 Hello, everyone. Happy Weekie Tree Wednesday. Wednesdays have just officially been dubbed Weekie Tree Challenge Wednesdays. So I hope everyone's doing fantastic. You know, we have... I guess we'll go ahead and just introduce everybody when we'll get started. So Mindy and I were Weekie Tree team members and Mindy's also the overall coordinator for the Weekie Tree Challenge. And then below us, we have Jarrett, who we're kicking off this week. We'll be introducing him a little bit later. And then we have Melissa, who we are wrapping up today. We're going to show her all of the goodies that we've found to be really exciting. I know they're both really excited, and I hope you are all excited. I saw in the chat, there are a few of you who are probably up at 2 a.m. right now, and great job. So for those of you who probably have popped in, maybe you don't know what Weekie Tree is. You don't know the Weekie Tree Challenge. I'll give you a little bit of an intro. So Weekie Tree is a community of genealogists who are working together on a single family tree. In other words, we collaborate to grow an accurate global tree that connects us all. And most remarkably, it's free. The Weekie Tree Challenge is our year-long event and part of our year of accuracy, where each week a team of Weekie Treeers takes on a genealogy guest star's tree and collaborates to make it more accurate and complete than it is anywhere else. And our goal is to improve our accuracy on Weekie Tree, add more family connections, and make more friends. And that is Weekie Tree and the Weekie Tree Challenge. And just to let you know if anybody has questions or comments posted in the chat, we'll ask them or show them when the time permits. And Mindy can take it away. Okay, and I'm going to go ahead and give a little bit of just general information on our point system. So we have two ways to earn points. Now, most of us don't do it for the points, but it is fun to have a little bit of competition and also a marker showing you where you're at and your progress for the week. So we have bounty points. Now that's 10 points for every brick wall ancestor, the first new ancestor on each line. And then one point each for the nuclear relatives. So that would be siblings or children's within one step of the direct ancestors. And I tell you, those points actually add up pretty fast. And at the end, we wind up with an MVP, which is our most valuable player. We'll show you that in a minute, but let's go ahead and talk about our collaboration. Starting with the spreadsheet on the left. This is crucial. We have anywhere from 25 to 50 people working on one guest's branches during the week. And so we do that so we can write down what profile we're working on. And that way somebody else doesn't come along, save over it, we lose our work, try and list what profile we're on. On the right is the G2G post that's in our forum. And we list out each of the great grandparents and that way if somebody breaks a brick wall or has an important discovery and they're bursting, they can go out there and put it in the forum. And the third way, this one we can't do without, this is Discord. Now, this is our live chat throughout the week and we are a global site. We do have people from all over the world that work on this. And so there's usually somebody in there chatting. Now, sometimes we're just in there cheering each other on. Sometimes we want a second or third set of eyes on a record to see if it makes sense. We have people that go in there and just get obituaries for people. They go out and get newspaper clippings. We have other people that specialize in land deeds. It's just anything we need to do, we do there in Discord. And once again, sometimes we're just cheering each other on. We've made a lot of friends since it started and had a lot of fun working together. So now we can look at our top five. Including our MVP. And I have to say, you know, we had just a slightly smaller group than what we have had this week. But as the summer weathers hit, people are going out and having fun. So it's a little bit harder to drag them back in and get this done. And they still are just at it. But it just makes it that much more incredible and impressive that they got the work done that they did. Now, our top-scoring person of the week was Andrea Stow. And she not only got the top point, she was the top bounty hunter as we call it. She got the most bounty points this week. So our top five overall was Andrea Stow, Donna Bowman, Rosalie Neve, Amanda Edie, and Maddie Hartman. Let's go ahead and look at all the overall stats for the week. Yes. And here's where we have our point system that updates throughout the day. And this is where I said, you know, we can kind of check and see how we're doing with our progress. Now, total points, that's where we pulled our top five from. That's anything, the bounty points and the individual nuclear relative points put together. Now, that's not the edits and whatnot. That's just creating those ancestor profiles. And for these guys, 394 ancestors were added. Now, 80 of those were direct ancestors and 314 of those nuclear family members. So you can see why I say that really adds up. And then for bounty points, we had 340. So that's 34 brick wall ancestors, pretty incredible. And then profiles edited with all these people working. We had 741 unique profiles edited. So that's anytime somebody went in, changed a date, added a source, improved that profile, it saved a point for it. And total edits, and still, once again, this is even not everything. We have people that once get those articles, we have people that work on space pages, do categories, fix suggestions. Those don't even count. But for the edits that do count, we have over 3,640 done this week. Just amazing. It seems like we always have at least 3,000 total edits for at least the profiles. I feel like that's a trend that I've noticed at least. Yes. Really around 3,000. Now, I guess we can get into the goodies and the brick walls and what we found. How exciting. I know. It's fun. This is Fett and Clark Le Masters line. And the orange box shows the new ancestors added to this line. And this was interesting. In his book, that dark and bloody river, Alan Eckert writes, on Dunker Creek off the Monongalia, where no attacks had occurred for a very long time, the houses of Joseph, Cumberlidge, and William Thomas were both struck. So Thomas was killed, as was everyone in the entire Cumberlidge family. Melissa, if it weren't for the fact that your direct ancestor had grown up and already started his own family and not been in that household, you wouldn't be here today. So it kind of puts things in perspective. Yeah. And the direct ancestor leading to them was the son Harvey. And he was 25 at that time. Now, there was a descendant that had a military headstone erected, Matt Cumberlidge, and he shares an ancestor with you. So Thomas thought that he would maybe be a good contact for you. His eighth great-grandfather is Joseph Cumberlidge. He knows a lot about the family. He's the executive director of the Green County Historical Society and Museum. So might be interested to just try and touch base with him. Yeah, that'd be great. And then we have Jacob Rice. This one, Jacob Rice and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Jacobs. They sold a portion of their land in Ellsworth, Tyler County, Virginia for the use of public schools. And this was just kind of fun there, seeing what everybody found as far as the deeds and everything. Their records were really good when it came to that. And there's all kinds of stuff that you can read on Jacob Rice's family. It was just interesting that they've done that. And it was mentioned again in a recent memorial for the school district. I like that because the presentations I do is on school records, researching the school records. Oh, that's awesome, then. So the person who finds this record knows that, and that's why. They were just magical. Okay, now, on the default line, you wanted to know about the furniture store owned by Ida Isidore, Bounder, DeBolt, Ladd, Beatty. She's got a lot of names. And her and her husband, John Talbert Ladd. Maybe that's why he went by JT. Yeah. Apparently, they ran a furniture store that sold furniture and toys. I thought it was cute that the article was found that they had all kinds of Christmas toys for sale. But they also had a second store that offered services to reupholster furniture. So, I know one of those wasn't strowed, so it wasn't right where he was, but I think that's like a 30-minute drive. And that was interesting, that story. I don't know if you know, but when Ida went to divorce John, she changed her mind several times. So, he would draw the papers up, pay the lawyer, and then she'd go, uh, you know what? Let's not do that. Or, oh, I want that. As we just do sometimes. So, I guess the lawyer actually wound up suing John. Not her, but Sue John. Because she kept changing her mind and he had to keep drafting new papers. So, that was just kind of fun. You know, it's always got to be something. I'll say that the baby name is actually new to me. Oh. Oh. Yeah, I do not know anything about that. I guess it was her other husband. I thought that her last husband was the lad, though. No. Baby came after she divorced lad. Yep. I knew that they divorced, but I didn't know she remarried again. Look at that. See, already goodies are going to want to live right away. And I've been, like I said, last week I said that one of the things I wanted to find was the information on the furniture store. Because I knew they owned stores or a store. That's fantastic information. Yeah, I actually have a Google picture I'm going to send to you. A street shot. But it's showing where the store used to be and it's not there. There's nothing there anymore. Well, where the first one is. I didn't have an address for the second one. So, I actually had a street address for the first one. That was interesting. There's a little courthouse right next to where it was. So, that was kind of fun. Now, this is on the Zelma Raph Curtis line. Here, we were looking at James Hill. And you see the orange boxes again. So, you have new, more new ancestors there. Right. James Hill was in Baltimore, Maryland. He was a son of John Hill. His father died in the Revolutionary War and his mother soon after. So, James and his much younger sister, Rebecca, were orphans and went to live for an uncle. Now, I'm not sure which uncle they lived with. But they lived with him for several years and then he died. So, they actually wound up with a Robert Lawton family until both became of age. And James himself, this was awesome, lived to the age of 99 years, three months and two days. Wow, cool. Yeah, that's some longevity. We found longevity in a couple of places in there. So, it was a lot of fun. That's good because my more recent ancestors, meaning my grandparents, grandparents, grandparents, didn't live to that old age. Oh. And then there were actually more than 50 ancestors added on these lines. And of course, it doesn't look like much there, but all it takes you know is for one line to take off and is kind of a domino effect and back behind it. So, more than 50 just on that one line. That's great. That line, the Curtis Line means a lot to me because that's my grandmother's line and she came to live with our family when I was three after my grandfather had passed away and she lived with us until a couple of months after I married and she passed away. So, yeah, she was more like a mother to me than my mother because my mother was, she worked all the time and my grandmother kind of raised us. Okay, and now we have the Wanda Ellen Barthes Line and this we were looking at Johannes Barthes, the father of the older of the Christian Barthes, was born before 1781. Most likely, and I'll probably say this wrong, and Ronald Fingin, Canton of Burns, Switzerland, so I know there were a few there. The Shown House mark was generally used for marking property is for the Barthes family of that area. So, it says the birthplace is uncertain but most likely and they did find other family members, ancestors also in that same little area. It says unfortunately, surviving church records only start in 1831. So, they would have liked to have taken that back further but you do what you can. That's right. Now, this one, we wanted to have good news for you. You know on this one. I know about this, yeah. You had some great interest in that and so our people went out, they constructed the line that seems to be the given one by different people's family, lower, and then they got together and they tore it apart. But sometimes that's what you need, you know, for everybody to get in. Once they were on, the profiles were up, they could go in, make notes, look at the records. Actually, a couple of them could get together and look it over and toss ideas back and forth and that line absolutely did work, did not work. Now, there is a possibility that they are by marriage somewhere related to the Pennsylvania bar terms but not in the way that everybody is saying. So, yeah, and what they found is that he was a Protestant preacher in Ireland. He actually, it was said born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Excuse me. And because of his inadequate preaching, he was kind of, I think, run off and not accepted. So, he married Elizabeth Swarajan in Dublin and migrated to the United States. Now, he is thought to have had five children by his two wives and his will was written in Cabell County, Virginia and I'm sure you already know that you have quite a few ancestors in that little area too. Oh, yes. But the records are fairly decent, so that was fun. There have been a lot of people that have been wanting to try to connect these Pennsylvania bar terms but really where it failed completely was at Stephen. So, when you hit Stephen, nothing made sense above that where it was trying to connect to that. So, there is one Scottish bar trim that their family intermarried. A Scottish bar trim, but yeah, none of the West Virginia bar trims have been proven to be related to the Pennsylvania. So, we kind of felt bad on that but it's still, you know, now you know, you had a whole team of people looking at it and you can relook over their notes and see what they found. Yep, that's right. Sometimes disproving is just as important as proving, so. It is. Now, this was really an explosive line. Elizabeth Pyle's line and that entire orange block there is new ancestors and it just kept going. So, you actually wound up with 100 new ancestors added to those lines and that's just the direct ancestors. That's not the family members. So, you know, you'll find some in between like everything we work out from the great-grandparents back, everything from, you know, there is sourced. Sometimes we connect to a branch. We might have a little area where there are profiles added when WikiTree was still kind of new and people were uploading GEDCOMs. And then when you go further back in the branches, you'll see that those lush profiles, again, more projects have taken them up and, you know, little by little we're trying to get those filled in but you will see some of those and you'll also see some just really beautiful profiles. But in the end, you wound up with ancestors in Germany, Ireland, France, Netherlands, and England. That's great. This one, the Clarence-Philmore Drummond line, we actually were taking a look at Johann Wilhelm Stober. He was born in 1726 in Stafford, Germany. He was listed as a Palantyne passenger, which means from the Rhine Valley River region in Germany, aboard the Snowmalley, I like that name, in 1737. Now, he married three times. He had three children with his first wife, nine children with his second wife. And thank goodness no children with his third wife. But I believe he outlived all of them and he died in his mid-70s in Franklin, Pennsylvania. He was an interesting man. Yeah, sounds like it. His profile, Johann Stober. Yeah, really nice. Somebody did some really nice work. And if you ever do wind up, you know, getting DNA done, it'll automatically populate through your ancestors, and that's what all those links were on the upper right, other people that share that ancestor with you. That's good, yeah. One day. He's got some pictures of his home, Fort Stove. Okay, that's great. Now, next we had Lula Levina, Coonrod's line. And her mother was found to be Mary Arilla Molly, straight, Coonrod. Yes. She married William Sherman Coonrod in 1889. They had seven known children. Lula gained 94 new to you ancestors. And then a couple more that are additional wives that we couldn't find the maiden names for. But that line really took off as well and wound up with a lot. I can tell you a little story about Lula. She was committed to an asylum by her husband, William Sherman Bartram. He had her committed because he wanted to be with another woman. Lula and William had 14 children. My grandmother was the 14th of the 14 children. She told me the story. She was in the asylum for 15 years and then they let her out. She carried with her, which I have the document that they gave her when she came out of the asylum that said on it that she was cured. And she lived for another 15 years after that. And so I asked my grandmother, I said, my grandmother remembered the day they came to get her and they literally drug her out of the house. And I asked her, my grandmother, I said, you had siblings that were older and married and had kids. I said, why couldn't they do anything? And this was in 1940. I have the papers from the court. And they said that there was nothing they could do because the husband had control and he could do what he wanted. And he married the woman he wanted to be with two weeks after he had her committed. And then after she got out, believe it or not, they all kind of still got together for family events. Wow. Yeah. And so I have always found that story to be absolutely horrible but absolutely fascinating. It is. Yeah, that's incredible. Okay. And then further back on the line was Edward Howe. He was born in 1573. And he was actually part of the Puritan Great Migration. So all of those that you see are new. And then going further back on that was, do you have his profile, Sarah, or? Yes, we do. Edward Howe. He had two Elizabeths. Maybe two Elizabeths. Do you want me to show the ancestors or be anything else about Howe or can we? No, we're good. Okay. Looks great. It's just fun. You know, like I said, you'll find a lot that are back in that era that the projects have just done an amazing job on already. So we found them and didn't have to do anything with those ones. The work is absolutely amazing. Thank you. Now this was peripheral family discoveries. And of course, you know, the worse or more shocking or sterling it is, the more likely you're here to find it in the newspapers and whatnot and find out a little bit more. But good or bad, it tells you something about the ancestor and makes you feel like you know them. So we like to see these. And the first one isn't bad. This is another one with some longevity. Now this is your second cousin, Lena Alice Massey. She was a centenarian. So she died at the age of 101 in Macomb, Michigan. And the Piles line, Elizabeth Piles' first husband, Shelby, drowned just two years after their marriage. She had several tragedies on her line. And sometimes just thinking back to how much some of these women went through and, you know, they get up every day and they just take care of their families anyways. Her son, Benjamin Franklin Bertram, was accidentally shot dead at the age of 19. That one I actually, I found the newspaper article because the person who actually shot them was actually my grandfather, his brother. They were hunting. My father, Forest Cecil Bertram, actually accidentally shot and killed him. I actually stumbled across the newspaper article about it and my grandfather had already passed so I couldn't ask him. But my mother never even knew his father, never even knew about it. Yeah, that was just so incredibly sad. It was. And then we had a still on the Piles line. Archie Piles, your second grade uncle was stabbed to death at the age of 17 in an altercation. I mean, a lot of it just seemed to be focused in this one little area of your branches. I'm not sure why. Another one that was startling on the DeBolt line, John DeBolt's sister, Elizabeth. So your second grade aunt was accidentally struck and killed by Frisco passenger train number two. It's interesting. I think you're free, honestly. I have another ancestor. Gosh, I can't think of who it was now that was actually that was killed by a train. Hmm. Wow. I've got the corners in quest and the stuff. Yeah. And then the last one that we put on here was Oliver Harlan Barth on the Barth line. So the brother of your second great-grandfather, Benjamin had an eight-year-old son die in a well on their property. I think this is the most tragic articles we found on one set of branches. I don't know if this Barth is the one, but I have one of the things about my Barth family is that they lived in Wyandotte County, Ohio, from very early on, like 1854. And they stayed there forever. They were one of those families that just stayed there forever. And the newspapers there are fascinating. probably went on to a very, very good mystery novel career because the obituaries are amazing. But I don't know if it's this one or another one where there are another well death where they went down into the well. The son was supposed to be cleaning the well. He died of well damp, which I did some research on well damp. And then the father who went down after him also died in the well from the same thing. Oh, wow. And so, yeah, I don't know if it's this one or someone else, but yeah. And then our military. Now, of course, there's a lot more than what we could list on here. But as we work through the week, we tend to find ancestors that served in the military one branch or another. We like to take just a brief moment to honor them. I'm sure that there are plenty more, but these are the ones that we found. So this will be something for you to look back through, you know, as you're browsing through your branches and looking at the news stuff. I will add, I know you put me out of this far, but my father was a 20 year veteran of the Air Force and he was in Vietnam. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, we don't we don't work on anything below the great grandparents. So for privacy reasons. Yeah. And then we have, okay, now this is the brick wall chart. So everything in the yellow is where there was a possible brick wall. And then every one of those little dots like you can kind of see on the pop out, there's a B put for every brick wall that was broken. And it was pretty even around your branches, you know, sometimes we see where it's all clumped on the mother's mother's side or, you know, paternal maternal side or something. But people were pretty even in finding those brick walls around your branches. So that was really a lot of fun. And I know some of these, like you said, you know, they're not technically like you weren't stuck there brick walls, you didn't have an ancestor listed there. Because there's just never enough hours in the day. And when you do any kind of professional work, you don't have time to work on your own tree. I do not. You know, I wish I had, I have got binders and binders and binders and stuff that I have not put online yet. So but this is I've seen stuff here that that I didn't I know I didn't know. So awesome. Well, hopefully this is this is met your expectations or exceeded them. I know, like I said, people worked really hard this week. It was cute. One of our team members, I said, Yeah, I went ahead and gave you the bounty points for that. And she said bounty points. Oh, I was just so excited. I was finding all this stuff. She said, I wasn't even thinking about the bounty points. So that's okay. I gave him to you. Now, overall, for our teams this year, and it is this year's going by crazy fast, we've just had so much fun with this, you know, but and this is not including your week here, Melissa, up until now, we've had 21 guest stars, 243 wiki tree years that have signed up for one or more months, almost 2000 direct ancestors created overall, more than 5000 nuclear relatives created for people. And then here's our big numbers, more than 71,000 of those edits and an amazing 464 brick walls torn down. So, you know, give a hand to our team members out there. They are just they're always amazing. Well, I'm extremely impressed. I think that this has exceeded my expectations and thank each and every researcher, you know, I've been one for 31 years and I know exactly what they've done. So they've been in a very short amount of time. And so I'm just very, very impressed by what they've been able to find. And hopefully I can etch out some time to actually start working on it again. And that that was the you wanted us to spark you. So yes, that's what I wanted. And I think it has. I'm interested in some of those things I saw that now I've got to go look into again. Well, that that pretty much I think that wraps up Melissa's week. I don't know if we had any other questions, comments or remarks. Unless he had anything or any finding from the chat wants to say anything. No, I get well, if not happy that they got things done. Yes, fantastic. So I guess we will we'll just thank you, Melissa, for letting us work on your tree and for participating in the challenge. I know everybody was super happy to work on your tree and find all the good, all the goodies. So I thank you guys very much. Like I said, I'm looking forward to taking up where they left off and see what I can do. Yeah, you have lots. You might, will you stay up late tonight to look at everything or will there be a weekend? Probably. Okay, so I guess we will move on and we'll introduce Jared, our next challenge participant, who is super excited to be our guest star this week. I know he was counting down the seconds until he came on. I saw someone say they thought my tweet earlier was pretty funny. So we'll do a brief, we'll give, I'll introduce you really quickly if you want to add anything or maybe we have everything covered. Who knows? So Jared, the genie vlogger, he started researching his family in 2009. He specializes in genetic genealogy and shepardic juice research. He writes a blog called shepardic genealogy. Am I saying that right? I think, I think I... Sephardic. Sephardic. I don't know where the age came from in the front. Okay, Sephardic genealogy has a blog called Genie Vlogger. He works as a lead forensic genealogist at DNA Labs International. Volunteers as a curator in genie.com, is a board member of the Alliance Colony Foundation, is the vice president of the Triangle Jewish Genealogical Society, serves as the chair on the board of directors for the International Conference on Jewish Genealogy. And I also read that he, hold on, he also is a musician. That's not there, but a musician. That's right. So anything to add, Jared? Or... I think you covered it. Covered it with your apron, so... And in all, it's free time. Yeah, yeah. Basically, my free time is either cooking for myself or walking my dogs, or cooking for my dogs. When your dogs get fully cooked meals? I spoiled them. I spoiled them terribly. So not always, but all the time. I mean, I spoiled my cat, but making her food, I don't know. I have trouble making myself food, so making her food. Well, I guess one thing I could add is I used to actually work as a chef. Oh, that's cool. That's part of it too. I do kind of enjoy playing. And to the person asking what instrument I play, I'm actually a multi-instrumentalist. I play guitar, bass, drums, keys, and a couple other things like xylophone and stuff like that. Wow. That's cool. Multi-faceted, multi-talented. So awesome. Okay, so I know now Mindy and I will ask you some questions. And if you watch any of these, you probably know the questions that are coming. So you started researching in 2009. What got you interested in genealogy? So when I say I started researching in 2009, that's really when I started researching seriously. But I had gotten interested originally when I was probably, I think I was about nine years old, and I had gone to my cousin's bar mitzvah. And at his bar mitzvah, they had this paper that traced my mom's family. So the Nunes Vaz family traced it back to like 1697. And when I saw that, and I like went through the names, it just was like, whoa, that's so cool. And that was the first time I really got interested in it. And I, my family got me like a really old version of family tree maker back then that was gosh, that would have been in the 90s, I think. And I like tried to trace back, but you know, as little kids, so I kind of didn't do it seriously. And then over the years, I would kind of go on and do stuff. And I actually didn't even realize I was looking at my ancestry account the other day. And I started my ancestry account in early 2008. I didn't even realize I'd done it that early. So it was a lot, a lot of that really came out of that bar mitzvah paper and just like going through each generation and having my occupation and their names and just like it was like so cool. That's pretty neat. Usually there's that little moment that like the bar mitzvah or, you know, I think something or, you know, something. Yeah, yeah. And who was your favorite ancestor? This one is, I'm sure you get this all the time. I actually thought about it beforehand and I decided that I was going to choose my great grandfather, Jack Ecoff. So I actually saw someone say they were curious about the Mills Music Publishing and this is where that comes in. He was just, he was so interesting to me because he was the only ancestor of mine or the most recent ancestor of mine really that was born and grew up on a farm and then had such an interesting career in life and did so many cool things. And he was someone that I always kind of wanted to know more about but like I didn't until I started doing genealogy research. So yeah, I see he pulled up his what's on the page now. But yeah, he was just, he was so interesting to me and I guess I might be giving away something here, but one of the first documents I ever found of him was his obituary, which was on the front cover of Billboard magazine in 1963. I think it was July 1st, 1963. So it's July 13th here on the. Oh, okay. So it might be, it's July 1965. I don't know the exact date. So, but yeah, he, I would say he's the one I'll choose for my favorite for this. Yeah. Very cool. So that's next question. I think I'll have these memorized. Oh my goodness, my cat just unplugged my light. Okay. Do you have any interesting stories to share about your family that you found? Where do I start? So many. Like I was mentioning the Mills music publishing stuff being part of literally Tin Pan Alley and forming what American music is today. Also, my family that was in the Alliance colony, which is also my great grandfather, Jack, the Alliance colony was the first successful Jewish agricultural society in the United States, which was in Southern New Jersey. And it was founded in 1882. And it was just, it's just this super interesting story that very few people actually know about. On another branch of my family, I have my great-grandfather Morris owned the Schubert Theater in New Haven and was big part in theaters in Connecticut and Massachusetts and went out to California and made films. And yeah, I mean, I could probably go on for an hour telling the interesting stories I've found. I know I'm kind of talking generally, not specific stories, but there's a lot. So not sure. That's fine. Yeah, that's okay. And hopefully we can find a few that you don't know about, though. Now, when did you first discover WikiTree? I can't remember. I, as many people know, I'm a curator on Genie. And Genie was the platform in 2009 that helped spark my interest to go serious with this because I instantly could connect and it was, you know, it's a collaborative tree, which is exactly what WikiTree is. And so that concept of not just building my tree like I did when I was young and then, oh, I don't know where to go from here. Instead of, you know, I'm building my tree and then connecting with others that even if it's not that we descend from the same ancestors, maybe we have an ancestor who had a sibling that married their ancestor that, you know, those tangential lines and connecting with that and just being able to find literally how everybody is connected. So because of that, I've always been like looking at all the different collaborative trees, like when FamilySearch came out with theirs as well. So I don't remember when I know it's been years. I feel like I've known about WikiTree since the early days because I feel like I saw posts on Facebook somewhere, you know, one of those genealogy groups saying check out this new WikiTree, but I don't remember when. I don't remember when. That's okay. Yeah. I checked you created your profile in 2019, but that isn't necessarily me and you probably stumbled on. I know that I created my profile a little while after I learned about WikiTree because when I made my profile is because I realized I didn't have anything connected to my GEDmatch profile. And then I learned that WikiTree had worked together with GEDmatch, I guess you could say so that you could link through that. So that was what sparked me in 2019. Be like, oh yeah, I should be on WikiTree. So what are your current brick walls? Okay. So there are a couple. The first one, which I think is the hardest and I'll be extremely surprised if anyone breaks through it is my great grandmother Fanny. So this is my father's line. So my father's paternal grandmother. And I know absolutely nothing about her in terms of her siblings, her parents. I have a general idea of when she was born, but I don't truly know where she was born up there. I do have a maiden name of Baruch, but there's actually a couple of maiden names that have popped up in different documentation and from family stories, some saying Greenspan, some saying that it was Goldberg, some saying it might have been Rosenberg. Baruch was the one that made the most sense because it was on the most documentation. And I did get that from one of my cousins saying that that was the name. Her husband, David, I just recently broke through just a few years ago on him because he was the same. But through DNA, which I'm sure some of you will end up watching that video that I talk about this, I was able to figure out siblings of his and then figure out his parentage and get some actual possible connections to where he was from in what was then the Russian Empire. But Fanny, I know absolutely nothing about. So she's probably my biggest brick wall because she's my most recent ancestor that I know the least about. The brick wall, though, that I think, and I really, really hope that Wikitryas will be able to break through is my, also on my father's side, and this is my Rosenberg line. So these are my second great-grandparents who, they're not the second great-grandparents aren't on there. I'm sure I think it's just my great grandfather, Harry Ross, who was born Rosenberg. And he was born to Benjamin, and we think it's Beatrice, but there's a few Beatrice, Jenny, Annie, you know, she shows up with a couple of names and different documents, which I'm sure we're all very used to for different people. But I have no birth record of my great-grandfather, Harry, who was born supposedly in New York. I have no birth record for his older sister, Mini, who was also born in New York, but we do have a record for his youngest brother, Isidore, who was born in Pennsylvania. But we don't really know much about Harry's parents, and that's where I'm hoping people will be able to help on Wikitry, because I'm hoping that someone with a special knowledge of New York records may be able to find something about their time while there, and possibly pull up the birth records for Harry or his sister, Mini, and maybe that will, you know, find something. But we believe that this may be my only German-Jewish line. And part of that reasoning is because most Eastern European Jews came after 1881 when the Tsar was assassinated. And a lot of the German-Jewish immigration is before that. And this family came about 1878. So it's like right on that cusp. Census records say Germany, Austria, Russia, you know, that typical all over-the-place type of thing. So I'm hoping maybe someone can find something that can pinpoint a specific area for that as well. And then I have one. Can I go through another brick wall? I don't want to think of too much time. But so another brick wall. This one is actually on my mom's side. And this one will, I think it will require someone with a special knowledge of records in Bessarabia. And this is my line through my great-grandmother Jenny. So this is her father's line. And her mother's line too. But her father's line mostly. So my great-grandmother lived to be 109. But her father died when she was seven. And we know very little about him. We believe that he's from Grodno based on some information we've been able to pull. I do have a photo of him, but because he died in 1904, there's very little on him. And trying to correlate any sort of records back from Grodno is extremely difficult. So that's one of the other brick walls that I would really point out. And then I guess I'm going to include one more. Just one more. This one is going to be special because I do know that I have my mito YDNA profile hooked up. I don't know how much the people participating will be able to access through that. But on my purely maternal line, that is one of my other brick walls. So this one ends with my second great-grandmother who was born Skowacki. But we don't know where she was born. She might have been born in Kiev. She might have been born somewhere in what would be present day Poland. The records are online and digitized. But as is mentioned on this billions of times, I don't have the time to research my own family that much. So it's going to take someone with knowledge of Cyrillic language or Hebrew. If someone knows Hebrew and can use Google Translate to figure out what books to look at. But the revision lists, vital records, all of that are up and available from Kiev. And I am hoping to find this side of that family in those records and figure out more about my second great-grandmother. So those are the brick walls I'll talk about. Yeah. Okay. And besides the obvious brick walls, what do you overall hope to see, hope to get out of participating in the challenge? And I know you've watched our challenge videos. So honestly, I think one of the most exciting things for me is knowing that as everybody's researching, they're probably going to fall across little pieces that I've left on the internet, whether it be talking in forums over the years or like on Genie, we have projects, which is very similar. I forget what you call it on WikiTree. But I know that you have those special pages for like a specific town. Space pages. Yes. So like I have Genie projects, but then I also have like Facebook groups with different information. And then I have, I have my blog, I have my videos, which I've already put in the G2G a link to some, you know, a playlist that'll have a lot of good information. But I'm kind of excited to know that throughout the week, people will kind of be discovering all these little gems across the internet that I've left. So. Yeah. So I've already pinned the link to your playlist in the discord room for anybody that didn't see it out in the forum. They can catch that link in discord now. And then we did have a couple of questions from your captain who will be Laura. Do you have pictures on your primary tree that we can use? Yes. So I am totally fine with anyone using those pictures. I will mention any pictures that are from Find a Grave. I always contact whoever took the photo to get permission. So if there are any photos where it says that it's from Find a Grave, contact the original person to get their permission because, you know, I just need permission to post it. But yeah, beyond that, all the photos and stuff go for it. Yeah, it'll be great to see all those in the, in the tree. Yeah. So it's a lot of fun. I really like the white space on Monkey Tree where you can really just put out there the narrative, the pictures, bring the person back to life. And then we do have our DNA expert. Would you like her to write confirmation statements for your profiles? Yeah. Yeah. I went through, like I said, I tried to hook up my DNA stuff, my GEDMATCH number so people would be able to pull that up. Might oh why. I don't know if I can give more access technically. But yeah, go for it. Any, any stops people can pull. Yeah. Very cool. Okay. I think, I think that's, unless we have any questions from the, the viewers, or if Jerry, you have any last questions or Melissa, you have any final comments before we go or? I'm just very excited. I just think everyone, each and every person that contributed because I know we all know what kind of work it takes and I'm so, I'm grateful. Thank you. You're welcome. And I know everybody's super excited. I don't know who's more excited, us or Jared. I'm so excited. I have, I know it's said a billion times, but I, I barely ever get to work on the tree. I'm always working on, on cases or other people's trees or, you know, so when I like every once in a while, I'll find maybe an hour or two to kind of go through, through some records, but to have a whole week. I'm so, so excited. Apparently, Yoke is, she says, Morse's father, Abraham is said to be born in Amsterdam. My second, no record and 10 year table. 8030. So that's actually, that's an interesting thing he should mention. That is, that has been a question mark in my research, because there's also no record going through the GRO index that I could find that would make sense for Abraham being born in London, which is where he would have been born otherwise because Abraham's parents immigrated from Amsterdam to London. So he was either born in Amsterdam or he was born in London and the UK census records say both. So yeah, you know, you know, the fun with that. So yeah, that, that'll be a, that'll be a good mystery to solve if you can solve it because yeah, I haven't been able to find an actual birth record for me either, but his wife was born in London and her parents in Amsterdam. That I was named after my great grandfather, Jack, who was my favorite ancestor that I chose for this. So your favorite answer is the one you were named after. Okay, well, unless there's anything else, we will probably wrap up. Thank you, everyone who's watching. Thank you, Melissa and Garrett. Thank you to our captains. Thank you, Mindy. Thank you all of Wikitree. And please don't forget to like and subscribe. You can check us out on wikitree.com. And we will see you next Wednesday to wrap up Jared's week. We'll have a countdown. There's a countdown. Also Saturday, we have our weekly live cast Saturday morning where we recap the week and we gave a little, little, little hints as to what, how's it going? And I believe this Friday is Friday, date night. Julie, you can correct me if I'm wrong because I know she's in the chat. But yeah, check us out next week, Wikitree Challenge Wednesday. And until next time, everybody, I think next week is at 8 p.m. Correct, Mindy? Yes. Same time, same place. Goodbye.