RLP 309: WikiTree Special Projects with Elaine Martzen and Emmaline MacBeath

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 309: WikiTree Special projects with Elaine Martzen and Emmaline MacBeath 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 genealogy 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 (43s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro

Diana (49s):
Hi. Nicole. How, are you doing today?

Nicole (52s):
Great. I’ve been entering a bunch of information that I got on my research trip into my log. How, are you?

Diana (59s):
I am doing well. I finished writing my report, now I’m doing the wrap up. So I am getting documents ready to upload to my tree, to Family Search. You know, trying to get the information out there. So that’s always a fun thing at the end of the project to wrap it up.

Nicole (1m 15s):
Oh, good job. That’s some of the things that we often forget to do the wrap up.

Diana (1m 20s):
Right? and I have got all these reports and I’ve come to a good conclusion. I wanna make sure the relationships are correct and put the documentation to show that. So I’m, I’m feeling pretty good about my conclusion.

Nicole (1m 34s):
Well great. For announcements today, we just wanted to remind you that if you’re trying to use Airtable and you’re feeling stuck, feel free to check out our Airtable research guides. We have two of them for sale on our website. They’re quick reference guides with four pages so they’re concise and have a lot of information packed into a small space so you don’t have to spend a lot of time studying, but it can really help you get started. And just so you know, the next Research Like a Pro study group begins August 28th and early registration will end July 31st. So for that $50 off of registration, make sure you sign up before then. And we are starting our Artificial Intelligence workshop.

Nicole (2m 14s):
It’s July 29th through August 1st, a four day workshop and we’ll have two hours of instruction in the mornings with a hands-on assignment for the afternoon. And we’ll be doing that for four days in a row to really help you dive in. And it’s called Research Like a Pro with AI to really help you learn some things you can do to be more efficient and productive by using AI tools.

Diana (2m 35s):
Well today we are excited to return to WikiTree and have a discussion with two people who we are excited to have as guests. We have Elaine and Emmaline here and let me tell you a little bit about them. Elaine is the leader for the Holocaust project and a co-leader for the Jewish Roots and US Black Heritage Projects, also known as USBH. Elaine’s focus at USBH is the Heritage Exchange Program. Elaine also chips in for the Cemeteries Project, Data Doctors and WikiTree challenges for 2024. Elaine’s family is primarily from the American South as well as a bit of New York and Vermont.

Diana (3m 15s):
Roots extend back to England and Scotland according to DNA and some paper trails, which Elaine is slowly working on. And then we have Emmaline. Emma is a genetic genealogist dedicated to finding birth parents for individuals, searching for them, and reconnecting enslaved ancestors with their descendants. Her goal is to reconnect all 10 plus million enslaved ancestors. Additionally, Emma is an author of young adult and middle grade fiction writing under the pen name Emmaline Rose. Her passion for genealogy began at the age of 12, long before the era of the internet and deepened with the advent of everyday DNA testing. She operates under the business names Emmaline Rose Books and Missing Link DNA originally from Northern California.

Diana (4m 3s):
And having lived in several other locations, Emma now resides in Washington with her two sons. Her spare time is filled with more genealogy and writing alongside reading and spending time with friends and family. So welcome to both of you. Hi Thank,

Emmaline MacBeath (4m 18s):
You, it’s great to be here. And of course I love Elaine, so it’s great to be with Elaine.

Elaine Martzen (4m 22s):
We’ve worked together for three years, I think. No, four.

Emmaline MacBeath (4m 28s):
Four,

Elaine Martzen (4m 28s):
Yeah.

Nicole (4m 28s):
That’s great. So what, what project are you guys working on together?

Emmaline MacBeath (4m 37s):
Everything.

Elaine Martzen (4m 38s):
Mainly US Black Heritage. Yeah. But yes, we, we help each other out with a lot of things.

Nicole (4m 45s):
Awesome. Well you mentioned a, project at WikiTree. So let’s go really basic here for all of our listeners. And Elaine, can you just tell us what are projects at WikiTree and how are they organized?

Elaine Martzen (4m 57s):
Sure. A project is simply a group of members organized around a topic or activity on WikiTree. WikiTree is all about collaboration and of course collaboration depends on communication and coordination. So projects make it easier for members who are interested in the same profiles or volunteer work to find each other and communicate and coordinate their efforts.

Nicole (5m 19s):
That’s great.

Elaine Martzen (5m 19s):
And one way that their projects are organized is they’re top level projects. Most of them are geographical, but they’re also some such as Data Doctors and I think Emma will get more into that. But each top level project has a page, a unique tag to follow a badge for members. And topical projects also have a project account and project box sub projects are a little smaller or less formal. So one example would be, Remember the Children, which is under the global project. Most projects have teams. One example would be like I’m on the Alabama team for US Black Heritage. And then England is divided into regional focus, as are a lot of the other country projects.

Elaine Martzen (5m 60s):
One other type is Free Space projects and those are the most informal one. And the only one I can think of right now is the Lizard Lounge ones that I started for Dallas, Texas, which it’s a club that’s pretty old and it’s now closed. So people can add profiles for people who would pass through and perform there. So that’s a general overview of our projects.

Nicole (6m 21s):
Wow, love that. Great examples. so it sounds like there are a limited number of top level projects and then within the top level there are sub projects that can help add additional projects, but you can’t have too many top level ones ’cause they all have their own badge and stuff, so, right.

Emmaline MacBeath (6m 41s):
Yes. Right.

Nicole (6m 42s):
Okay, cool. Thank you for explaining that.

Diana (6m 45s):
So Emma, can you tell us some more specifics of the type of projects that are available on WikiTree?

Emmaline MacBeath (6m 51s):
Yes, and, and I wanted to add to what Nicole was just saying. One of the reasons we have limited number of top level projects is there has to be a project leader for those. And those are more experienced members of WikiTree who’ve been around a long time and know the website Really well. And so there’s a limited number of project leaders available, but anybody can start. And like Elaine was talking about the Lizard Lounge, she started her own personal project. Anyone can start a personal space page project and invite others to join in with them on that topic of interest. But the top level projects that we have, we have the geographical ones that Elaine mentioned, and that’s by, you know, country.

Emmaline MacBeath (7m 32s):
And then those can be narrowed down. Those countries can be split into smaller geographical areas with sub projects. And then we have topical projects, which are based on themes or cultural groups such as the Mayflower project, the Holocaust project, the Native Americans, US Black, Heritage, Project. And then we have functional projects which actually help run the website. Lots of people help chipping in because you know, WikiTree is 99.9% volunteer run. And so all the members chip in with different parts of the running of the website that they enjoy. So for instance, we have a Greeters project.

Emmaline MacBeath (8m 13s):
They greet all the new members who come in. We have all sorts of different Profile Improvement projects that help make sure the data on the profiles is good, that the, the relationships are solid. We have a DNA project mentor projects help members understand the website, help them understand genealogy, Adoption Angels, which I also lead, we help find birth parents for WikiTree members up to the grandparent level. And there’s a lot of projects. So there’s really something for absolutely everyone who loves genealogy.

Diana (8m 50s):
That is so wonderful. So can I ask, what do you do when you’re involved in a project? So let’s say if I wanted to be part of the US Southern Colonies project, would I be working with those profiles or doing research?

Emmaline MacBeath (9m 7s):
Yes, yes, yes. It, it, it partly depends on the project because some projects have very specific tasks that they want to accomplish as a project. Some projects there are only specific tasks, other projects, it’s a wider range. And so like you mentioned, southern colonies, there may be something very specific you personally wanna work on and you wanna collaborate with others on those tasks. And so you can choose something that has to do with the southern colonies and work with others, work with the project to accomplish what you’re working on.

Diana (9m 40s):
Oh wow, that’s really neat. So a way to give back to the community as well as probably to help with your own research. Absolutely. If it’s something you’re really involved with. Great. Thank you,

Nicole (9m 51s):
Well, just as a follow up after what we’ve talked about so far, it sounds like projects really help to standardize different ways of formatting a profile so that there’s consistency. Is that correct?

Emmaline MacBeath (10m 4s):
That’s a very good point, Nicole. That is one of the, the goals of projects is to help standardize profiles for specific topics for specific locations. For instance, when you’re working with Colonial period genealogy, the sourcing is different. And so those projects will help make sure that there’s good, good enough sourcing on those profiles. Geographical projects are gonna help set the standards for what kinds of things should be on those profiles that are appropriate for their country. And, and so standardization is a very, very key part of projects.

Nicole (10m 41s):
Well, it’s just a brilliant idea. It’s so cool. WikiTree has so many neat things that we’re just learning about now.

Elaine Martzen (10m 47s):
And the projects can also help write, help pages on naming conventions and things like that. So that’s really helpful for like Dutch genealogy if you don’t know anything about that. So every project has a help page on that type of thing.

Nicole (11m 2s):
Oh, wonderful. Well, Elaine, let’s talk about a project that you are very close with the Holocaust project. Can you tell us about that and what, what the mission of it is?

Elaine Martzen (11m 13s):
Sure. Our mission is to create profiles for every Holocaust victim and connect them to the main tree and make the profiles the best they can be.

Nicole (11m 21s):
That’s great. So are you the main leader? This is the top level project, right?

Elaine Martzen (11m 25s):
Yes, it is. and I am the main leader right now. I would love to have someone else on board with me and I’m sure I will soon, but right now it’s mainly, mainly me and I have, we’ve got a whole team working every day. We have a dozen or so people adding new profiles and making new connections. It’s really great to be able to communicate with everyone.

Nicole (11m 48s):
Nice.

Diana (11m 48s):
So Elaine, how did you get involved with the Holocaust project? Well,

Elaine Martzen (11m 52s):
I had become a project leader for yes, Black Heritage and Jewish Roots. And there was no leader at the time for the Holocaust project. Someone had had to step away. And it’s a topic I’ve been passionate about for years and I realized that there is no, there still is no single genealogical database for every victim. And what better place for that than WikiTree?

Diana (12m 15s):
Yeah, that is wonderful. What a great service. So some of the profiles would need to be updated or corrected. Is that what you’re mainly doing is going through any profiles?

Elaine Martzen (12m 27s):
Before I was leader, luckily the prior leaders had found a lot of older profiles and had gotten most of them up to speed. Like using WikiTree plus search, which is kind of an extra search engine on top of WikiTree to find profiles that needed work. So we were able to gather them all under the same roof, make sure the locations were correct so that we could find them again. So some of that work was already done when I showed up. So now we’re mainly focused on adding more people there. Well depending on how you count anywhere from six to 11 million people, we only have about 15,000, maybe 20 if we use WikiTree Plus to find some more. Anyway, we have a long way to go.

Elaine Martzen (13m 8s):
But we’ve also made a lot of progress just in the last few months just because of things like this podcast, the, I’ve been on YouTube a couple times, just getting more people introduced to WikiTree Holocaust Project.

Nicole (13m 21s):
Oh, good job with that outreach. And that’s exciting. The progress that you’ve made in the last few months and the momentum. Tell us some of the research that you’ve done in the Holocaust project. Just give us some stories or something.

Elaine Martzen (13m 34s):
Oh sure. Well some of the resources that we’ve been able to use are the United States Holocaust Museum has a large database, the Dutch Youth Monument, which is the Dutch Memorial, which has over 100,000 victims in it, as well as a fair number of their parents and extended relatives so that we can use that research to connect to Dutch profiles that we already have on WikiTree. We also use Yad Vashem, which is the Israeli national database, Arolsen Archives based in Germany. And we have a couple of WikiTree tech folks who are, who are good at helping us pull in a couple birth dates and locations and make it easier to add people to WikiTree.

Elaine Martzen (14m 15s):
And what’s been also amazing is just we start with a single profile and then we might end up finding someone who moved to the United States or that two generations ago they were from Turkey, they still have relatives in China, like things like that. It’s little stories that just expand over the entire globe. And that’s been really interesting to learn more about.

Nicole (14m 34s):
Oh, how wonderful. It sounds like you’re combining the use of a lot of different databases that already exist to help you add more profiles. So that’s great.

Diana (14m 43s):
Yes, I was just wondering that same thing, where are you getting all the names? So have these institutions been really helpful? I’m sure they would want to have this information out on WikiTree or it sounds like some of them are just public databases. I’m sure you’ve got both. They’re

Elaine Martzen (14m 59s):
All public databases and as part of the Holocaust project’s growth, we do intend to be in communication with them in the future, but we haven’t yet. We’re kind of still at the very beginning. Yeah, so haven’t reached out to a whole lot of people yet, but we’ll get there. Of

Diana (15m 15s):
Course. So as a project leader, what, what are you doing? What are you really focused on, how are you trying to encourage others to help?

Elaine Martzen (15m 23s):
Right now I’m mostly talking to current WikiTreers who may not realize that in their country there were a fair number of Holocaust victims and once they realized that they think, oh yes, I would, I would like to add some of them to WikiTree. So I’ve still been mainly working within the WikiTree world, but I am slowly reaching out to other places. So we chat in Discord, which is an online communication platform, people are on it on all times a day or night because you know, people are in Europe and Australia and everywhere. And then we also chat on G2G, which is Genealogist to Genealogists. It’s a public forum on WikiTree. You have to have a WikiTree account to write on there, but it’s publicly available to read for anyone.

Elaine Martzen (16m 8s):
So we reach out on there, ask for help on particular profiles that we’re stuck on. And then we’ve, I’ve been on YouTube a couple times and Sandy Craig has helped by making some YouTube shorts. I’m not a very tech person, but she’s made a few videos for us that help get the word out.

Diana (16m 27s):
That’s wonderful. And since you are worldwide, that really increases your reach. I guess I hadn’t even thought about you being international and having WikiTree from all over the globe.

Elaine Martzen (16m 38s):
I’ve been so delighted to work with a lot of our European folks because doing the Black Heritage Project, I’ve mainly been working with Americans, although we do actually have a good number of Australians, Canadians and some other folks too. But I’ve gotten to work a lot more closely with some of our English folks, Dutch, German, French, Czech, Hungarian. We have all kinds of folks on WikiTree and they have taught me a lot and I wish I could thank every single one of them. I’m extremely grateful. They’ve all been a, a massive help to the project.

Nicole (17m 12s):
What a wonderful description of the worldwide reach of WikiTree. Well Elaine, tell us about some of the special standards for recording information about the Holocaust victims. Well

Elaine Martzen (17m 21s):
One of the main things is just record every single shred of evidence that that you have. I mean this is kind of true with all types of genealogy, but I feel like it’s a particularly important here because sometimes there’s just one little clue, one mention of a cousin that can help connect to the world tree. And because it was a fairly recent event, especially with privacy regulations in Europe and stuff, sometimes it’s hard to end up connecting folks. But one of the other things we do to, for recording information is we use WikiTree categories. So that’s a system to tag profiles into groups. So for example, we use Auschwitz Birkenau Victims for one of our categories.

Elaine Martzen (18m 4s):
And we have for every concentration camp and ghetto, we have different category. So it, there’s a little autofill feature on WikiTree that makes it really easy to fill in categories. We use it for cemeteries. There are all kinds of uses for every single project. So that’s one of the important things to call, use the categories, use the research notes, and those are kind of the main things for it. Yes.

Nicole (18m 26s):
Wow. You hit on a special challenge in that it is a recent event and so with all the privacy regulations, that probably presents quite a bit of a challenge. and I think sometimes we think that if it’s a more recent generation then it’s easier genealogy. But in this instance it does sound like it would be harder because I know in Europe they have really strong privacy regulations.

Elaine Martzen (18m 47s):
Yes, there are a fair number of countries that have death certificates available. Even if they died in a camp in another country, they have a death certificate logged in that country. And it is accessible on the internet. So not for every country, but it’s sometimes it’s challenging and sometimes it’s not. It just really depends.

Nicole (19m 4s):
Well great, thanks for sharing that with us so we can understand how it, how it kind of works. and I love the idea of being able to tag people with categories. And then I’m assuming after you’ve done that you can then see a list of everybody who’s on WikiTree who was at that particular ghetto or concentration camp.

Elaine Martzen (19m 20s):
Yes, exactly. So it’s categories are great for genealogy, but especially in this case, I think it’s also really important for historical purposes. Like I can imagine once we get enough people on universities coming and checking out WikiTree to verify work in their own research. So I think that Wiki Tree’s category system is very valuable for this.

Nicole (19m 44s):
Very valuable for sure.

Diana (19m 45s):
This is such a fascinating conversation because I have, you know, visited a concentration camp. I’ve been to the Holocaust Museum in Israel, I’ve read extensively on it and it’s so neat to have something like this to help people connect, and I am just blown away at what you’re doing. So Thank you so much, it’s just exciting to hear about. Sure. Well let’s have a word from our Sponsor Newspapers.com. This episode is brought to you by Newspapers.com. Discover your mom in the paper 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.

Diana (20m 28s):
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 dating 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. 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.

Nicole (21m 7s):
Well let’s switch gears now and we’ll talk about another special project at WikiTree. Emma, can you tell us about the US Black Heritage Project and its mission?

Emmaline MacBeath (21m 18s):
Yes, it’s a very project that’s very, very dear to my heart. We are a top level project, but we’re also considered a sub project of the United States Project since we are a topical project that covers the entire country. And we’re also part of the African ancestry project, which I also lead. We have quite a few goals and missions, but some of them are to collect in one place the information and resources to assist others in building their African American family trees. Our biggest goal is, and we’ve already met this actually, we’re very, very proud of this and that that was to create the largest online public database of connected African American family.

Emmaline MacBeath (21m 57s):
and I haven’t checked our numbers lately, I’m gonna check that in a little bit, but last I checked, we were over 350,000 connected family members. So we’re very, very excited about that. We want to bring together Wiki Treers who are interested in connecting African American families together. We process all types of documents regarding free and enslaved ancestors during the time of slavery and we create their profiles. And this is part of the Heritage Exchange program that you mentioned that Elaine is part of. She’s the leader of that part of our project. We provide standards for African American genealogy on WikiTree and we create as many organized structures, especially the Heritage exchange slavery era time.

Emmaline MacBeath (22m 43s):
That was very difficult at first when we started. So we had to, to create some unique standards in order to do that work. And of course we continually spend lots and lots of time to improve all the the African American profiles on WikiTree. So we work on their biographies, we work on their sourcing, we work on connecting them together, just whatever we can do to make our profiles the highest quality in terms of sourcing and correct attached family.

Nicole (23m 12s):
Wow, that’s a really high goal. I mean, you have a lot of great goals in this mission statement and it seems like a wonderful accomplishment to have 350,000 connected family members and WikiTree for African American families. That’s amazing.

Emmaline MacBeath (23m 26s):
I’m gonna check that number while we’re talking because I haven’t seen it this week. We are so addicted to watching that number go up that we check every single week to see what our new numbers are. Oh, here it is. We’re at 351,707 as of May 19th. So that’s very, very exciting.

Nicole (23m 44s):
That’s so neat. Well you mentioned the Heritage Exchange program and for people who don’t know what that is, could you just quickly tell us?

Emmaline MacBeath (23m 54s):
Yes. So we kind of have two different parts to our project. We have during slavery and post-slavery. And the reason why is slavery era, it’s a different type of genealogy. We we’re working with different kinds of documents in order to identify enslaved ancestors and to connect them to their family. And so in 2020, that’s when our project officially got off the ground. The first thing we did is we said, okay, we have all these great features on WikiTree. How do we use these features to easily document our enslaved ancestors in a standardized way so that we’re working smarter, not harder. It probably took us six months to a year actually to create this special system that we use with categories and space pages and using all the WikiTree features.

Emmaline MacBeath (24m 43s):
And so Elaine oversees the work that’s done on this particular part of our project. One of the biggest parts of what we do is we have to teach others how to use our system because it is super, super important that everybody’s using the system the same way and keep it standardized so that it’s easier to make those connections once the profiles are created. And then of course, like I said, our goal is to get every enslaved ancestor identified and then connected to their family. That’s a tall, tall order, but we’re determined to do it.

Diana (25m 16s):
Well, I’m just looking at your webpage here for the Heritage Exchange and I see that you have got plantations and clicking into those, it’s looking like you are pulling the wills, the census, taxes, everything you can to identify all the enslaved people on that plantation. And then each one of those people has their own specific profile and yes, that is neat.

Emmaline MacBeath (25m 44s):
So one of the things that we do is we’re constantly looking for new types of documents that are available that we can access that may name enslaved ancestors. And then of course we’re extracting the names. And in the beginning their profile is what I call a placeholder profile. ’cause we don’t know a lot about them. We might just know their name and where they lived and a sort of time period when they lived. So we use kind of this placeholder system to get their profile created so that their name is out there, we’ve got a starting place for them and then the next step is getting more information about that community and then, you know, working to make the connection.

Diana (26m 24s):
Absolutely. and I imagine you’ll eventually get into those manuscript collections where there’s just a lot more information, letters, diaries, account books, all those types

Emmaline MacBeath (26m 35s):
Of things. So we we already do it all. Yeah,

Diana (26m 37s):
You’re already getting that. Oh, that’s neat.

Emmaline MacBeath (26m 40s):
We’re, yeah, we already do it all. It’s just a matter of time because there’s so much data out there, a lot of it that’s never been touched and we just need more people to help.

Diana (26m 51s):
Right. To

Emmaline MacBeath (26m 52s):
To get it done.

Diana (26m 53s):
Well you know, it’s really neat because I know years ago, you know, as a matter of our client research, our own research, we run into documents that have enslaved people mentioned and I know I had written a blog post about that, putting that out there. And there have been a few other projects, I think Beyond Kin and maybe a couple others with this goal to try to get the information out. And so I love that you’re bringing it together in one place. That’s neat. Well how did you even get started in this?

Emmaline MacBeath (27m 23s):
It’s kind of interesting. As a genetic genealogist, when I was working with Black clients, working with their DNA, I started seeing this pattern of trees that weren’t full there. There were just partial trees for all their DNA matches. It was hard. It was hard work. And so the first thing I did is I went out and I went on a little discovery journey and I said, why are the trees like this? What’s going on? And that’s when I learned about how slavery affects African American genealogy. And at that time I said, you know what? We need a central database of connected trees where all the family is put together in this tree so that when someone’s trying to work on their tree, they’re working on genetic genealogy, they can go to this database and boom, there’s that.

Emmaline MacBeath (28m 6s):
you know, at least part of that family where they can easily make those connections. And so in 2020 when I became a project leader at WikiTree and I learned that the African American project, the African American project was started in 2015, but it never really blossomed into what it is now. And so I was like, oh my goodness, this is what I’ve been dreaming of building. I became the project leader in 2020 and we restarted the project and that’s when we started creating all these systems to create this worldwide database. And you know, like you mentioned, there are other groups who have been trying to do some of this work, but the problem is there’s been no central database.

Emmaline MacBeath (28m 48s):
And so the data is fragmented all over the internet. And in order for it to be powerful and really make connections that have never been made before, it needs to be all in one place. And so that’s what we set out to do and we’re seeing success every single day now and it’s, oh my goodness, it’s so exciting.

Diana (29m 9s):
Well I am excited we’re recording this podcast so we can get the word out there because I know there are many people that would love to be involved with this and would love to put the information that they find somewhere that’s going to be available widely. So this is great.

Emmaline MacBeath (29m 25s):
And that’s one of the things Elaine and I do is we go out to groups and people who are working on research projects and we, we tell them about what we’re doing and we say, Hey, can you bring your data to us and put it in this central database because you know, that will just increase the power of what we’re doing.

Diana (29m 43s):
Absolutely.

Elaine Martzen (29m 44s):
You know, we have a couple people who’ve host their own websites and then they want to close the website because it’s too much for them and they’re transferring the data to WikiTree. And we also have an email address, which can be in the show notes where anyone can send family information about slavery that they would like added to WikiTree even better if they could join WikiTree and help us with it. We have probably a six month or so lead time on actually getting that accomplished. But we have a, an Excel sheet to-do list for getting the data onto WikiTree that people request how

Nicole (30m 18s):
Great. It’s neat that you have tasks and an organized way of doing it and that you’re able to take on some of the information other people have gathered, but then they don’t know what to do with it. It’s just such a great goal to get it all centralized into one place. And I’ve felt the same over the years hearing about the various projects that they’re kind of all scattered around. And so this is so great to, you know, finally have a place for everything that has been found and put it in one central location where they can all be linked together in one big family tree.

Emmaline MacBeath (30m 50s):
Yes.

Nicole (30m 50s):
So, great. Well let’s talk about some of the challenges that the Black Heritage Project has and how do you address them?

Emmaline MacBeath (30m 57s):
So when we started in 2020, the first thing we had to do is create standards for African American genealogy on WikiTree because no one had really tackled that. And it’s really important because, you know, when everyone’s doing everything the same way, the data is cleaner, it’s easier to work with, everything is so much easier. So we had to, to create a lot of standards at first, the first thing we had to do, like I said, is what do we do with slavery era? We’re gonna have a lot of people with nothing but a first name on a will or some other document and we don’t want to say, oh forget we can’t create a profile for them because all we have is a name. And so we had to first create a system, the placeholder system that we use in order to create their profile so that their name is up there and ready to be added to when more information comes in.

Emmaline MacBeath (31m 47s):
And so we created a placeholder surname system in order to help with that because currently on WikiTree, if you don’t know someone’s last name, you use the last name of unknown. And if we have 100,000 John Unknowns, that’s not useful to us. So we, we first created a surname placeholder system. One of the other issues is terminology. That’s one of the biggest questions we get from people who aren’t used to working with African American genealogy. There’s a lot of disagreement out there about preferred terminology. And so what we did is, well personally, I went out and I spoke to a lot of people in the African American genealogy space.

Emmaline MacBeath (32m 28s):
I, you know, asking what are you comfortable with, what do you prefer? What’s the standard? There’s really no one answer. And so we chose what we thought worked best in a genealogy context for WikiTree and we have that posted up and we stick to that because if we change the terminology every year, then we have hundreds of thousands of profiles we have to update. Eventually we will come back and revisit that again in a couple years. And then it’s how to work with this data that people aren’t used to working with. you know, the wills and the diaries and the plantation logs and you know, most people are used to an 1850 census and they just go and there’s their family and they create all the profiles.

Emmaline MacBeath (33m 15s):
And that’s not how it works for us during slavery era. So the Heritage Exchange program, you know, we’re teaching each other how to use these other documents and honestly we’re all still teaching each other because we keep coming across new types of documents and we have to figure out how to make the best use of them. One of our biggest challenges too is we bring in a lot of new people to slavery era genealogy to African American genealogy. And so we have to teach them how this is different from what they’re used to, how to read the documents, how to make sense of them, how to create profiles for them.

Nicole (33m 52s):
Well how does the placeholder system work for the last name?

Emmaline MacBeath (33m 56s):
There’s steps ’cause everything kind of depends, but the basic system that we use is we use the known slave owner’s last name because we know that there’s probably a 50 50 chance that that actually was the last name that they kept. So we have a good chance of already having the correct last name, but also they’re going to be connected in some way to the slave owner. And so having that last name is genealogically useful to us. We have a banner at the top of their profile that says, we know this may not be their correct last name is just a placeholder and when we get new information we will update that list name. And so far the system’s been working really, really well for us.

Nicole (34m 38s):
Wow, that makes a lot of sense.

Diana (34m 42s):
Yeah, it really does because that surname ties them to a community to a specific location and that is so important.

Emmaline MacBeath (34m 51s):
Yes. And that’s the thing about the work that we do is we work by community. We don’t go in and we don’t pull 1 18 50 census record. We have to study in an entire community at a time. You mentioned plantations as part of the work We do, we do community studies with these plantations and we, we study who own the plantation over time. We study bills of sales, wills, legal documents. There’s a lot that goes into, I don’t spend a lot of time with Heritage Exchange because it’s super, super hard work and, and I just wanna say Thank You to our team who does this work day in and day out? Huge.

Diana (35m 30s):
Well, it’s a lot of data and then you also have to track the families that are moving back and forth and that the enslaved people could be moving with them. You know, we’re going from Georgia to Mississippi and it is a very involved project, so That’s so neat. Well, you know, if someone is listening and they have this scenario where they have found people mentioned in a tax record or a will or a probate, what can they do?

Emmaline MacBeath (35m 58s):
So as Elaine mentioned, there’s one of two things that they can do. They can either send us the information, we have an email address at the bottom of our project page spec that’s specific for taking in slavery era information that people wanna send us and they can send us images as well at that email. Or even better is if they wanna join WikiTree and join our project and learn how to work with the WikiTree system and help us put these people on WikiTree, that would be absolutely amazing. Yeah,

Elaine Martzen (36m 30s):
There’s some learning curve too, but it’s not rocket science. We have it all. We have it laid out in written pages. We have a few help videos and we’re always available via email at G2G, et cetera for specific questions. So we’ve onboarded lots and lots of people and are looking forward to more.

Diana (36m 50s):
Oh, that’s great. Well, you know, the more people you get who are helping, the more progress you’re going to make and the better it is for everyone. So this is a neat opportunity for anyone looking to, to give back and, and to do something a little bit different maybe outside of what you’re currently doing with your genealogy work

Emmaline MacBeath (37m 8s):
And I wanna mention just quickly, you know, like I said, Heritage Exchange can be very, very hard, but we have lots of easier genealogical tasks that are a huge piece of what we’re doing. Like we’re working on our 1880 census project right now. We’re enumerating every African American who was on the 1880 census. It’s been great fun. We’ve had people from all over WikiTree who aren’t in our project, who have been helping, they pick their favorite location and they just go in and they create all the profiles. This is something everybody can do. So if you already do genealogy and you wanna help with this big picture that we’re working on, there are lots of things that you could help us with.

Nicole (37m 47s):
I love that idea. I want to do that. I have my location all ready to go. I, I’ve got two ideas actually, but of course I’m gonna do Hawkins County, Tennessee because that’s where all, all the Dyers are from where, and

Emmaline MacBeath (38m 0s):
Yes, Tennessee needs a lot of love. We have I think six or seven states finished, but Tennessee’s a huge, huge one.

Nicole (38m 7s):
Well that’s such a great suggestion and I think there’s so many of our listeners who are gonna sign up for WikiTree and get an account and just, I can just see it, you know, if everybody listening spends one hour a month even. Yes. What a big difference we can all make in making this one connected family tree for African Americans even larger and increasing that number from 351,000 even more. We can watch it go up every week with you.

Emmaline MacBeath (38m 36s):
Absolutely.

Nicole (38m 36s):
Well this has been just way too much fun. I’m gonna give each of you a chance to say anything else you want to Elaine.

Elaine Martzen (38m 43s):
Oh, sure. We’re welcoming new members all the time for the Holocaust project and we have an Auschwitz 2025 Initiative where we’re trying to add all the victims by Remembrance Day, January 27th, 2025. Honestly, I do not know if we will make it, but I think we’ll get close and we’ve gotten lots of people interested and I’ve been very grateful for all the help that’s occurred.

Nicole (39m 6s):
Oh, what a fun goal. I love that. And that’s some concrete goal to focus on the Auschwitz camp and stuff. Well, Emily, do you have anything else you wanna talk about?

Emmaline MacBeath (39m 16s):
Well, we love goals, especially in the US Black Heritage Project. Our goal for this year was to reach 400,000 profiles. We’re just about to reach it because we’ve had so much help this year. We are so flabbergasted, we’re so excited. And part of that is because of the 1880 project and we’ve had people from, like I said, all over WikiTree, all over the world, not just Americans work with us who are working on that specific project. And so I just encourage everybody to come do what’s your happy place? you know, if you love working on cemeteries, if you love working on the federal census, whatever it is, we need help in that area. So come join us and be a part of this amazing, amazing database that we’re creating.

Nicole (39m 60s):
It is amazing. I love it. And I’m so happy that you guys took the time to come on our podcast and talk about it because it’s just, I feel like something that is under known about, I don’t know the right word for that, but underappreciated. So we are just really happy that we had this conversation with you. Thanks so much for coming. Thank

Emmaline MacBeath (40m 19s):
Y’all Thank you for having us.

Diana (40m 21s):
It’s been so great to hear about this and I just really appreciate the work that you’re doing. So Thank you, Thank you from from, I’m sure all of our listeners. Well thanks everyone for listening and we will talk to you next time. Bye-Bye

Emmaline MacBeath (40m 35s):
Bye.

Nicole (41m 10s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will 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 DNA 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, join 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.