. And so it had confused me and I had seen this, this JC Cline kind of difficult to interpret initials and thought, is this really my person? But anyway, once I figured out the lay of the land, I found him and oh good, now I have him in a cluster of people that he was living around. So you know, I can kind of map and, and look at all these different people that were living there in 1836 because really all I have is him buying the Landsdown gland in this tax list. And he’s only there for like at most two years, But, you know, now I figured it out. so that was, that was kind of exciting when I finally understood the tax list.

Diana (2m 25s):
And the funny thing is I was doing that browsing, you know, the boring browsing page by page. Well, I was listening to Elizabeth Shown Mills’ latest webinar on legacy tree webinars on tax lists. So it was really fun to, to be following her webinar as I’m doing this browsing and scanning page by page.

Nicole (2m 42s):
Yeah, that’s a lot of work and it can be arduous. When I talked to you over the weekend, you hadn’t found it yet and you were feeling disappointed that you didn’t find it

Diana (2m 50s):
Right? Right.

Nicole (2m 52s):
So it sounds like there was just an error on the land record for the township.

Diana (2m 57s):
Yeah, I had looked at all the 20 eights and he was not there, but there was this JC Cline 29, but the initials didn’t really look that much like JC, they, they just looked kinda odd. So I wasn’t sure. and I hadn’t quite figured out how it was organized yet. So yeah, I found them. The other interesting thing in this county is in the deeds, they do not say how many acres of land it is for, for buying and selling. and I went back and checked and it is not there on either of the deeds, but on the tax list it shows him being taxed for 70 acres and then another gentleman being taxed for 10 acres of this original patent. So I thought that was really interesting too. So maybe I can research, you know, the other gentleman.

Diana (3m 37s):
Well

Nicole (3m 38s):
That’s really interesting. You learned a lot this weekend.

Diana (3m 41s):
I did. and I kind of decided that now I need to stop on this part of the research and go back to DNA and really work on DNA because I think this will be a whole nother project. Figuring out where he was before coming to Illinois. you know, there’s a lot of fantastic, fantastic. So anyway, I’m gonna stop that and go back to DNA on my research.

Nicole (3m 57s):
That’s good. I’m glad you found a stopping point. and I also decided to stop on my diary research because there was so much ahead. But I made a lot of progress with looking at the different Y lines on the YDNA surname project for the Dyers. and I wanted to spend just this report writing that up instead of adding a bunch of other research to it so that I have a report that just focuses on that

Diana (4m 19s):
Part. That’s really good. Yeah, I think it’s really important to know when to stop and realize that you can go on forever, but let’s just stop and write up what we have, which is one of our biggest lessons we’ve had to learn,

Nicole (4m 31s):
You know? Absolutely.

Diana (4m 33s):
Well, let’s do some announcements. We have our Research Like a Pro Webinar Series. Our latest webinar coming up will be June 18th. This is Jessica Morgan, and the title is The Oliver Case using Deductive Reasoning with British Parish Records. So this will be fabulous. Jessica is our British specialist on our research team and is an amazing researcher, so I’m excited for that. We have our next Research Like a Pro DNA study group beginning in August, and we’re excited to welcome returning members as well as new members. We have our peer group leader application on the website, and if you have gone through the Research Like a Pro process before and would love to have free registration and work with a small group, be sure you apply for that.

Diana (5m 18s):
And we are also excited for our brand new Research Like a Pro with AI four day workshop, which will be July 29th through August 1st. And we’re excited to teach and explore together how we can use AI in all the processes for Research Like a Pro. And then, as always, please join our newsletter if you’d like to keep in touch with us. We send that out weekly on Monday and let you know of latest blog posts, podcasts, videos, and all the different things that we’re doing here at FamilyLocket. We are excited that we have got the National Genealogical Society Conference that we are done with that at this point. It’s done. It’s always fun to look forward to other conferences coming up.

Diana (6m 1s):
Summer’s usually the time for institutes, not not a lot of conferences, but we’ll have the Association of Professional Genealogist Conference in the fall. So always fun to think of what’s coming next.

Nicole (6m 14s):
Thank you. Well, I’m so happy to introduce our guest today, Betsy Ko. She is a mentor at Wiki Tree and also the leader of the Wiki Tree Events Committee. So hi, Betsy

Betsy Ko (6m 29s):
Hi. Nicole. Hi Diana. It’s so wonderful to be here, Thank you for having me.

Nicole (6m 33s):
We’re so glad that you could join us today. I’ve been wanting to do a series on Wiki Tree so that Diana and I and our listeners can learn about it and how we can use Wiki Tree to further our research and preserve our research. Well, before we jump into that, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started in family history.

Betsy Ko (6m 55s):
My interest started back when I was a child because I had the middle name Tudor, and there were some family stories about that name. And then the interest lay dormant for a while until 2015. And, and then I started digging more deeply. I discovered Wiki Tree in 2019. It was through, as many of us do, it was through a Google search. and I came upon a profile of an ancestor that I was researching, and the profile was on Wiki Tree and it had research notes. and I was just very struck by the approach to constructing the story of this person’s life with accuracy.

Betsy Ko (7m 39s):
And so I looked into Wiki Tree, joined myself, and now I spend every day there’s time, time spent on Wiki Tree. It’s a wonderful community.

Nicole (7m 49s):
I love that. Well, tell us more about what you do at Wiki Tree as far as your role with being a mentor and the events committee.

Betsy Ko (7m 59s):
Right? Yes. So with the events committee, as I mentioned, the community is wonderful and you really do get to know people, which surprised me. I, I never anticipated that with an online community. But we have many events throughout the year. Our biggest events are what we call “Thons”, as in marathon. We have three connect-a-thons and a source-a-thon every year where people are organized into teams. And it’s a lot of fun. And of course all ultimately it, it benefits the health of the tree as we’re, we’re adding sources or, or growing the branches.

Betsy Ko (8m 40s):
So I help organize many of those events. And then my other role is as a mentor, my life outside of genealogy is as a musician, as an teacher. So during the pandemic, I, like many other teachers, had to learn how to teach online and became comfortable with it. So I thought out loud one day that we could do a lot to help new Wiki Treers by having Zoom sessions where we could talk with them in real time screen share and really answered their very specific questions. So I’ve been doing that for a year and a half now, and it’s been so rewarding to help New Wiki Tree.

Betsy Ko (9m 23s):
And also we just start, we call them newts, by the way, NEWT, which stands for new to Wiki Tree. So earlier this month we just debuted a team that I captained for the Connect-a-thon, which we was the new team for anyone who’s new to Wiki Tree, first time doing a thon. ’cause you know, it’s, it’s a lot when you start on Wiki Tree.

Diana (9m 46s):
Oh my goodness, I had no idea all this was going on. That’s so awesome. So many good things came out of Covid. It was not a fun time. But yeah, man, we’ve got a lot of educational opportunities that came from that. So I think a lot of our listeners are probably thinking, okay, I’m interested, what in the world is Wiki Tree? So I think we need to just start at the beginning and let us know what this is.

Betsy Ko (10m 9s):
Absolutely. So Wiki Tree is now 16 years old. It’s a single family global tree, and you’ll find us at wikitree.com. There are 1,102,000 members and a little and change. So it’s a very large community, more than 30 million profiles that have been put on the tree. And what the things that make it special, all of our active members have to sign an honor code, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in, in a bit. But among other points, it asks that those who sign uphold accuracy and sourcing. So again, that, that struck me immediately when I discovered Wiki Tree.

Betsy Ko (10m 52s):
I thought that that was wonderful. It’s a very collaborative community and incorporates DNA and it’s free.

Diana (10m 59s):
Oh, that’s a wonderful overview. So I’m just looking at my profile here and I am cracking up because I have Newt Schultz Elder, and so I’m apparently a newt, which is very, very absolutely correct. I looked at that thought, what in the world is that? And then you talked about what a newt is, the new Wiki treers so that is so fun. Well, obviously I mute these podcasts and these discussions so I can learn what I’m doing there. So thanks for that overview. It’s great. Of course, I’m happy to hear that it’s growing and it’s, I mean, so amazing.

Nicole (11m 32s):
Well, how do you get started with creating an account?

Betsy Ko (11m 35s):
It’s very easy. When I was at Roots Tech, people were stopping by the booth and you know, in most cases I just said, Hey, let’s, let’s just create an account right now. And it took all of about three minutes. So you go to wikitree.com and you’ll see a big get started button. You click it and it will come up with a field. You put in your name, your, your password, you certify that you’re an adult, or that you’re over 13 and you have an adult, your parents’ permission. Then what that does is it creates a profile page. Then you’re off and running from there. It’s that easy.

Nicole (12m 13s):
Well, that does sound easy, and it’s nice to know that it’s free and that it’s easy to get started with creating an account.

Diana (12m 21s):
So can you tell us, Betsy, what kind of accounts there are?

Betsy Ko (12m 26s):
Yes. So when you go through that, that procedure that I just talked through, what you’re gonna end up having is a guest account. So this actually still allows you to do quite a lot on Wiki tree. It allows you to, of course, browse around other profiles and say you stumble across your second great-grandparents’ profile. You can post a comment on the profile and, and reach the profile manager who probably is a cousin. It will allow you to post on our, we call G to G forum. And that stands for Genealogists to Genealogists. It’s very active and people post questions and new ideas for, for the community.

Betsy Ko (13m 11s):
Lots of communication going on there. You can’t do any editing though, such as creating new profiles. If you’re a guest member. If you want to do that, you would upgrade to being a family member. and I, just wanna say again, when I use the word upgrade, it’s totally free. Family members can make more contributions. Most family members tend to upload photos, which we love. And there’s also a section of the profile at the bottom for memories. So if there’s a favorite story about an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent that you wanna add, there’s a place for that. As a family member, you can add DNA and you can do up to 300 edits on profiles.

Betsy Ko (13m 55s):
At that point, 300 edits, the system is really going to prompt you to sign the honor code and become what we call a Wiki genealogist. So there’s a 10 point honor code, and once you sign off on it, it will give you the ability for full participation in all of the projects, community events and so on. Wiki Tree is also really fantastic for its geographical and interest based projects. So for example, I’m in the England project and the Canada project, just to name a few where I can collaborate with others who are specifically working in those countries.

Diana (14m 37s):
Oh, wow, that’s amazing. So I have a really beginner question for you. Sure. Looking at my profile page, how do I know what kind of account I have? I’m guessing I maybe have a guest account, but is there a way I can tell that on the page?

Betsy Ko (14m 51s):
Yes. So it should be right under your name. So I’m looking at my profile right now and it says Honor code signatory. I think from seeing other profiles, it would say underneath your name, guest member or family member.

Diana (15m 7s):
Oh, I just clicked on my profile and there I am. I am an honor code signatory. Okay,

Betsy Ko (15m 12s):
Excellent. Wonderful.

Diana (15m 14s):
Well see, I’ve learned something already. This is so exciting. Okay, so that’s great to know. and I love that you really clarified. There’s no cost. This is a hundred percent free. Always,

Betsy Ko (15m 23s):
Always.

Diana (15m 23s):
Great.

Nicole (15m 25s):
Well, you’ve mentioned a couple things alluding to this, but I know there are some rules when we’re collaborating on Wiki Tree. Can you kind of go over some of those rules?

Betsy Ko (15m 34s):
Absolutely. So, so the honor code is a nine point document and I’ll, I’ll just talk quickly through the nine points. The first is collaboration, because as everyone knows, the farther you go back, the more great, great, great, great great grandchildren that person will have had. And the likelihood of our bumping into each other on a shared tree is, is high. So, and we actually, we, we celebrate that on Wiki Tree. When we come across a cousin, we may bring different sets of information to enriching that ancestors’ profile. And story accuracy is point number two. Every profile is a work in progress.

Betsy Ko (16m 16s):
New information’s always coming to light. So we’re always aiming to improve because people are human. There may be mistakes. So we, we try to fix the mistakes. Also, knowing that mistakes, we, we try to, to assume good intentions. We take the stance that mistakes are unintentional and, and just work to fix them. When there are misunderstandings which are inevitable, we really try to minimize those by being courteous to everyone, even if that is not return, but we try and be polite to everyone. Point number five is privacy. And this is something that has been given an impressive amount of thought.

Betsy Ko (16m 58s):
I think Wiki Tree, we privacy protect anything that our family members might not want public. We’ve actually had a, a shift in policies for living people on Wiki Tree. Not active members, but say close family of active members. And really we wanna make sure that everybody has the chance to say yes or no, whether they want, want to be on Wiki Tree. And then copyrights is point number six. We don’t knowingly copy information that’s owned by somebody else that includes pictures. So we, we either get permission from the owner of the photo or we, you make sure that it’s in a common attribution realm.

Betsy Ko (17m 44s):
We give credit for others. So a lot of times you’ll see it at the bottom of a profile. It might be managed by one person, but they give credit to an earlier researcher. We cite sources. And then finally, we’re united in a mission to increase the world’s common store of knowledge. So we, while we respect copyrights and privacy, we’re, we’re trying to keep the information as free and open to everyone as we can. So that’s what makes a Wiki Treer a Wiki Treer.

Nicole (18m 17s):
I love that. That was a really good overview and, and it’s so great to hear about the privacy, respect and then the copyright respect and, and just really goes along with so many of the standards and genealogy standards published by the Board for Certification of Genealogists. So it’s nice to see that. and I really like the last point that you mentioned. We do want to give credit and respect copyright, but we’re trying to keep information free and open and I just remember, you know, in our copyright lesson that we teach in the study group that my mom teaches facts can’t be copyrighted. And so I love that even though we’re not going to take a paragraph from a book someone wrote and copy it without permission, we can still use the facts from that, you know?

Betsy Ko (19m 1s):
Absolutely.

Diana (19m 2s):
Right. Those are, that was such a great discussion of the rules that you have in place and the guidelines. I I think those are excellent. Well, for someone who’s just getting started and they wanna build their tree, say they’ve got their tree on Ancestry or in Family Tree Maker, Roots magic, can you create a GEDCOM and upload that? And how do you do that? If

Betsy Ko (19m 23s):
Yes, you can. Absolutely. and I know that many people come to Wiki Tree having been at genealogy for decades, possibly. And so they, they have their tree stored elsewhere. So we, we do have a way to upload GEDCOMs and we have all these help pages. So it’s, it would be easy to just search for GEDCOMs and then once you upload a GEDCOM, what’s going to happen is that we have a tool called GEDCOMpare, and it will compare between what you’ve uploaded and what profiles are already on Wiki Tree because we only want one profile per person.

Betsy Ko (20m 6s):
We don’t want to create duplicates. They do happen and in we can merge them if they do happen, but we, we try to avoid them if we can in the first place. Your GEDCOM can’t be more than 5,000 people. In fact, it’s recommended that you perhaps split your tree into smaller GEDCOMs, maybe a line at a time and upload those smaller trees. The other comment that I have just based on my personal experience is that I, I had my tree on Ancestry and I had a lot of media and I found out, even though I didn’t have anywhere near 5,000, that made it a little more cumbersome.

Betsy Ko (20m 50s):
And ultimately I ended up just manually entering my ancestors again because it gave me an opportunity to review my research, which I, I valued.

Diana (21m 0s):
That’s so interesting. So if I add a few of my ancestors, do you eventually get back to someone that’s already in the tree, you know, like you get to, to a great grandparent or something and connect there?

Betsy Ko (21m 14s):
Yes. That is a really exciting moment. So I’m sure I, if it were me and I was, you know, looking at great-great-great grandparents, I would reach out to the profile manager and see how are we related. So looking at any profile, you’ll see a profile manager and then right to the right of that, there’s a little envelope. So you can send a private message and also between the name and the envelope, there’s another little icon that will tell you the relationship of that profile manager to the person in the profile. Oh, nice. That’s very handy.

Diana (21m 52s):
Nice. There are a lot of things going on here, so it’s like somebody thought of everything they wanted to have and then outta it. That is so awesome. Yeah.

Nicole (22m 4s):
Well, at this point we’re going to have a word from our sponsor Newspaper.com. This episode is brought to you by Newspapers.com. Discover your mom in the newspaper when you search Newspapers.com. Find the stories that made her who she is today by searching the largest online newspaper. Archive Newspapers.com makes it easy to find your mom, grandma, and others in the papers. Search more than 945 million pages from major news titles to small town papers, uncover birth and marriage announcements, obituaries photos, and much, much more. Explore papers dated back to 1690 or as recent as last month. Newspapers.com is used by millions of people every month for genealogy, historical research and more, find something you like with Newspapers.com.

Nicole (22m 50s):
It’s a snap to save and share articles with family and friends, or attach them directly to your Ancestry tree. Use promo code FamilyLocket for a 20% discount on your subscription. That’s Code FamilyLocket and celebrate the stories of a lifetime with Newspapers.com.

Diana (23m 7s):
All right, well, let’s say we want to just find an ancestor or a person we’re researching on Wiki Tree. How do we go about doing that?

Betsy Ko (23m 16s):
And this is something that I do all the time. What you’d wanna do is just go to the homepage or actually there, there’s also a search field at the top of any profile, and you’ll see a space for first name, last name, or if you know their Wiki Tree id and you’re just trying to get back to them, you could put in their whole ID and then hit search from there and it will give you a table. Now, this is also just changed as of April 1st, so it looks a little different than it has in the past, but I love the new functionality. The table allows you to sort by name, birth date, death date, a profile manager that’s a new feature, last edit date, and the privacy level, like a sophisticated spreadsheet.

Betsy Ko (24m 3s):
You can not only filter it, you can filter it one way, you can click the button, you can do it in reverse, and you can add a secondary filter. Once I got used to it, I realized what a powerful improvement this is.

Diana (24m 17s):
Oh, wow. So I am just guessing that if you get on here and you get a little confused, this would be why you would wanna join one of your Zoom calls. Right. To, to, to learn how to navigate all the different things. Because, you know, I’m looking, I I decided to search for my John Cline and, and there are a lot of profiles here. That’s exciting too, how you can search and look through all of these. So that’s great.

Betsy Ko (24m 42s):
Absolutely. If we were doing this on a Zoom call, you would see it in action and, and you know, I see aha, I hear aha all the time on those calls.

Diana (24m 53s):
Okay, so what about just looking for specific surnames, you know, if we don’t have a, a man

Betsy Ko (24m 60s):
Right. Surname index pages. So those have been around for a while. They’ve changed a little bit with the introduction of the new search field, but they’re still there. The now they’re intended more for new visitors to Wiki Tree to just, you know, say, oh, I’m interested in this surname. And if the way to get to the surname page is to just type that surname in the last name field of the search box, and then it’ll come up. For instance, I was looking at someone earlier today with a surname Hazel. So when I type Hazel in the field, it gives me Hazel genealogy, it takes me right to that page, and I can see all 777 Hazel profiles.

Betsy Ko (25m 50s):
I can click on any of those and you know, also see who the most active contributors are in the last month in that surname.

Diana (25m 60s):
Oh, great. So let me just clarify something. So you could enter a living person in your tree, say, I have a YDNA test on my Schultz line, but the permission of the test taker, I could enter him in there and have him be named as a living person. Is that correct?

Betsy Ko (26m 18s):
Yes. So what would happen is you would go ahead and you would create a profile for him, and then there’s a field for an email address. And so you’d enter his email address and then he would get an email message inviting him to join Wiki Tree and getting him to that field where he could create an account. Sounds like he would be willing to do that. And then that would be fine. In the cases of living, people who are invited who don’t want to have an account or be a part of Wiki Tree, they can still be listed in your family tree. But the, as we use an anonymous placeholder, so that, that would just be like Living Smith, right?

Betsy Ko (27m 0s):
And no other information.

Diana (27m 2s):
And if I created that profile, could I put the YDNA information up on that or do you have to have someone living put their own YDNA?

Betsy Ko (27m 11s):
Yes. Yes. It must be the person to whom the DNA belongs.

Diana (27m 15s):
Okay. Now what about the case of my mother who is deceased, but I have her DNA in that case? Could I put her DNA on the tree?

Betsy Ko (27m 25s):
I believe? Yes. Yes. Okay.

Diana (27m 27s):
Sorry to ask all these hard questions.

Betsy Ko (27m 29s):
No, no, not at all.

Diana (27m 32s):
All right, well Thank you for helping me with that.

Nicole (27m 36s):
Good questions, mom. Okay. Let’s talk some more about the ancestors profile page on Wiki Tree. So what features can you see on that page?

Betsy Ko (27m 47s):
Sure. Let me profile to look at while I, while we talk about this. So there are some horizontal menus across the top of every profile page that are really valuable. So you’ll start on the left hand side, but then just to the right, there’s the edit button where if you’re, if it’s your profile or if it’s an open profile, you click there to make changes. Then we have a tab for images, so that’s where you can see and upload images. Then we have tree apps. And one thing that I haven’t mentioned already about Wiki Tree is that we have an awe inspiring team of volunteer developers who have created apps and browser extensions and all kinds of different ways to visualize and dig deeper into our family lines.

Betsy Ko (28m 41s):
So tree apps, that tab, tab is where you would access those apps. Going to the right of that is changes and that’s, that’s a very helpful tab because it will, when you click on it, you will see all the changes that have been made to a profile starting from when it was created. So, you know, it’s helpful to see if somebody went in and did something or if you can’t remember what you’ve done. And then finally the last tab on the far right is privacy. And we do have seven different privacy levels on, on Wiki Tree. So really very flexible.

Betsy Ko (29m 22s):
Now, I will say that if, if someone has been dead for a hundred years, or was born more than 150 years ago, their profile is required to be open. And the only exceptions to that would be a notable, say Henry VII is his profile is protected by the England project because you just wanna be careful with people jumping in and making changes to a notable profile like that. Great, thanks for going through all of those tabs. Yeah. And then going down a little further, you’ll see who the profile manager is profile, and every once in a while you’ll see a profile that is an orphan and it says, would you like to adopt this profile?

Betsy Ko (30m 8s):
So we encourage people to adopt a profile and that that means that it will go on your watch list. Your watch list is a list of all the profiles that you created or adopted or where you are on the trusted list. And the trusted list is a group of people. This might be particularly pertinent for people who died more recently. You’ll have a trusted list and only those people can make edits to that profile. And so if you’re not on the trusted list, you can make a request, please add me to the trusted list. And then you have the biography and you have all the family relationships.

Betsy Ko (30m 48s):
I really like how you see parents and siblings. You don’t have to click on anything additional to see the siblings. The siblings are all right there. Spouse, children, and the bio wiki tree profiles are so flexible and they really allow you to tell a very rich story.

Diana (31m 7s):
Well, how about editing? you know, you, you put in your basic information and then you get new things. Is it pretty easy to edit whatever you’ve put in there?

Betsy Ko (31m 16s):
Yeah. When you first create a profile and can also access this anytime afterwards, by clicking the edit tab, you’ll see that there are radio buttons for certainty or uncertainty. So this comes into play with dates. For instance, supposing you have a baptismal record, but no birth record, you can absolutely say that the person was born before the date of the baptism, but you, you, we can’t say for sure what, how much earlier. So we have, we have a, a radio button for before this date or after this date. So that’s helpful. Then the locations, it’s very helpful.

Betsy Ko (31m 57s):
I find when I start typing in a location, it will give me a list of options. Like, we think you’re trying to enter this. We just caution people to be careful with the dates because as we all know, given place and time was categorized differently depending on the date. I mean, if we just think of the United States, you know, and oh, it was a territory at this time and then it became a state. And so there are specific locations for each of those timestamps.

Diana (32m 32s):
Oh, I love that. That’s so neat. And as we’ve been talking, I went to my dad’s profile, the only profile I have on here, sadly, but I’m gonna get more and did some editing on his page and it was so easy. and I, oh good. Love the way that you can say, oh yeah, I’m certain of this because I know my dad’s birth and death for sure. But, you know, you’re getting back here on a third great grandfather, and you’re like, well, I, this is a good estimate. you know, you see a record, you’re not sure if it’s yours or not. You can mark uncertain. So I love that. This is just awesome, really. So great.

Betsy Ko (33m 6s):
I I, I love that you’re editing with your profiles as we talk.

Diana (33m 9s):
This is how we do it on the podcast. We try it out as we’re learning, then we can actually talk with some certainty about what we’re seeing. So, so it’s great. But now my next question is adding sources, because I don’t really have any sources up here for him. So how do we do that?

Betsy Ko (33m 25s):
Right. So ideally we wanna lead the reader to a specific credible source, such as a census birth, marriage, death record with a link and I. I will also insert a footnote here. There’s a sort of different stringency levels with modern profiles, which would be 1700 forward and pre 1700. So any, if you’re dealing in a profile that’s before 1700, the sourcing requirements are stricter. And, and we actually have a, what we call a, a certification for pre 1700 work. So you have to do that. It’s a self-certifying thing, you where you read and then you take a little test and, and then that then you’ll be able to edit pre 17 profiles.

Betsy Ko (34m 9s):
But let’s assume that we’re talking about something more modern. I mentioned our wonderful team of app developers. We have an amazing browser extension called Sourcer. And what it does is it takes all the work out of creating citations. So supposing you find a source Ancestry or Find a Grave, it, this app or extension will allow you to just click a button and it creates the citation for you. It’s copied in your clipboard, you copy it over to the profile. And of course with FamilySearch, they make it easy too because you just can copy the citation right from their website and drop it over.

Diana (34m 50s):
Oh, wonderful. I love that you’ve made it easy. So it makes it more likely for people to actually, to do that. Yeah.

Betsy Ko (34m 57s):
I was just going to add, for modern profiles, at a minimum we want, just wanna state where you got the information and I, I feel for beginning wiki, the whole idea of creating sources and, and the way it looks can be a little intimidating. So I mean, it’s okay to write, Find a Grave memorial and then give us the number or, or a FamilySearch ID number or a link to an Ancestry tree as long as the tree is public so that people can click over there and see the sources that you’ve gathered over there.

Diana (35m 32s):
Oh, that makes it easier.

Betsy Ko (35m 34s):
That’s nice. It helps. It’s, it helps very much in the beginning. Yeah.

Nicole (35m 38s):
Well, where I have written a bunch of source citations in my research log, can I just copy and paste those into the profile too?

Betsy Ko (35m 46s):
Yes, that would work. We prefer Chicago style for, for the citations, but really I think we’re just happy to have, you know, a good citation. So nice that that tells where we can see the information for ourselves.

Nicole (36m 2s):
Great. Well, what should we be aware of when we’re creating new profiles? I know you mentioned it’s not ideal to have duplicate profiles. So tell us more about that.

Betsy Ko (36m 13s):
So when you go to create a new profile, you’ll, you’ll put in the person’s names, dates, locations, and then the system will search for you. And sometimes there will be no matches. And in that case it’s perceived directly to create the profile. In other cases, especially with a common name, it will give you a list of all the other existing profiles that have a similar name, approximate plus five minus five year dates sort of thing. And you should look down that list to make sure that you’re not creating a duplicate. That said, duplicates happen.

Betsy Ko (36m 53s):
So when we discover them, there’s a process for doing a merge and it’s, it’s not that that complicated.

Nicole (37m 1s):
It’s nice to know that we can merge that if we need to. And I’ve had to do that a few times. That family searches tree as well where, you know, new information comes to light and you find out they have a first name and a middle name and they have two profiles, one for their early years, one for their later years and they need to be merged. So, well, can you tell us a little bit more about this relationship finder? You mentioned there’s a way to see how the profile manager is related to the person. Is this tool allowing us to find our relationship with people on the tree?

Betsy Ko (37m 33s):
Absolutely. Let’s say you’re on some profile other than your own, and up along the top right hand corner, you’re going to see some pull down menus and one of those will be that person’s wiki tree id. So that’s where you wanna be. And then there’s two of those menu items that you’ll wanna play with. One is connection to me and that is going to give you the pathway between you and that person, including marriages. So it, it could be very extensive or it could be quite compact. It’s always exciting. They show a, a marriage by a change in color.

Betsy Ko (38m 14s):
So it’ll go along green, green, green, green, yellow, and you’ll know that there’s been a marriage. So what you wanna see is all green and then you’ll know that that person is actually related to you. And then there’s also another item in that same pull down menu that’s relationship to me. So if you wanna skip straight to that, that will tell you that if there’s a direct line or if there’s some sort of blood relationship I should say. And if there’s not, it’ll direct you to try a connection through marriage. and I just also wanted to mention that we have something, you’ll hear a lot of Wiki Tree called the CC7. Have you heard about that yet? No.

Betsy Ko (38m 54s):
In your time. Okay. So CC7 stands for close connections within seven Degrees. So the idea is that you to yourself is zero and then your parents are one, your spouse is one and so on outward. But the way that we allow for marriages to play into the connection count means that people can have CC7s that are, you know, if they’re families with multiple siblings and they all get married and they, you know, people get their CC7s up in the two thousands even. Hi, there are some people even higher.

Betsy Ko (39m 34s):
And it can be a motivator, a little game people like to play to see how high they can get those, that circle of connections within seven degrees to grow. It’s fun. That

Nicole (39m 45s):
Is fun. I love that. Thanks for going over the relationship finder, the connection finder and the CC7.

Diana (39m 56s):
Okay, so I am back on merging, sorry, I’m just gonna digress here for a minute because I am looking at, my dad’s doing a search for him and I find that there is another person who is entered his profile by the name of Nicole Dyer. So how would we merge those two profiles? I mean, you know, I’m just, I mean I know we can do it, but I was just, you being a duplicate.

Betsy Ko (40m 21s):
Well, I mean this is the easiest situation of them all because you two know each other, so it’ll be very, very easy. But you would just make note of the two profile IDs and initiate a merger and the page will pop up where it’ll ask you for the two IDs and, and then you just follow the prompts. It’s a routine thing with merges that the final merge profile will always have the ID of the profile that was created first. Okay. So in other words, the lower number.

Diana (40m 55s):
Okay. Oh great. It’s fun to just look at this and work through how to do all this. So great. We’ll work on that. Okay. Okay. Now there is something that is called a Free Space Profile. And what in the world is that?

Betsy Ko (41m 8s):
Yes, Free Space Profiles are one of my favorite features of Wiki Tree we call them, and I’m doing air quotes right now, “anything pages”, so this is where you can put more detail on a place or a thing, then it would be appropriate to put in a profile bio. So it’s important, but maybe you don’t wanna put it right on the person’s page. So I mean the, the uses of FSPs is just more than I can list. On one hand, people have documented family, pets, houses, events, schools, family heirlooms, family recipes to-do lists for their research.

Betsy Ko (41m 53s):
And one of my favorite ways to use a Free Space Profile is to make notes on my brick walls. So, you know, just have a family mystery page where I lay it all out and then if someone says, well I think I could help you with that, then I don’t have to, you know, refresh my memory. I know that I’ve, I’ve written it all down and I can direct them to that page.

Diana (42m 16s):
Well that’s a great idea. Oh my goodness. Where do you find that in the menu?

Betsy Ko (42m 21s):
So on the, again, top of any page, you’ll see this, the pull down menus on the top right and there’s an menu. This would also be where if you wanted to add an unconnected person, you see it says new person and directly above that is new Free Space.

Diana (42m 39s):
Okay. Wow, that’s great. you know, it’s kind of like any new website, you just need to move your mouse around, look at everything, click on everything and start learning. So I love that. But it’s very helpful having you tell us exactly where to go. I really like that. Yeah, I can see a lot of uses for a Free Space Profile, you could put, you know, we’re working so much with DNA, you could add a whole explanation or maybe can you add upload images so you could put a diagram of something you’re working on.

Betsy Ko (43m 8s):
Yeah. Free Space Profiles can have images just in the same way that a person profile does.

Diana (43m 14s):
Okay. Oh my goodness, that would be so neat. I love that idea.

Nicole (43m 18s):
Ooh, yeah, you could create a page for like a one name study or like a project DNA test takers.

Diana (43m 24s):
Yes. ’cause we do pages like that on family lockup, you know, private pages that we send to people to say Join our project. But anybody can do it here on Wiki Tree. You don’t have to have a website. You can direct people to that specific page. That’s, that’s a great idea.

Nicole (43m 40s):
Well fun. Speaking of DNA, that’s kind of our last question and I know we are gonna do a future episode that goes into detail on all of the DNA tools and features at Wiki Tree. But here’s what I know about DNA and then you can fill in the gaps, but, but I know that you do not upload your raw DNA file to Wiki Tree. So tell us, how does DNA work with Wiki Tree?

Betsy Ko (44m 5s):
Correct. So what you would do is you, you would upload your DNA to say GEDMatch, that’s the way most people do it. And then you would provide, when you go back to Wiki Tree and you click on the DNA page, it would ask you for your GEDMatch number. And then what will happen is, for instance, I’m looking at my second great grandmother’s page and it tells me just the theoretical because, because the system knows that I’m a second great granddaughter, it tells me the theoretical amount of percentage that I should share with her. but it, if it was not me within my family, it would give me information about another Wiki tree member that I should reach out to a possible cousin DNA match.

Betsy Ko (44m 54s):
And you can upload autosomal, mitochondrial, YDNA, there’s options to get all of that information onto Wiki Tree.

Nicole (45m 2s):
Love that. So cool. I think that’s one of the neatest features is being able to see on the sidebar that list of people who have taken a DNA test who are descendants of that person to help you connect and collaborate. And you can see, oh, they’ve taken the mitochondrial DNA test, that’s great. Now I can know the haplogroup of this ancestor we share. That’s not on my mitochondrial DNA line.

Betsy Ko (45m 25s):
Yeah. Nothing more exciting than seeing a new name pop up on that DNA connection list.

Diana (45m 32s):
Well, I would imagine with this, people would actually respond to you because as a user, you put in the email that you use, I would think are people pretty responsive on Wiki Tree when you reach out to them?

Betsy Ko (45m 44s):
In my personal experience, I’ve had good success rate with me messages that I’ve sent out. So what happens when you do send a private message, they’ll get an email if they wish, they can just reply to that email and then the two of you will be connected by email. And the other way to communicate with other members is at the bottom of any profile, there’s a a comment field. So you can put a comment on the profile and the profile manager will receive a notification.

Diana (46m 15s):
Wow. Well, this has been wonderful. I have learned so much already and I’m excited to go spend an hour or two updating my Wiki Tree, which is very, very sparse. Just me and my dad. I need to do a little work here. But I’m excited now to do that. I know what I’m doing now.

Betsy Ko (46m 31s):
Oh, wonderful. and I, hope you, you connect with an existing profile soon. That’ll be fun. Me

Diana (46m 38s):
Too. I’m excited to see how, how long it takes.

Nicole (46m 41s):
Well, Thank you for coming, Betsy, we really appreciated hearing from you and learning about Wiki Tree.

Betsy Ko (46m 47s):
It was my absolute pleasure Thank you for having me.

Nicole (46m 50s):
Alright, everyone, have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye

Diana (46m 54s):
Bye-Bye

Nicole (46m 55s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today, we’ll help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services to share your progress and ask questions to our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses. To get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.