 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the rock reveal. This one's a long-awaited one. We usually don't wait this long. So I'm real excited. My name's Betsy Koh, if you don't know me already. And to my side there is Sandy Paddock, who's joining me as our host today. And we have three of our five raw keys with us. We have Monty McCoy driving in orange. She's going to drive safely while he's driving. And Steven Tomatzowitz, who's decked out in full wiki-ti-tria tire. T-shirt, mug, backpack, and enormous joining us as well. Hi, so glad you could all be here. Wow. So it was quite a month in February. I think one of the most exciting things was this was the first rock where everyone who was being rocked got a badge. That is cool. Yeah, for caution, the threshold. So we worked really hard. Once we saw that that was attainable, pushed for that. So let's look at... There we go. So if you are joining us and you're not a wiki-tria member already, wiki-tria is a free online one-family tree. We're a collaborative community where it's really like no other genealogy website out there, where we work together for accuracy and connecting people. Unlike some definitions of connection, wiki-tria's definition is a little more broad in that it allows for connection to go through married lines, marriages. And I think that's so cool because we all know anyone who's part of a family knows that it's all one big family and that sometimes those people who might not be related to us by blood but rather through marriage are just as true family as anyone else. So I love that wiki-tria defines connection that way. The rock, we will rock you event started in March 2023 and rock is an acronym for random acts of wiki-tria kindness. And what it involves is that we have people nominate others from the community and then we randomly select five individuals who are going to get rocked. And what that means is that our team of volunteers go to town for a month on their lines and try to increase their CC7. The CC7 are all profiles within seven degrees of an individual. So you are zero to yourself, your parents are one, your grandparents are two, and so on out. But when you factor in marriages and really grow out the branches, the CC7s can get quite extensive as you'll see. So we had a team of 40 rockers this month and some of them sort of snuck in and I noticed that they were rocking unofficially and I got their names on the list so I think I got everybody who contributed in some way to all the work you're going to see. So thank you so much to the rockers. I know that the people who have been rocked always consistently say how much they appreciate you're giving time to their branches. We all know that working on our own tree is precious precious time so it's really a great gift of wiki tree love to to work so hard on somebody else's lines. So we've got three of our rockies with us. We have Mickey Arvis, Stephen Tamatzowitz, and Monty McCoy are with me here live and Dave Stern and Matthew McCombs. Matthew Comes unfortunately could not be with us but they're going to be assured me that they're going to be watching at the earliest opportunity on the YouTube video. So here are our numbers. So first of all, note that note what's in blue at the bottom. Our total increase in cc7 for all five rockies was over 3,000. 3,119 and even those of you who are who were rocked are we were chatting a little bit beforehand saying that wow it's just really hard to you know sort of get a handle on what's been done. I mean you'll be digging away at this for a good bit of time. So we have here the starting numbers, the ending numbers. So this was the number on January 31st and this was the number right on February 29th right before midnight. So we can also see that percentage growth for each person. It looks like well by percentage wise Dave started the farthest behind and had the most most growth by percentage but then Matthew had the biggest number of profiles added. So and as I mentioned all five rockies earned a badge. We were able to get Stephen, Dave, and Nicky over 1,000 and I know some of us were really pushing hard for that. I'm so happy that when we made that happen and then Matthew and Monty were already over 1,000 and we got them their 2k cc7 badges. So here is Stephen and Stephen I just love this picture. What you can see here is that he was also brandishing a bingo wiki tree. I mean you know just everything he could find. Love that. So Stephen you and I joined wiki tree around the same time. In 2019 he's a member of the Italy and Poland projects as well as a semi-tourist and he coordinates a one-place study for South River, New Jersey which is where some of his father's family lived and we'll talk about that later and when it's thaw and time you'll find him on the Mid-Atlantic US team. Except for this latest one I'm on your team this time. Oh right, right. I do my best with the team affiliations but you know when people switch around I can't always keep up. Now this is just a little wink because Stephen was very, he was on the rock team himself and so of course he was in the discord channel for We Will Rock You and kept chiming in about his own branches and people kept saying stop peeking and so Aaron Breen said maybe it's rebellious acts of wiki tree keenness which made me chuckle. So here is what we did for you Stephen. I'm grateful that you didn't push yourself over a thousand so that we'll give you it but really some nice filling in especially in your the outer blue rings. Sounds like we have some, are we okay? We've got some feedback. Yeah, okay. So looking at Stephen's line, well you know what Stephen, I'm not going to presume to talk about your lines because you know them way way better. Do you want to just give us a quick little introduction to your family? Well yeah my parents are still around so there's not much on them. My grandparents on the top there the first two they were in the South River area and my other great grandfather or my grandfather he was married to my grandmother there and then of course separated and they kind of remarried and stuff and they were like Saginaw, Alaska, Montana, you know they moved around I think Oregon and then my great grandfather on my dad's side which is the top side you know they were in South River and I I understand right they came over on a boat or something and sit with the grandmother and she was married to somebody else. That was Caroline. My other my grandmother's side she was married to Francesa. You know and they I found some records of them living in New Jersey in that South River area but they were kind of vague and of course the misspellings are all over the place you know or variations as we're calling them now and the other my other grandfather and his family they were over Saginaw in that area and through my research it's like my great-grandfather's son which was Robert went along with the photo with the hat they lived next to each other that's where my mom was born in Saginaw and then I found another article that up the street my grandfather's grandfather's father lived up the street and his name was Herman and then I had a story where that wasn't his name and so I was trying to disprove that and I was trying my mom doesn't really know much about it or really cared so I I was reading the article when I was visiting her and I we read it and it sounded like the funeral of Herman was taking place at his son's house just down the street. Hmm is that this Herman over here on the right? Yes, yeah. And of course I've gone and taken pictures of those areas off of like Google Earth and stuff and my grandfather's house was he built it out of like cement blocks it's left the other house was ripped down and the one up the street was ripped down you know a lot a lot of the houses are coming down and it was same with the ones in South River on some of their first houses they were they had that hurricane and and unless they raised their house so far and all this stuff they just bought got bought out and and tore a bunch of them down and so far the one house is still left and I was on Facebook the other day I found somebody whose grandmother lived in that house but they haven't contacted me yet who do you know if they had any good stories of you know what their interior of the house looked like. Okay well yes so your Stevens one place study really is focusing a lot on the houses of the area I thought and I noticed in in your profiles you go into a great deal of detail the history of the houses where your where your family lives so I thought that was very cool here is um so I guess it was a not just a paternal but maybe some of your maternal as well or in South River New Jersey well we live there we live near there well anyway here it is just I always like to get situated um to know where I am geographically so it's you know just a little bit southwest of New York City um northeast of Philadelphia um so um we had um let's see your there were some things found about your second great grand uncle Eli Frederick Gatsby um oh yes okay so this was a an existing profile and it's actually actively managed by Jane Embleton and what happened here was that Christine Daniels created a close connection um between you and Jane when she connected Eli with his parents so if you uh uh I guess I guess he was floating around without parents and so to Roggate and parents Robert and Mary and then all of a sudden you and Jane have this uh nine degree yeah yeah and sometimes they were flipping Eli with Frederick I've noticed in some records depends which one you look at that sometimes right well there wasn't there wasn't a Frederick in the family it was just his first and his middle name I mean sometimes people would do that on their own right they'd be like today I feel like using my middle name not knowing how much distress that would cause a genealogist in the future some of the family members they mostly some of them just used their middle name and when I found their first name other family members who are alive didn't realize that right right yeah it can get very complicated so um that was that was one cool thing and then Carrie Shoe was your great grand aunt so she was let's see the looking at so Harry Guy Shoe is your direct ancestor am I correct yes yeah so she was the oldest child in the family he was the youngest child so this was a tough story their mother died when when they were all young and Carrie ended up going to work as a servant Kathy found her in the 1880 census as as a servant and she was 12 years old wow yeah yeah and then she did she did end up getting married um she married uh Stephen Todd and they had uh all in all 10 children so um hardworking lady for sure and Kathy's ease in the chat today oh great hi Kathy great you great that you could join us yeah um so sit before we before we go on um Stephen any any comments thoughts I know you've been digging a little bit well I was really happy to see a lot of us and there's new information I haven't even looked at at all of course because so much you know with the 324 additions you know and and some of them I'm really comparing to another family tree book that a relative gave me and some of them were following that so that was kind of neat to know I you need to see the dates and I love it when I get pictures and stuff too but yeah great job everybody well you gave us some fun lines to work on so thank you Stephen yeah and and thank you also for your your rocking I mean you're gonna your name's gonna come up again later for what ends up what you did for others so thank you yeah so Dave Stern um uh has been a wiki treeer since 2021 uh he's a member of the United States Appalachia and military and war projects uh he also contributes to the Stern one name study and is a member of the mid-Atlantic team for funds I'm sorry guys I have a software up my uh my computer is insisting that I enter a password there we go okay I don't know if you could see that nope we know we do not know your secrets okay all right so here's uh Dave started out with a low cc7 only 400 so you can see what we did here I mean just uh actually Greg Clark helped me a little bit this morning with with getting this graphic and it's timed oh my goodness what what amazing growth um and and I agree um 659 additions to Dave's cc7 so I was able to make a list of Dave's lines that ended up being worked on that I know of that's the big disclaimer I mean there could be more but these were the six that I was aware of and going to this to his ancestor view I I put a star by the most recent common ancestor for those lines the Cameron one goes back to the third great grandparent level and so the Cameron was the maiden name of John McMillan's mother so I would say Dave whenever whenever you watch this and you're get you're ready to roll up your sleeves these are the lines where I would be looking for activity um so um just to look at a couple of things um now people who ended up adding profiles as a part of the we will rock you challenge um generally should should have um hopefully um orphaned them by now so that so that the raw keys can go ahead and pick those up within their own watch list um so here are two examples uh we had Jeremiah Kerns um Kerns 1327 who is a seven degree connection um for Dave and uh Christine Daniels um worked on his profile um filling it out a little bit and um and then more even closer we have Mike Russian 27 uh four degree connection um and Steven and David Reynolds gear uh were responsible for doing the work on this profile um Steven did you I can't recall did you create this or was it already I think it might have already been there and you added to it that one I can't remember yeah so many profiles yeah yeah but um there's there's work to be done there um parents and siblings who might might be able to be added so um but this is this is nice because you've crossed the pond there and anything that's done you know will still add to the cc7 because he's only at four degrees so that's really nice to find a a three to four degree connection with room for growth um so I just wanted to point this out in case anyone is not aware of this under the find menu right towards the top you'll see there's a place for to click on cc7 changes and that's for your personal changes if you notice you go uh log on to wiki tree one morning and see oh my gosh my cc7 just went up by 10 and I didn't do anything click here and you're you're gonna find out what happened um it's a it's a really it's pretty recent and I'm so glad for for it and what it can tell us I think it's for the month oh just for the month okay yeah and I would also say I think you need to set a baseline on it you need to do it at least once and then it sort of knows how to how to look moving forward so go ahead if you haven't already clicked on that button go ahead and click on it get it get it in tune with your with your cc7 grid and then it can catch any new changes so sandy I think you have some some uh things to add yes I do and I'm gonna actually pull up a comment because um there was what we call an app latch and bat call bat sign call it came from Kathy and she was the cheerleader to get him to 1000 yeah she kept saying in the rock channel you know he's so close he's so close he's so close and I was just you know casually looking through the discord channel's wiki tree and said well let me see what I can do and sure enough it was Appalachia Pennsylvania the Kerry Dave over that 1000 ccc cc7 mark that got him his badge really really cool town a lot of people do not consider or know that Pennsylvania just north of Pittsburgh is Appalachia but it sure is and the city of Butler the last Carnegie library to be built in Pennsylvania was in Butler which is really really cool if you don't know what currently the libraries are look it up on Wikipedia really cool idea but Butler was a stilt belt area and what did they build in Butler they built railroad cars and this is where I started to get Dave over his 1000 mark with James Roland Ross in Butler lived and died born lived died in Butler this is somewhat current day downtown Butler and Appalachia Pennsylvania helped get him his badge and thanks Kathy for keeping track of that and kind of putting it in front of my face yes yeah they I echo that because I saw Kathy was was spurring people on and that that really made a difference should I go to the next yeah okay oh did there was one okay all right and speaking of bat signals we did the same for for you Nikki we were we were you know we could see 1000 but it was still it was still still a distance and so we got some people from the England project who hopped on over and and did uh milk rolling for example uh did did some and uh Janet Costa also helped out I did a few so we got we got you there so Nikki's been on wiki tree since 2018 member of the whales england and profile improvement projects she's a sorcerer and a data doctor and a also a leader for the herb for char team with the england project and I have to say I want one of these mugs yes a wonderful christmas present from my wife yes yeah yeah yeah so just as I because I'm into my homework I'm also a leader for the radnyshire team for the whales project so and they're like right next to each other so I have family that cross all the time so great yeah um hi anyone who's watched me on the live cast might have picked up on the fact that I have a little bit of a mug problem so I love a good mug so um well here's we we got you over uh by 28 so um here is your your comparison from the beginning of February to the end of February I I'm gonna I am so touched by this because I I said like my yearly goal was to try to get my cc7 to 750 by the end of the year and to see those numbers keep inching up like I didn't cry officially but you guys made my eyes water a lot and so um yeah thank you everybody that that took part in this it is really um amazing and wonderful oh we're so we're so glad and um yeah I mean wiki tree love it's for sure it's all about um so um like like I did with Steven can can I let you talk about your lines a little bit niki um sure so um oh my my mom's side Welsh pretty much Welsh Welsh Welsh a little bit of English I'll stay within the same area um yeah they were here and there um my dad's side while the the Orvis name is very well um researched um I had a hard time actually getting my grandmother's um maiden name um and when I found it I was so happy but then also bummed because it was yet another Jones that I had to search for and I was like are you kidding me um she's she Welsh because um I haven't got there yet I mean funnily enough it looks like it's more on the Scottish side Canada Scotland which is its own little blocker but um yeah so that was really exciting um and I um I for a long time I lived on the like southeast uh US and a little bit on the east coast and then I came to Chicago and for a visit and I just really fell in love with it um and I guess it's after doing the genealogy and seeing how much of my family's from the midwest it kind of started to make a connection you know and I was like oh there there is some kind of family pool going on here so uh yeah it's just been interesting seeing Indiana Illinois Iowa yeah so yeah you've got some some deep roots there yeah yeah well um are you are you familiar with Celia Mary Caster I'm not I know the name caster but I don't know this particular person right right so Chet Snow who is on the rock team um worked very very intensely within the caster lines he he's sort of you know you know how it is when you're connecting and you're like oh I just hit the connecting jackpot and he he emailed me or sort of early on like oh there's this family of niggies and you know solid good solid midwestern folk and so many connections and he was just you know adding and adding and then um a little while later he he emailed me and he said wow I found this it's it's kind of a sad story but um uh you know just really also at the same time touching of of her life uh so she was born um you know turn of the century in North Dakota and she I there must be something in your family Nikki about the name Celie because I see that there's more than one yeah yeah and I'd never really heard it so yeah interesting so yeah I was I was looking at another Celie in your family who's quite a bit earlier than this Celie um like like 1811 so um he uh this Celie married Florence uh Florence Shope and they had a one uh daughter Celia Mary uh and then very sadly when Celia Celia was four years old uh Florence passed away uh and Celie was he was an only child he he uh he just I think it seemed like he was a a loss at what to do this little girl uh so he he um asked his cousin to take care cousin and wife the cousin's wife to take care of her um so she was living with with family but not with her father um and in the meantime her father eventually moved back to his um where he he grew up so so here was royal uh Iowa where Celia was living with extended family and here was uh Delaware Iowa where um Celie was living had returned and at that time by that time his father his father was getting older and and he was looking out for his father um so um Celia traveled across Iowa every summer to visit her father and you can see like this is like present day it's almost four hours to drive you know I can't imagine what it was in 19 you know 15 right yeah so um a big person in Celia in in the family equation was a a cousin of Celie's whose name was Mabel Talmage uh so Mabel was living with Celie and and his father and um she was the one who was really responsible for encouraging you know strengthening of the relationship between Celia and her father became a uh surrogate mother to Celia so eventually after she graduated from royal high school Celia moved permanently to Delaware and lived with her father she was working as an agent for the railroad company and eventually she met a young man Elmer Smith and uh they they got married and and Mabel made sure that they had a lovely lovely wedding festivities and so they settled down in Marshalltown and eventually had a baby daughter uh who was who was named Florence for Celia's mother um so the sad part of the story is that Celia herself succumbed to stomach cancer so she ended up dying when her daughter was four just yeah just as her mother had okay wow so yeah so one of those really tugs at your heartstrings yeah yeah yeah wow um so um then moving over to Wales um do you do I think you must already know a bit about your highway line am I right a little bit yeah I mean my uncle Bill married into my mom's family so I know them a little bit not as far back as I would have liked but yeah okay yeah the families yeah so um John Tyner and I know John's in the yeah hi John and Maureen Wilkins who's over in London they were working on your highway line um so you'll see their names on the changes they added added um and I I looked at Thomas Highway um so he was uh very known for um founding this hydro spa and in the Highland Moors and I uh I mapped it um so it's right in the middle of Wales yep yep yep that's yeah do you know how to say this land lander and Dodd well yeah lander and Dodd Wells yeah okay all right and I read just somewhere that that it's often just referred to as Dodd yes yeah the Dodd yeah yeah right right so and he also discovered uh several springs and uh I mean this was uh this was quite quite a quite a thing back in his you know turn of the century late uh late 19th early 20th century um yeah so apparently they are um refurbishing this the spa so yeah lander Dodd and Victorian times was big big spa town that wasn't their whole thing so yeah yeah it makes sense I didn't know about this that's so interesting yeah okay I'm glad we uncovered some things you did um and did you did you peek at all Nikki as we were going I didn't I wanted to so badly but I was like no I'm gonna wait I'm gonna wait so tonight yes I will be shuffling through everything and yeah yeah going through it all okay all right that's very disciplined of you not only waiting the end of the month but waiting until the reveal so and Sandy has something for you too imagine this yes that's right you're an Appalachian so again Kathy sent out the Appalachian bat signal call and it was towards the end of the month and she's like I just know we can get Nikki over the line over the line so I said okay well let me let me just take a look and I swear to you guys it's just random where I happen to find this it's like wiki trees calling me with their own backhaul and you were really close to the 1000 and it was uh West Virginians who got you over to your 1000 bench and this is kind of really interesting to me because I work meant I have work wins in my family but we're not connected through the workman's interest we're connected through my own minutes minutes but um Pocahontas County West Virginia is where a lot of my ancestors oh and my mother's paternal line come from like almost all of them and then Minnesota where that location is in Minnesota is where my husband's family come from so it was always like this is strange this is weird yeah you know never the two met until my husband and I so um this was kind of interesting and the other thing is I would have assumed that the West Virginians such as Ike and his entire family his brothers and sisters his wife his children his uh mother father all left Pocahontas County West Virginia to go to Minnesota assuming that it would have been because of timber because timber was really big business in West Virginia and also Minnesota but no lifelong farmers and they farmed in West Virginia and went to Minnesota to farm as well so you're an uplatch and welcome to the biscuit club all all roads lead to biscuits it does in through beginning during after you're there yeah fantastic and I will tell you I was in Pocahontas County October of last year and that is actually my picture of on the road not on the road but that is an accurate picture they took going through Pocahontas County beautiful yeah uh so the West let's have Nikki finish up hers because this one kind of speaks to the next thing yeah yep yep exactly so um Nikki enjoy enjoy discovering um all the new profiles and um yeah any any other any other thoughts um no I mean this is just an amazing project and um obviously not the one that's going on but the next one after that I'm gonna give back and join and see what I can do to help others because it is it's just um I yeah going over that thousand mark thank you guys that just is amazing I didn't think that would happen for a long long time if ever wonderful wonderful thank you so much great we're so happy we could do it for you all right Sandy I'm turning it over to you so I think that we've got our two remaining rappers and that would be Matthew and Monty and they are hardcore Appalachians you know whether they were part of this project or not they they would have no choice they were really hard for Appalachians but before I begin you know when you talk about rock and you get involved as we were from our end helping some of them are really easy and some of them you can find and I kind of chuckled when Stephen said yeah I figured you were going to work on one line and not the other line because the roadblocks were coming up pretty quick I have to tell you that Matthew's and Monty's lines are some of the most challenging lines I have ever worked with as a professional genealogist for certain reasons they um they had a lot of a lot of special care and a lot of special needs that needed and I'll tell you kind of what we did along the way and also I I have a big thanks to get at the end but that because they were so challenging and they had a lot of issues with them that we literally babysat these these certain problematic profiles we we try to babysit their lines we answered dozens of questions from those that were helping they were like can is this right or is this the right location or is this the right person because they were so difficult so um we actually knew in advance who was going to get rocked and we went and cleaned up a lot of profiles beforehand so those that were volunteering at the very beginning on February 1st had a clean slate to work with otherwise I it would have been it would have been a disaster so we we babysat we helped out we answered a lot of questions as a project and we changed all quite a bit and I just want to want to shut up because I don't think everybody understands that sometimes project members come together for rock and do things like this okay so let's talk I believe it's Matthew that comes up next and Matthew's been a wiki tree here since 2015 he's been active and then he's taken a break because I know he's had to move and then he's come back and he's active really active again uh in the meantime why he was taking a little bit of break from wiki tree he was waiting on his DNA and we're going to explain why that's important just a minute he's a member of our project the Appalachia project and also the Appalachia roots team for thons and then on the next slide we can kind of see where his cc7 went so it looks like we didn't do a lot but again I just want to point out that with Matthew's line in particular there were so much babysitting so many questions to answer from other wiki treeers that it took a lot of time but we did get them over 2000 well over 2000 badge so that was pretty exciting actually sandy I have to say I disagree that it doesn't look like you did a lot because because where you filled in was closer to the center and I think I think that's tougher it's easier to to be further out yeah his his is his was interesting and we'll show you um I'll help you out on the next slide Matthew with your family like I just want to point out that when I said hardcore Appalachian I mean I mean his family is from Appalachia all the way back I mean it's it's Kentucky Kentucky Kentucky and um since Matthew is not here to defend his choice I will tell you that we do fight over um Kentucky Appalachian spice in Maryland Appalachian spices so I will tell you that Matthew my spice is still better than your spice that's the benefit of not being here I get the win but you know he is hardcore Kentucky and I love all his grandparents pictures those are so nice okay and then on the next slide we'll see deep roots very very deep roots and you can see this is Kentucky you can see where he's at this is very close to some of you might know Harlan Kentucky Harlan gets a lot of press it's it's a couple counties away and this is one of his family photos it's a family reunion photo of the mom and the dad and the kids and that's a really really cool picture that you see from his own records and his own files very deep roots which sometimes is easy and sometimes is not and I'll explain why on the next slide okay so the Rocky became a hawk we finally we had something called MPE and for those of you that don't know there's different ways to say it um or define it I should say I will say not the parent expected um you can see from Matthew's own pages from his DNA confirmation statements non parental or non parental events he has a lot of him he has four and he listed them with Betsy they have four brick walls we came close to getting one and I think we still might have that one but we need to do a little bit more verification on it thankfully Matthew has done his DNA he's he's an expert in DNA he knows his stuff with DNA he knows his family lines with DNA and a lot of problems with MPEs and unfortunately this happens sometimes we get excited on our own lines we get excited and we see a census and we thought oh there we go we can add them to the tree as a parent and especially if other places have little green leaves that say it's true then it must be true but it's not and we in that Blanchard project knew this ahead of time he warned us that they were for it MPEs that we needed to look at what we did is you see at the at the bottom of the slide we went and put the parental relationship is not x person please see notes we left notes in biography now why did we do that because this person Woodward Rowling is shown on every census for a particular profile for a particular ancestor so it would seem to make sense that that would match but it didn't because Matthew goes by DNA first then then he'll go by records so he already knew we've disconnected Woodward Rowling about four times that I know of so it's really easy to do on our own profiles our own ancestors so that's why we kind of did that little warning and then we turned Matthew into a hawk we didn't know what else to do so we said Matthew you know your lines you know the DNA for your lines and you also know your MPEs for your lines these are your bit we gave him a set of profiles and some babysitting don't do anything else this month but babysitting he did one other thing and I'll tell you when we talk about Monty what he did but this was the only way that we could figure out so for it's funny that Steven and Nikki you guys kept it kind of don't look don't look and we encouraged him to look we encouraged him to double check so he still has the four MPEs in his line one I think we're very close to breaking through with new DNA discoveries and that's the way it's going to have to fall is somebody's going to have to be tested and come out okay if we go to the next slide so the padlet so I want to point out something you know best he puts a lot of work into these presentations it's a lot of work and all because she's got to kind of watch throughout the month what's going on and what's being done and what's being said and what's being found so that's why we have those padlets we ask everybody to put anything you know good bad and different up on those padlets so Betsy can kind of pull from them and have some interesting finds you guys work the lines so we only know what interesting finds are when you put them up there so I encourage everybody to continue to do that and put it up up there because this is this was kind of tricky with Matthew he only had sad stories on his padlet so I took some that were probably more special to Matthew than than anything else so the first one was he has an ancestor George Woods he was a night placement and he was an end to watch he went into a cafe there was a taxi driver that was inebriated that was at the bar shotgun in front of him two pistols on a nearby table gunfire and stewed some were wounded but officer Woods and the cafe owners and I believe they're two children that worked at the cafe were killed outright so that was kind of an end to watch in the second one is very fascinating to me as you know I do a lot of work with coal miners in a lot of ancestry work with coal miners as well as disasters project on wikichery what you're looking at a picture is an actual a coal mine cart or wagon a car however you want to put it that's actually in the coal mine they will drag that in a couple other ones along the way throughout the deep mine on the railroad tracks that is one ton you probably heard this uh excuse me song 16 tons well that's one and coal miners would have to get 16 tons a day out and that's a lot that's a backbreaking work too when this was done so chris smith actually died in a coal mining accident he fell underneath one of these and broke almost every bone in his body and you can see that he actually fell in the mine the little bottom piece of a clipped image shows that it was an accident and then he fell under the the mine car and they literally had to carry him out keep in mind that almost every bone in his body was broken it was just excruciating so they you know Matthew's family are coal miners they come from coal mine country as well and the other thing that's very interesting about this is the doctor who wrote up that death certificate actually had the guts to write it in full detail most of the time doctors would just say died in a mine and you wouldn't get that information so hopefully when Matthew sees us he can go back and check out the profile for chris james but that is a lot of coal that you got to bring out of there too okay and then on the next slide and i should say nicky i love my welsh uh coal miners too john helps me tremendously with my welsh coal miners research okay so something kind of cool out of Matthew's so he had an ancestor Joseph McDonald who signed up for New York National Guard uh instantly was sent to this what we call now the Mexican expedition some know it as a poncho villa expedition and or the mexican punitive campaign and for those of you that that don't know about this poncho villa kind of started the mexican border wars with the united states when he invaded i guess is the only word i can use new mexico president wilson didn't like that so poncho made it back over to mexico but president wilson said no i want him brought to me he should you know face judgment and that's what this mexican punitive campaign is about it was one of the last times too that we used um horses tremendous amount of horses on us soil for war as well so he has an ancestor that actually fought in the poncho villa expedition and those came from wiki comments those are not matthew's pictures or not his ancestor that i know of but that's a lot of soldiers a lot of soldiers walking through there okay so then we go to our next slide uh in monty you're up but let me just finish with matthew i need to say something too very special about matthew matthew uh k came into our apple ad show project a while ago it helps everybody out that has a dna question a kentucky question he's really just such a cool guy that jumped in from the instant sometimes you know when you have new people that come on the wiki tree or new people come into your project or even on discord they're a little shy and i love that matthew jumped right in it fit in and started helping right from the get go so i just wanted to give a shout out to matthew and i thank you for being part of our project as we go through okay matthew are you driving safely driving safely just listening okay i know you've got a couple people that were worried about you so matthew i rolled up matthew matthew is new to wiki tree he is new to the apalachia project as a matter of fact i think dave stern beat you by a week so who we profiled earlier dave stern has been an apalachia project member for about three weeks and matthew just a little bit more than that and he also is on the apalachia roots team for thons he's uh diving straight in this thon and going straight in if we go to the next slide matthew we did we got you over he was just got his 1000 badge and we got you over 2000 so i need to ask did you pee did you look um not a lot a tiny bit it we we also have in our discord our project discord we have a little sub channel set up so if we have any questions or research issues or problems then we ask them there and i have to tell you that monti has dug into his dna and has given us every bit of dna information that he can find he has gone and asked relatives for information he's tried to confirm everything that that we had questions with and that was helpful because as we go to the next slide we're going to talk a little bit about your family monti so tell us a little bit about your your parents i i and i have to say in your stepdad right yes um yeah they were divorced my parents um i i was a baby so i was born in 69 so i'm assuming 69 70 and uh you know mom raised me for uh 10 years and in 79 when i was 10 um she married my stepdad and we moved from Dayton Ohio to uh indiana which we left the city for a farm which uh was an eye opener and really you know a blessing for me but my stepdad raised me and uh i did see my real dad but he was busy with a new family and working and raising for other children and and uh he always paid support and you know he was a good guy he doesn't want to could but i really didn't know much about his family and that's kind of why i got interested in um you know genealogy trying to find out because his mother died in 69 and uh grandpa mccoy died in 79 i think i only seen him once or twice in my whole life so there's not much really known and i'll say that the mccoy is an important name to Appalachians it's it's um it's out there and it's it's it's pretty important if we go to the next slide i want to show you something that monti talked about so this photo comes from monti himself this is one of his photos and um you had a really good saying with this money about a creek i believe when you're talking about the photo i was trying to find the name of the creek which i'm draw or not the name but the uh origins of the creek like uh i'm drawing a blank on the guy's name now but i would like to find the story about it because it's kind of starts right there and i'm sure you know it got named by whoever built that house but the courthouse here had this a fire in the 1900s and they lost all the records and this is part of what monti's been doing is trying to go and find people in his family lines actual living people now who have the knowledge or the records or the stories and some of them have been kind to him and some of them have been brick walls and some of them have been nice so that's kind of what what you find if this is now this is interesting to me too because the middle graphic is something that one of our other Appalachian researchers found and i cannot claim him only as Appalachian because i know the Nordic project will not like me if i do that but eric stamper is a gem when it comes to Appalachia and Nordic projects and DNA and also researching and i wanted to point this out because i eric found connections cna connections and gem matches with monti with some of the people in a certain particular area in north carolina as well as kentucky but that north carolina connection we are convinced and we're going to continue working monti's lines that eric and monti are somehow related and we're probably missing just one little piece of information to get them connected and that's kind of where where we see that so i wanted to make sure to mention that because a lot of times when rock ends for these individuals some of us keep going and keep digging especially those mysteries now i did mention the mccoy right and monti had a question at the beginning am i related to william mccoy well william mccoy is the father of randolph mccoy of the hat fields and mccoy line and that was his his big question at the top and i can't tell you how many duplicate profiles we have merged and cleaned up in wiki tree because of monti's question am i related to william mccoy and just a little back history for those of you that might not know everybody's probably heard of hat field mccoys but i do not know why but about 99.9 percent of appellations just have to prove that they're related to one side or the other and it is frustrating for us as a as a project because a lot of our project members these are actual ancestors they're they're special to them they're not just a thing and i will also point out one other thing that we talked a lot about when we're working with monti's line is there are bigger feuds out there and appellation than this one this one just made it to hollywood so i don't know i would rather talk to you about the mine wars than the hat fields and mccoys but that's if you'll do me a favor and go to the next slide so here's that william mccoy that way mccoy is a tricky one so how do we try to find if monti's related to him when we start working his lines and so these came from the paddlets thank you to those that gave the information to the paddlet so monti this is an interesting find for you you had distant ancestors that went from indiana to oregon and were menonites traveling west so that was that was kind of interesting from kim mundi illinois is that around your area well no that's kind of a surprise really in marion marion county illinois and then they ended up in yaml county oregon so then their last name was woofer so you'll have to dig into that and see that and then this is a mystery and i know that nancy is in the chat and nancy is the one who found this so you have a cp a connection cc seven the gentleman started out with the last name slack somewhere in the middle he changed his entire family name to walker and somewhere between 1910 and 1917 we see that he you know he was recorded as a slack and then he registered for the war for war one as a walker slight variations of names looks like um mervin and george interchange the name first name and middle name so we're going to leave that to you to research and then you can come back with a good story with us and if we go to the next slide oh the brick walls i did mention duplicates the duplicates and brick walls right so how did we we're still trying to figure out montes mccoy line as well and i got to give a shout out to a gentleman named john as well as eric who helped out with this this was this this really almost broke our spirit with this one this one was tough he had dora lee lin mccoy and samuel b lin and then also there's this sarah emeline mooser and they were brick walls brick walls brick walls and we're looking and we're there's a lot of movement between states so sometimes they miss some information sometimes their names were transcribed wrong sometimes their location or where they were born was wrong their middle initials were wrong their spellings were wrong this was this was the mess of a genealogy mess that you never want that rabbit hole ever then when their children had children they named their children the same and we couldn't tell which was which or who was who belonged to who belonged to which parent vital records in kentucky they started about 1852 i believe but some years were missing so we don't even have birth and death records at this point for some of these individuals and it was eric stamper who came in and said let me do something completely different completely bizarre because these records the birth marriage and death records are not working let me go to land records and see if i can find land and deeds and that's what helped us we got those and we say okay if we have this then let's go back to our research and i love this because john star this is quote from john and in the end there was just one census record with probably misrecorded state of birth that was overwhelmed by all the other records we had bringing it together why because we had blinders on genealogists you got to sometimes take those blinders off and look at the big picture sometimes census records sometimes most times um they're not perfect they don't always have the right spelling they don't always have the right locations so once we we took a break we sat back eric found the land records we looked again and we broke down some brick walls that was really cool for us to get those down okay so i think we still need to answer that question about William McCoy right so let's go to the next slide okay so i already talked a little bit about the Hatfield and McCoy viewed i can't tell you how many trees on another site two other sites three three other sites had old William William McCoy Randolph's father attached to lines that are montes and we're talking probably it's definitely hundreds but probably close to thousand that had old William connected down the line through Randolph and down to to monti i know monti went to family members and said i need records give me some proof give me some verification monti has been trying to get dna verification he you've had a little bit of trouble with dna right monti yes with ancestry dna so he's he's um so something keeps kind of going wonky so he keeps sending tests out to see so we've used monti's dna that was the only way we were going to try and see if you connected to old William and sadly we were never able to confirm a connection to Randolph which would get us to his father William so we chainsawed we we chainsawed and not just once but there are many times because did i mention that every up latch and pretty much wants to be related to a hatfield so we we're not giving up we're gonna wait till some more dna comes in monti has uh in a relative that's still living that we're going to try and bribe with biscuits to get some of if you're a part that she has that she's keeping secretive so there's still hope but um right now if there's a connection from what i see to monti to the William McCoy it's it's going to be very distant at best but we we did try to get his one question answered that he had but we broke down a couple brick walls in between that's right that was good okay and then um on the next slide is is probably the big one that i have to mention i i when i mention and call out certain people please everybody know that i appreciate everybody's help and i know badsy appreciates everybody help and all of you that were wrong appreciate everybody's help i i i don't discount that when i call out just a few but the reason why i'm calling out these few is because eric stanford patrick stacey erin robinson john de hart dug leaper the this group in particular came in in hard core broke down lines spent hours going days days going through really old records these are unindexed records these are not the easy to find ones they uh questioned and when they had a question they thought that something was right for matthew or monti's line but they needed a second opinion they came in they weren't they weren't afraid to say hey double check my work look at this that you know our dna experts here or eric and dug they came in every time we were stuck with maybe a wrong spelling or name can you look at this can you check these lines i can't tell you how much eric and dug help us in appalachia with dna because we do have endogamy we do have npes but the really really really cool thing matthew and monti rocked each other yay so that was really cool they didn't go into their own special paddlets much individual but they did go and chat in each other so it was really really fun to see them rocking each other so i just want to give a thank you to this special core group because i've i've seen it i saw the work they put in and we have what's called a late night rockers kind of group it's unofficial but you'll see a lot of us working from about midnight to to the three a.m when it gets close to end of the month and that's how we did it so thank you to everybody yes thanks everybody for sure i appreciate it so monti what do you think of being rock you're this is fairly new experience for you the wiki tree being on wiki tree being in a project and also being rocked i was pretty excited it was funny because i don't think that my family you know my kids and my wife you know they weren't they're not into it like i am so you know they weren't excited but i tried to follow along and dig through the william mccoy's because there's way too many of them and uh you know and try to answer it but you know maybe someday we'll get it but i enjoyed it and uh a super good crew um really helpful and i do think uh me and uh stampers uh related somehow we just haven't found you are yeah you are well i appreciate them guys and the discord channel and uh usually it's a wintertime project for me because in the summertime i barely go inside just to sleep but um it's kind of it gets kind of addicting wiki tree addicting and i do need to say one one um other shout out to monti and thank you so monti um sent me and it's hard to see probably because abin is in form so i wanted to thank monti for that and i think uh erik patrick erin john and dug have one on their way too okay so thank you that's that's that's the apple latches and steven i'm still working on that connection to you but four out of the five um had apple latch and roots almost a full house oh well you know i just just listening to the past hour and everything i mean it's it's overwhelming but in such a good way um you know it just the discoveries the numbers the the investment of the rock team um it's it's um really makes my heart feel full so um thank you so much to everybody um for for what what they did and for you know letting us play in their branches if you were one of the rockies and um if you're all fired up about um we will rock you um we have another one starting april first and that's not an april fool's joke i notice it's blank blank blank we have five people who've been selected yes well uh first of all let me explain that what we did this time round is that we took everybody who's been nominated since the beginning of rock this is our seven this is going to be our seventh rock so i went through all those g2g posts um in previous for previous events and i compiled a list of 66 people who were nominated but who have not yet been rocked and then we did a random number generator on those 66 now i have positive responses from two people but i need to hear from all three from all five before i release the names so i see names in the chat i'm just saying i did too email or private message for me please let me know so that so that we can um hint hint go ahead and um and make that announcement and april's connect the thumb up so that's really cool to combine the two exactly exactly so um that's all we've got for you today but i hope that that was more than enough wonderful yeah well thank you to everyone who's joined us live in the chat nice healthy group there and and for everyone who's watching afterwards and have have a beautiful rest of your day