Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

@WikiTreers is a free One-World family tree set up like a wiki. It has been in operation since 2008. It currently has over 27 million profiles.

The community of people who use WikiTree set up various online social events and challenges amongst themselves to encourage improvement of the quality of their tree. They declared 2021 their “Year of Accuracy” and this year thought of a very innovative way to promote WikiTree and get new people involved. Each week, they invite a well-known (in the genealogy world) guest to add their ancestors up to their great-grandparents to WikiTree. The challenge part happens when the WikiTree community goes at it to extend the guest’s tree adding sourced profiles with documented biographies. They collaborate with each other in a Discord chat room. The challenge part is to see who can acquire the most points, by breaking brick walls (when compared to the guest’s main tree elsewhere) and adding profiles for new ancestors and their siblings, with additional credit given for any profile edited. The points really are just for fun and extra motivation to help do the best job possible with the guest’s tree.

The guest’s week starts on a Wednesday. There is a livestream with Mindy Silva, the WikiTree Challenge coordinator, the Team Leader for the week, the previous week’s guest and the current week’s guest.

My Intro, Wednesday July 14

My week started on July 14. It was the end of the John Boeren’s week. The first half of the livestream was what was called the “reveal”, where the team reveals what was done on the guest’s tree and who did the best, points-wise, in the challenge. John has all his roots in The Netherlands. The Wikitreers managed to add over 1000 profiles of John’s ancestors to WikiTree, just about completing his ancestry to 8 generations deep, in some cases breaking brick walls by extending John’s tree further than he had done in his own research.

This was followed by my introduction and a review of some of the brick walls that I have in my research:

Unlike some of the guests, this was not my first exposure to WikiTree. I heard about the WikiTree challenge in January and that prompted me to join WikiTree in February. I then added my ancestors and started to write up their profiles on WikiTree.

I really enjoyed watching the Wednesday livestreams with the various guests, and seeing their reactions at their reveals. The WikiTreers worked very hard and always surprised the guest with what they found.

Then in June, they had Jarrett Ross, the GeneaVlogger as the guest. There was a tree I thought I could help with, so that week, I became one of the challengers working on Jarrett’s tree. It was an intense week of working on someone else’ genealogy, but was a lot of fun.

Wed July 14 to Wed July 21

With my involvement up the that point, I was hoping that Mindy would allow me to be one of the challengers, or at least help the participants in the Discord chat. Unfortunately, that was not allowed. I was not supposed to know anything about how they were doing. It was all supposed to be a surprise to me at the reveal.

So I followed the rules, stayed off WikiTree, and I even uninstalled Discord from my phone so I wouldn’t get notifications that might clue me in. I was very honorable in that way because I realized it would be more fun for me to be surprised at the end.

But I was allowed send one-way messages to the WikiTreers. Jarrett had done this two weeks earlier with a few tweets from his Twitter account. So I did the same and sent out a series of 21 hints via Twitter including the @WikiTreers address to make sure they’d see them. e.g.:

Hint 4: @WikiTreers - Rivenu Braunstein had a daughter Rebecca/Becky who married Leib Feinger and together they moved to France. There should be good French records on them that might give their history.

— Louis Kessler (@louiskessler) July 15, 2021

I had no idea what they were working on, but those hints I sent out made me feel like I was involved.

Every Saturday, WikiTree has a morning livecast with Sarah Callis, Mags Gaulden, and Mindy that summarizes the WikiTree community’s activities for the week, ending with a brief summary of how this week’s WikiTree Challenge is going. Mindy couldn’t make it this week and invited me to take her place. Of course, nothing of significance was going to be revealed to me. I was to be kept in the dark.

My Reveal, Wednesday July 21

I kept myself busy on Tuesday and Wednesday diverting my mind from thinking about WikiTree by working on a few projects, cleaning my desk, and adding sod to my lawn.

I knew my challenge would be tougher than the others. All my grandparents and only one set of great grandparents had emigrated to Canada from Russia or Romania in the early 1900s. That meant that any deeper research would require Russian or Romanian records. Those records do exist, but very few of them have been digitized, translated, indexed and been made available online. I have had success on several of my lines using specialized researchers who have access to the archives in Russian and Romania and have been able to find records for me. I knew the WikiTreers would not be able to do that.

To make matters worse, I had been adding profiles to my tree since February, so the WikiTreers didn’t even have very many new profiles they could add for me.

Sure enough, they realized they would not be able to take my genealogy further back, so they wisely did the next best thing and focused more heavily on the siblings of my ancestors that had come over and worked to improve their profiles, find new sources, newspaper articles and other valuable information that I had never seen before.

This was WikiTree’s summary of my week:
Highlights from Louis Kessler’s WikiTree Challenge - WikiTree G2G

Excellent Results

Although they may not have extended my genealogy, the results were extremely rewarding to me. I had a few brick walls, not ancestral, that I really thought they could help me with and they did.

My great grandmother’s brother was Louis Segal who married Sophie and had a daughter Sarah in Romania. They moved to England in the 1900s, went to Canada in the 1910s and ended up in Jacksonville, Florida in the 1930s and then I lost track of them. The WikiTreers found their ship record to Canada as well as the likely 1940 gravestone of Louis Segal in Jacksonville, plus other twists and turns and tidbits to that story. They added all that information to Louis’ profile on WikiTree along with sources. I’ve got enough there to solve most of my big mysteries about him. I’m currently working on rigorously going through his biography and forming conclusions and reorganizing it appropriately. The “Research Notes” section of WikiTree biographies is a wonderful tool for this type of analysis.

The WikiTreers also added valuable information like this to other relatives. It will take me several weeks (at least) to go through all the work they did and review the new information found.

They attempted to look at the Rothschild family for me. Although they could not connect my wife’s Russian-based ancestor to the family, they added a lot of Rothschild profiles to WikiTree which was valuable work.

Another absolute breakthrough happened when I was going through some of my documents to provide for my hints. My number one brick wall is my father’s stepfather Louis Kessler and his first wife Sarah Katkow. They were supposedly from Ogec, Russia according to the 1916 Canada Census, and I couldn’t nail down where that was. That is until I found two death records for Sarah.

I ordered the same record in 2004 (likely forgetting that I ordered it before). I had thought they were identical. But they’re not. Compare the two carefully. pic.twitter.com/GdvLwXOgmu

— Louis Kessler (@louiskessler) July 16, 2021

I had always thought those were two copies of the same death certificate. But they were in fact death registrations for Sarah registered in two different municipalities. And the 2nd one lists Sarah and her parents’ place of birth being Odessa, Russia!  The mystery of Ogec is finally solved. It was nice for me to contribute significantly to my own research during this challenge week.

Mondays with Myrt – July 26

I discussed my week on the WikiTree Challenge on Mondays With Myrt (Pat Richley-Erickson) starting about 13:50 in until about 47:00:

Going Forward

I know how long it takes to write good sourced biographies. It involves cross referencing all the information you have and putting it together into something that makes sense.

So the biographies that were added during my WikiTree Challenge week are very much appreciated. I’ll be maintaining those into the future and using WikiTree as the place I write my ancestors’ history.

Great thanks to all the WikiTree people who worked so hard on my tree this week.

There are still 5 more months of the WikiTree Challenge. Great guests are lined up. There are a few coming up, like Drew Smith and Melanie McComb, whose trees I plan to help with. Looking forward to the fun.

This Wednesday, July 14 at 3 p.m EDT, I’ll be introduced as the @WikiTreers guest for the week.

I’ll be on the panel of the Livecast which will be about an hour long. The first half hour will be the “reveal” of John Boeren, whose week they’ll have just finished up. The next half hour will introduce me and the challenge that the WikiTreers will have with my tree.

The July 14 livecast link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoHzM2AMRwg

The livecast of my “reveal” next week will take place Wed Jul 21 at 8 p.m. EDT on both WikiTree’s You Tube Channel and WikiTree’s Facebook Page.

Note the intro is at 3 p.m. EDT and the reveal week is at 8 p.m. EDT. The first week was moved earlier to accommodate John Boeren who lives in The Netherlands.

Come to the livecasts so you can add comments and chat. If you can’t make the livecasts, both sessions are recorded and will be available afterwards via WikiTree on their YouTube or Facebook pages.

What’s Going to Happen

I have seeded WikiTree with my family research back to about great-grandparents, which to be honest, is almost all I know.

Genealogists who use WikiTree (known as WikiTreers) have been participating in this challenge since the beginning of the year. Every week they have a new guest and spend the whole week working on the guest’s genealogy. They try to break brick walls and find new ancestors, and add their nuclear families (i.e. siblings and children). Along the way, they check all the information and add sources to back up every fact. This is part of WikiTree’s “Year of Accuracy” and that is what they are striving for.

They also improve each relatives’ biography and try to find interesting details of their lives that will add some life to that person. Biographies are possibly the most valuable contribution you can give your ancestors.

The work they have done for their other guests so far have been fantastic. For example, watch Devon Noel Lee’s reaction and Connie Knox’ reaction to what was found for them when they were the guest.

My genealogy has always been an interesting but difficult challenge. All the 10 “grandparents” I research (my 4, my wife’s 4, my father’s stepfather and 1st wife) immigrated to Manitoba or Saskatchewan from Russia or Romania in the early 1900’s. Russian and Romanian records are not easy to find and not easy to translate once found. It will be a real challenge.

But my experience with the WikiTreers for the past 6 months during the challenge is that they have all shown to be excellent researchers who have been gaining expertise as the weeks go by. They share what they’re working on with each other on the chat that the challenge uses at discord.com. And more often than not, they figure out a solution to most problems. And they all had fun doing it as well. I tried it for a week when Jarrett Ross was the guest and it was thrilling.

Whether or not they break 100 brick walls, or no brick walls, I know they will be improving all my profiles at WikiTree, adding sources and research notes, and providing many new paths for me to explore with my research. I know I will be very surprised at the reveal, likely multiple times.

Radio Silence

I had hoped I’d be able to help as a participant in my own challenge, and do research with all the others. But that’s not the way it works.

So I am respecting the rules and as of my intro on Wednesday, I will stay completely off WikiTree and not peek one iota. I will not go on the Discord chat channels, and I’ll even uninstall Discord from my phone to prevent notifications from it.

I’ve got a couple of projects to keep me busy during the week. But I can tell you right now: it’s going to be a looooooong week!

So please join me if you can, at my kickoff and at my reveal the week after.

I wrote several months ago about the WikiTree Challenge:
No Genealogist Should Miss the WikiTree Challenge

Each week, WikiTree is holding a challenge for all the people who use WikiTree as part of their “Year of Accuracy”. They invite a genealogy special guest – usually someone well-known amongst genealogists – to add their basic tree onto WikiTree and let the WikiTreers (that’s what they’re called) go at it. The goal is to extend their ancestral lines accurately, adding people and writing biographies that are based on reliable source information. The challenge part is that the WikiTreers get points for each ancestor or ancestor’s sibling added and extra points if they break a brick wall, which is finding ancestors that the guest didn’t have in their primary tree or correcting ancestors they may have had wrong.

And LOT of brick walls get broken!

Look at the special guests to date. If you’re into genealogy, you’ll likely have heard of many of them:

Week 1 – A.J. Jacobs
Week 2 – Cece Moore
Week 3 – Jonny Perl
Week 4 – Jen Baldwin
Week 5 – Henry Louis Gates
Week 6 – Judy Russell
Week 7 (rest week)
Week 8 – Thomas MacEntee
Week 9 – Katherine Willson
Week 10 – Pat Richley-Erickson
Week 11 – Rob Warthen
Week 12 – Dallan Quass
Week 13 – Ellen Thompson-Jennings
Week 14 – Tim Janzen
Week 15 – Cheri Passey
Week 16 (rest week)
Week 17 – Connie Knox
Week 18 – Scott Fisher
Week 19 – Devon Noel Lee
Week 20 – Nathan Goodwin
Week 21 – Gena Philibert-Ortega
Week 22 (rest week)
Week 23 – Yvette Hoitink
Week 24 – Coral Parks
Week 25 – Melissa LeMaster Barker

Each week on Wednesday, WikiTree has an hour live video on their YouTube channel and their Facebook page that reveals all the findings of the previous week’s guest, and introduces the guest for the next week. If you miss it live, you can watch it later on YouTube as all the weeks are recorded. As part of WikiTree’s weekly Saturday morning livecast, they include a brief progress report on how the WikiTree Challenge is progressing. 

From Wednesday to the next Wednesday each week, WikiTreers work together on the guest of the week’s tree on WikiTree.

Learning About WikiTree

I found out about the WikiTree challenge early on. On week 2, when Cece Moore was the guest, I got hooked. I then attended almost every Wednesday live session and many of the Saturday sessions.

This of course, raised my curiousity level about WikiTree. I knew about it since 2011 when I included WikiTree on my GenSoftReviews site. I didn’t open an account at WikiTree until 2017 when I got back to working on my own genealogy again, but I only added a few profiles. This year, after watching a few WikiTree challenges, I was impressed enough to take the plunge. I signed their Honor Code in February and started adding more profiles of my ancestors and my closer relatives to the tree.

WikiTree is a One-World tree. Like FamilySearch and Geni and several others, WikiTree wants each person to be in their tree just once. So everybody has to collaborate and work together on a common genealogy and add sources and improve each others’ biographies.

WikiTree has a lot of features. So many, that it will take you several months to just find out about them. There are apps and tools that help you in many ways. There are watchlists, feeds, profiles, images, charts, help, markup, connections, relationship finder, merging tools, DNA. The list goes on and on.

But it’s the social aspect of WikiTree that is the most interesting. They have group projects, their Forum called G2G, and recurring events to give users fun ways to improve the information in WikiTree such as their Source-a-thon, Friday Date Night, the WikiTree Question of the Week, and this year they started their WikiTree Challenge.

Week 26 – Jarrett Ross’ WikiTree Challenge Week

I had just stood on the sidelines for all the WikiTree Challenge guests up to now. The guests had varying backgrounds: early America, England, Germany, Netherlands, even early Canada. It would have been in a trial by fire for me to try to work on any of those. My expertise, like anyone’s, is of course in the lines I research and the places my ancestors lived. Few of the guests up to now had overlapped with what I know most about.

That’s until the last week. Jarrett Ross was the guest.

Jarrett Ross is a professional genealogist who calls himself the GeneaVlogger. Jarrett’s YouTube channel called GeneaVlogger is where he posts wonderful videos on genealogy that include interviews, tips, tutorials, reaction videos, and videos about his own ancestry research.

Jarrett’s ancestry is Jewish on all his lines. And many of the lines come from the Russian Empire. Hmm. Sounds like something I can relate to.

Behind the Scenes at the WikiTree Challenge

I signed up for the July challenges and was allowed to work on Jarrett’s tree with the other WikiTreers.

Mindy Silva is the challenge coordinator, and Laura DeSpain was this week’s team captain who leads the research for the week.

A shared spreadsheet contains all the participant’s names, where we write the ID of the profile we are editing. That’s so we don’t try to edit a profile that someone else is currently working on.

There are special pages set up to document any brick walls or mistakes we find in the guest’s tree, and there is a page of resources specific to the guest’s genealogy including additional information from the guest. It has a place to add interesting finds and anything needing extra work.

And for motivation, the challengers have access to a live scoresheet showing the points we’ve currently earned compared to everyone else, ordered by highest total points earned.

There are also links to Jarrett’s main research tree. His happens to be at Geni. The challengers are allowed to use his information, but must make sure they have a source for anything they want to add to WikiTree and must verifiy that information themselves.

After the Wedmesday guest intro, everybody gets to work.

Jarrett’s tree initially includes some information about all his ancestors out to at least his great-grandparents. We are allowed to work on any person or lines that we like, for as much time as we like, but we only have a week.

On Thursday morning, I started on one of Jarrett’s lines, went through a few of the sources he provided on his Geni tree as well as some I found on my own.

The genealogical puzzles started appearing. Some facts didn’t align with others. I needed to research more, possibly to check different places for BMD records or Census or ship records. Russian Jewish research is more difficult, and JewishGen and a few other resources are the best you can do for those.

A huge part of this is how we communicate. The WikiTree Challenge uses Discord as their method of coordinating the work. Discord is a powerful group chatting platform, that originally was developed as a social gaming platform for mobile games. It works wonderfully for team coordination. We all were using it to tell each other what we’re working on, what we need help on, get help, give help. It really worked well and looks like this:

Whenever I asked for help on Discord, I always got it.

I must have spent 20 hours on Thursday, Friday and Saturday researching that one line. I found a bit of new information that I hoped will help Jarrett. Along the way, I added a few people to WikiTree, including biographies, source notes and pictures whenever possible.

All WikiTreers are encouraged to add research notes to a profile whenever they encounter something about a record that is important to note, such as conflicting evidence, assumptions, what resources were researched and whatever else might help anyone reading the profile.

I switched gears after three days and spent a day looking at some of the other lines. Once I found a line needing a bit of detective work, I continued with it until the end of the challenge.

Overall, this was a 50 hour week of very intense research and detective work. Most nights I was up until 2 a.m, simply because it was such a rush and I’d lose track of time. There was a lot of very pleasant communication on Discord with all the other researchers that was a lot of fun. It was nice to be able to help others and get helped by others. And I learned new things as well.

It was definitely a manic and intense week, but also exhilerating. So much fun, but quite exhausting. My family wondered where I was hiding most of the week.

I can see how some WikiTreers can love doing it. Each week, the participation seems to be increasing and the participants keep gaining experience and are becoming really expert researchers.

The work of several dozen diligent people plus some of my contributions produced an impressive result.

The reveal for Jarrett is recorded here:

What’s Next for the Challenge

The above video finished with Jarrett and introduced John Boeren as this week’s guest. John is a regular on Mondays with Myrt. He lives in The Netherlands, with all Dutch lines going far far back. That’s not my specialty, so I won’t be part of the team this week. I’ll wait until a future challenge comes up that I feel I can better help with.

And the week after John. Well, that’s my week!  I’ve been selected to be the guest for the week of July 14 to July 21! All these WikiTreers will be working on my tree, hopefully breaking some of my brick walls and finding information new to me, or even disproving what I thought was true. Anything and everything will be accepted with open arms.

I’ll give all the details about my week in my next blog post in a few days and let you know when you can catch the livecasts which I’ll be on.