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The WikiTree Challenge for Mark Cuban - Thu, 15 Dec 2022

Yesterday was the final wrapup of the challenge week at WikiTree to try to add as much as possible to the Mark Cuban @mcuban family tree.

Mark Cuban is the the American billionaire who co-founded Broadcast.com and owns the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team. He is widely known as one of the sharks on the TV show Shark Tank.

The challenge was a whole week, from Dec 1 to Dec 8, where a few dozen people, myself included, worked hard to research Mark’s genealogy and add information on WikiTree to his ancestors and their nuclear families.

Wiki Tree Challenges

WikiTree has been very innovative in publicizing their platform when they devised the WikiTree Challenge. In 2021, its first year, each week WikiTree chose a well-known genealogist as their subject, breaking many of the brick walls that had previously stumped these admired researchers and professionals. In 2022, they changed their tactic to use noted personalities and entertainers.

I first wrote about the Challenge in March 2021: No Genealogist Should Miss the WikiTree Challenge. In July 2021, I myself was honored to be chosen as one of the genealogists to be featured: My Week as the WikiTree Challenge Guest. A lot of interesting was added to my relatives’ profiles on WikiTree. It was just amazing to have a team of people work on my tree for a week.

I also participated as one of the people helping with several of the challenges. My expertise is in Jewish Genealogy in what is now Ukraine and Romania, so naturally I selected those guests where I might be able to contribute.

A few week before my week,t I helped with the challenge for Jarrett Ross the GeneaVlogger - The WikiTree Challenge – From the Inside.

The week after my week was Daniel Loftus, and he had one mysterious relative Peter Welsh who emigrated in Manitoba and just happened to be buried in a cemetery within biking distance from my house. I had never been to that cemetery before, so I visited and took a picture of Peter’s grave and found additional information that I added to Peter’s profile.

In September 2021, I helped with Melanie McComb’s challenge on her Jewish side. Melanie had previously put in a lot of work on my challenge, so I was very happy return the favor and to do the same for her.

And in December 2021, it was Marian Wood whose challenge I participated in.

For those participating in a challenge, each one is a week-long intensive effort to flesh out new ancestors and find sources confirming them. We’d then write up their profiles on WikiTree and add to their biographies, source information and research notes. All week, the participants would all be collaborating on the WikiTree Discord channel for that challenge.

There would be a "kickoff” on YouTube with Mindy Silva (the challenge coordinator), the Team Leader for the challenge, and the featured genealogist. And a week later, there would be a “results reveal” on YouTube where Mindy and the Team Leader would “wow” the guest with all the brick walls broken and information found.

Mark Cuban’s Challenge

When the format changed in 2022 to famous people and celebrities, there were fewer people I felt I could really help with. You really need to be dedicated to spend a week of your time. It’s a very intensive week. So there would need to be a personal connection or something of interest to draw me in.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Elaine Martzen, who is the coordinator of the Jewish Roots Project at WikiTree. Elaine has been participating in a lot of the challenges, and was a contributor during my week when I was the guest. Elaine had asked me in September if I could participate in the Scott Turow challenge, but I was busy that week. This time she asked me if I was interested in helping with Mark Cuban. I was available and Mark looked like he had a very interesting Ancestry, all lines being Ashkenazi Jewish from Eastern Europe, so I said sure.

Prior to the challenge, Mindy as the Challenge Coordinator, set up Mark’s Ancestors up to his great-grandparents as our starting point. I was one of 23 participants on the challenge team. There were also several other members of WikiTree who participated unofficially and provided additional help.

On Thursday Dec 1 at 11 am, we had a Zoom Kick Off session, with about 12 of us from the team in attendance, so we could meet each other and discuss strategies.

I spent most of the first day on my MyHeritage site adding a new family tree that I called “Cuban Family Tree”. I seeded it with the ancestors up to the great-grandparents that Mindy initially put up. I used the “Quick and Dirty” techniques for building a family tree that genealogists often use to determine the ancestry of their DNA matches. That was helped greatly by the wonderful Smart Matching to records and trees that MyHeritage provides. I quickly built the tree up to about 80 ancestors, their siblings and spouses. My goal was to find approximate birth years and originating towns in Eastern Europe of Mark’s family.

Interestingly, I got Smart Matches from a MyHeritage user named mcuban, who turns out to be Mark Cuban himself.

and also Brian Cuban who is Mark’s brother.

It seems the Cuban family is very interested in their genealogy and unlike many of the other 2022 Challenge celebrities, have done quite a bit of research themselves.

Mark Cuban was contacted by the Wiki Tree people lto see if he’d be willing to be the subject of a challenge, and he was fine with it. Mindy wrote on his Challenge Page:

We had spoken to Mark Cuban about this challenge. He is "big into genealogy" and has used Ancestry, MyHeritage, and 23andMe. But he wasn’t so sure we can find anything new for him. "Not sure you would have sources I don’t," he told us.

So the challenge was on!

The Week’s Progress

The team had another Zoom session that evening. Jewish Genealogy in Eastern Europe is not simple. You can go back to 1800 if you’re lucky (it’s hit and miss depending on the town) but very few of the available records are digitized and fewer yet are indexed. The records themselves are in Russian and sometimes Hebrew, and the people themselves spoke Yiddish. And just to add to the fun, the handwriting in these languages on these records is often atrocious.

Even so, I still was going to try to find some records of Mark’s family that were in Eastern Europe. I was very familiar with using JewishGen and many other Jewish Genealogy resources. A few others in our group were as well, but the majority of our team although new to Jewish records, were quite experienced with North American research. They looked for and found many immigration records and gravestones which were essential to help determine or confirm where the ancestors were from and what the person and father’s name written on the stone in Hebrew was.

Everyone helped everyone else on the Discord channel throughout the week, asking questions, getting answers, posting interesting finds and getting help with certain tasks.

For my initial searches, I started looking at Mark’s maternal grandmother’s ancestors. They were from what is now Lithuania. Wow, JewishGen had a lot! I had no experience with Jewish records from Lithuania, so I was amazed at the incredible amount indexed compared to my ancestors’ locations. I was able to collect evidence for 3 more generations of Mark’s Ziv ancestors than he had on his MyHeritage tree.

There were so many Lithuanian records for the family that it took me 3 days to compile them and write up people profiles and source on WikiTree. I spent 3 hours developing a spreadsheet to help me generate the source citations, because doing 100 of them manually one-by-one would have been torture.

I knew these records were accessible by anyone on JewishGen if they knew where to look. So I presume a lot of this information would not be new to Mark.

Four days had passed already. Only 3 days remaining in the challenge and I had only really looked at one of the four grandparent lines.

I noticed early in the week that Mark’s paternal grandfather came from the town of Malin (now Malyn) that is now in the Ukraine. That was very near to where some of my ancestors were from. I know a researcher, Boris Makalsky, who has a group that has been scanning records from the archives in the Zhytomyr province. Boris has found about 200 records for me over the past 3 years from several of my and my wife’s lines. I emailed Boris and asked if he might have any records from Malin and I gave him information about Mark’s great-grandparents.

On Tuesday, Boris emailed me back. He had found and provided me with one record for each great-grandparent which added another generation onto both lines. Both I and the team found this very exciting, and this surely was information that Mark could not have found, as this information had not previously been scanned and was not available in any form online.

Not only that, but Boris said he has records for both families going back to about 1750. Mark would very likely want to contact Boris if he would like to get access to the other records available.

Seven days is never enough. I would have needed another 7 days to thoroughly research Mark’s other two grandparent lines. But you can only do what time will provide. I was very happy with my contributions to the team.

And I must say the team’s work was equally amazing. They found and documented many stories and details about Mark’s family, There were 21 Interesting Finds recorded on the Challenge Page. And the 23 of us registered for the challenge over that week added profiles for 16 more ancestors and 513 of Mark’s other relatives to WikiTree, totaling 2,711 profile edits. I’m tired just thinking about it.

Wrap Up

I was invited to be a on the panel in the Challenge Wrap Up yesterday. It is available for viewing on YouTube. Mindy, Elaine, our team leader Thomas Koehnline and I discuss what we found: