 It's Aaron Forrest-Elf. I'm here with David Randall. And we are excited to do the startup for the first stop of our 15 Nations Global Tour. I just wanted to share a little bit about how this came about. At the end of last year, we asked for suggestions of what people might like to do for events or something special to do since this is Wikitree's 15th anniversary year. And one of the suggestions was from C. McKinnon and she suggested selecting 15 underrepresented countries and figuring out how to manage their last names of birth, how to get their heads of state to have profiles on Wikitree. And we all thought that was a really good idea. And the first person he popped into my head immediately to take the reins and run with us was David. And he has done fabulously, as I knew he would. And so we picked, he picked the first country and it was India and they've been going for three weeks. And so I'm gonna let him tell you a little bit more about how this whole Global Nations Tour works and where it's at and what they're doing and all that good stuff. Okay, thank you. First, I apologize for the glow in my face. I don't normally glow quite this much. But, so I took on this project really blind as to what I was getting into. I was told there was a special project where I wanted to take charge and wasn't giving much information beyond that. But when I was told what it was all about, it actually really kind of sparked my interest. And what we've done is, well, we haven't selected all 15 countries, but we're gonna pick 15 countries throughout the year. Some of them are still up in the air. But we decided to start with India. For those of you that are not aware of the project, we started with India and selected 15 notables from India and set out to build their profiles, build their biographies, and ideally to get them connected to the global tree. Now, unfortunately we weren't able to connect anybody and we'll talk about that a little bit in a bit, but we did accomplish some pretty amazing things. And I'm going to share that with you today. First, what I wanna preface though is to say, when I put these 15 profiles up, I knew nothing about India genealogy. I knew nothing about what resources may or may not be out there. And I pretty much knew nothing about most of these personalities. So it was really random and up in the air as to what we were going to accomplish. My biggest fear was we would accomplish nothing. We'd find out there was zero information on anybody and for three weeks we'd sit there twiddling our thumbs. But that turned out to be anything but the case. The 15 people that I put up, I deliberately added no family members, no parents, no siblings, no children, no spouses. And as far as their bios were concerned, I put up typically one or two sentences that I got off Wikipedia summarized, just letting people know who they were. And from there, we as a team, and I should say that team as opposed to myself because I was busy doing other stuff for the most part and not building bios, but the team took the reins and ran with them and they were able to build up all 15 profiles. And to those original 15 profiles that again had zero family members linked to them, we have added 226 family members. Wow. 226 additional profiles that we did not have. That's fantastic. Now, that's impressive, but it's even more impressive I think when you hear that prior to three weeks ago, India had 400 profiles on Wikitree. People born in India, there were only 400 profiles. So we increased by over 50%. That's amazing. There, we're now up to 600 and something, so. That's true. And the idea now is to continue this, even though we're gonna be moving on to another country and our focus will be somewhere else, I went on today and was able to add on almost a dozen more family profiles to what we've already accomplished over three weeks. So there's still plenty of work to be done on India. So if you were in the middle of a project, if you've actually didn't have a chance to get over to India and wanna go over and work on some profiles, there's still a lot that needs to be done and a lot of opportunities. Some of our profiles have many, many more family members connected than others. Interestingly, the current prime minister of India has only three connections. So far, family is next to impossible. I won't say it's impossible, but it's been next to impossible for me to find anything on. He married and left his wife almost immediately and never remarried, didn't have any children. So there really isn't a lot of information on him that I've been able to find. So that's part of the problem. The other problem is that he has a living personality. So his profile is locked. I don't know how much that discouraged people, but I've mentioned it a couple of times in G2G, if you wanna work on a locked profile of a living person, let me know and I can add you to the trusted list and you'll get in there and do some improvements. The only living people I'm picking so far are the current heads of state and heads of government. So in this case, it was the president and the prime minister. So there were two living personalities. Everybody else I make a point of choosing only deceased notables in order that people could access their profiles. Definitely. So again, we've done some pretty good work. One of the things that I had the most fun with was that a large number of the notables that we selected had a huge number of other notables in their family trees. There was a couple that had literally dozens of people in their family tree. Wow. Who had their own wiki tree pages. Wikipedia pages. Look, I'm sorry, Wikipedia pages. So that actually made it easier because then on those pages, you hear about their spouses and children, et cetera. So I added something to it. And I picked out a couple that just impressed me the most. I'm on the wrong page of my notes here. But I'm gonna say all of these names incorrectly because I don't speak any of the languages. I'll give you an advance as I say these names. But Ravi Shikhar or Shekar, he is a well-known musician, a very popular musician in India. He turns out to be the father of Nora Jones. Yeah. And I did not know that. So that was interesting. And they have dozens of musicians in their family who are all well-known, not only in India but around the world. World wide. Many of them moved to the United States and are here. So I'm hoping we've been working on getting Nora Jones' profile open. I think that's about to happen if it hasn't already. And we may be able to make a connection through her family because she had American roots on her mother's side. So we'll see what happens once we get there. Great. He used to, this is just a totally random side note, but my dad, my dad is very into Ravi Shikhar. Okay. And so I grew up listening to his Sitar music and then I was really, I'm really into Nora Jones. And so there was a day where we figured out like, hey, these two are father and daughter. Yeah, no, I had no idea. In fact, when I was first told, I thought, oh, that's funny that his daughter's named Nora Jones because they're looking for a singer named Nora Jones. And it turns out to be her. It turned me, but it was her. And yeah, there were a few others. There were a number of our earlier ones were freedom fighters that a lot of people that work with Gandhi and some of the founding fathers of India. So it was a good history lesson to learn. You know, I don't know a lot about Indian history. We didn't really study that in our schools. Learning about the partition between India and Pakistan. There's one story of a woman who she's an actress and she married an architect, but together they created a production studio. And then when Pakistan broke away from India or was split from India, they had to make a choice as to where they wanted to live. And the husband went to Pakistan and the wife stayed in India with her children. Oh, wow. But then she went on to become a very famous, she was already famous as an actress, but became a big producer, Bollywood, I guess they call it, but a big producer in India and had a very successful career, despite not having a husband around, which that surprised me also was how many really strong women there were in India in the late 1900s, early 1900s. And also a number of the men that were women's rights activists that well ahead of what I think was probably going on in the United States at the time. Sounds like it. That was interesting too. But again, just a lot of really, you get beyond the notables and into their families, there were just dozens of really interesting stories. It was hard to keep moving on because I wanted to say. Rabbit holes. Read more. Well, I think that's one of the really cool things about this global nations tour and I hope a lot more people get involved is it's a chance to kind of touch base in a culture and the people that you probably aren't super familiar familiar with and learn a little bit about their histories and their practices and their culture and their people and kind of branch out beyond your own tree a bit. Yeah, and that's, I think that's one of the really cool things about this project is there's a number of benefits out of it. There's a benefit just learning a different history, something to take a break from your own family tree and learn some skills maybe that your own family tree doesn't allot you. It's hopefully will encourage people with Indian ancestry to get involved and to make some more connections. We're trying to make a world a global tree and we can't do that if half the globe isn't participating. It's true. So hopefully that'll encourage people when they see that we have a number of profiles from their areas. So there's a lot of benefits. It also, because we're focusing on the notables, I don't know how many people have tried Googling something and getting wiki tree as a response but I've had that several times and we get pretty high up in the rankings. So somebody looking for information on some of these obscure, more obscure personalities may very well be directed to wiki tree and become hooked like many of us have. That's the goal. So now do we have, I don't see on the screen the chat room do we have might just expanded too big. You might be, you might have to click on the comments. Okay, there we go. All right. Just know we had any, oh, I see I had the wrong button pushed. Okay. So I'm just curious if anybody listening that was actually actually participated or people tuning in for the first time. Do you have anybody had any questions on India before we move on to our next stop? I was gonna say you had a, there's a, I know you're gonna share a screen but I think there's also the, you guys put together a resources page, right? Yes. You wanna show that because that's another kind of cool benefit of this is there's this whole page now. Okay. There's a screen. So just above our list of notables we did add a resources page and first off we have over on the right we have a map of India with the various states. So if you are curious where in India one of your profiles is from you can expand on that and hopefully be able to read it. It's a little bit small but and then we'll go back here. Oops. Okay. Try that again. Take two. Okay, for some reason I'm having trouble. Okay, here we go. I'm in trouble going back space but okay, here we are. So this is our resources page and you can see we start out with just Wikipedia sources to get you some general information. We've enlisted our family search resources. Family search has a number of databases that are all free. If you actually have an ancestry account we've included some ancestry databases as well. And then we just listed alphabetically any other sources that people were able to come across. There's the BBC, How to Trace Your Roots on the Indian Subcontinent. There's Cindy's list here. Find My Paths, British India Office, Births and Baptisms, Google Books, Dictionary of Indian Biography. So it's just a bunch of sites that people have been able to find that have either genealogical information or general history about India or links to places where they may not have online resources but archives and libraries that you can contact if you're so inclined. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, and again, I hope that this will continue so if anybody has, anybody can go on and edit that so you can just add, if you have additional resources you can add them in. And hopefully that will continue to grow so that it's something that I think is lacking across the internet. If you Google India genealogical resources you're not gonna find on this as long as what we have and even on Cindy's list they don't have an India section. They have an Asia section, but not an India section. So I know that there's been, yeah, I don't know that there's an equivalent list anywhere that I've been able to find. That's awesome. That's pretty cool. Are there any, I know you have that one page that had a list of profiles. Were there, is there one of those in particular that's like reached some kind of completeness that you wanna share? Well, I can tell you if we go to, now this one I'm gonna have a real hard time saying, Satya Jit, Ray, he was an actor. And he is the most connected at this point. He has 59 relatives connected to him. Nice. And again, still not connected but the problem with connecting when they're, when the family was entirely in India is there aren't a lot of profiles from India to connect to. So, you know, it's kind of the problem coming from the other end as opposed to from our end. But he has, his wife was a not so famous actress but an actress nonetheless. And I believe it was her, no, I think I've got the wrong one here. I think I did the wrong person, that's the one below him. So this individual was an actor named Dilip Kumar. And I was infusing him with the one above but his wife was a, and still is alive. She is a famous dancer in India. Cool. And she has, let's see, I really like this profile. Her mother was one of India's first superstar actresses. And I just, I really like this portrait. It's a beautiful picture. Yeah, it is. And she was considered the first female star of India film. Cool. And she's got a really nice little biography here. Yeah. A couple sources. She got her obituary was found. So I think once they moved past Wikipedia and which is spelled wrong here, but we'll fix that. She got on the internet movie database. And then also her obituary, which was I think our biggest resource in my experience was the most helpful resource. But I found that Indian obituaries are not nearly as complete as what we're used to in the West. Yeah. They didn't give spouses, main names and all of that. They usually, they talk more about the professional life and the career as opposed to the family life. But sometimes these individuals were notable enough that they got into the Western press and they might have more biography at that point. So. Very cool. But yeah, this is one of those unexpected notables that we didn't know were gonna be on her radar, but there she is. Yeah, that's cool. They had a number of actors and actresses. It does appear that in India, families tend to follow similar careers. So you'll have a bunch of musicians or a bunch of actors or a bunch of politicians. It seemed to do a lot of following in their families, footsteps, really generations. Very cool. In fact, yeah. So again, it's you start out with one person and then that's interesting enough that you start moving on and you just get tons of fascinating stories. It's hard to know, like I said, when to quit and move on to the next person. Yeah, that's fantastic. Okay, so for our next stop, our next station, we're gonna travel all the way around the world and I'm gonna type it in here. See if we can pull it up. Sorry for the line, let's not go like that one more time. Okay, I think I have to log out in again because it's not letting me change the... It can be a pain sometimes. Yeah, that's... So Darren was saying he worked on categories for India. He wasn't comfortable making the profiles but he did add categories, which is great, every little bit helps. Okay, I figured out the glitch, so let's pull it up here. Yeah, one of the things that I tell people if you're not comfortable doing research and particularly in a country like India that you're not familiar with, there's plenty of other stuff that needs to be done. We can do just pulling the biographies together and making them enjoyable, readable. You can, even just doing checking for typos, just going through and reading them. And if you notice any errors, go in and clean them up a little bit, that's helpful. Okay, here we go, here we are. Are we up? Nope, nope. Okay, now I got to share it. Okay, our next stop is going to be Argentina. Argentina, other side of the globe. That is far from India as you can get. So Argentina is an interesting country. Obviously they speak Spanish down there but they also, there's a lot of... They don't have a national language. Most of their records are done in Spanish but there's a lot of English speakers and there's also a lot of people of a variety of backgrounds there that speak all kinds of languages. One of the things that I learned already about Argentina is that after the United States, they have the largest number of immigrants in modern history. Really? So they have people from all over the world and the statistic that I read and I can't remember the exact number but something like 99% of Argentinians have a European background. 99% huh? Yeah, which is comparable. I don't know what it is in the United States but we have a very small portion of Native Americans who have no other, you know, who are pure Native American. Right. It's a small number of our population and it's the same there. They do have a native population and they have a lot of people with native blood but most of them have had some European blood either from the Spanish that first came over, other Europeans later on and now there's a lot of Arab and Jewish population there. So they got a big group of people. A lot of German. I was gonna say, I remember reading about a lot of Germans going down there. Yeah, so it's gonna be interesting. It's gonna be different than... India. Yeah, but it's gonna have its own challenges so we'll see how we do. You can see on the screen we've got a little bit of information on the history and stuff just to give you a little intro before you jump into the profiles and once you do that, let's go down and look at who we're gonna be visiting once we're in Argentina. Starting with Carlos Saavedra Lomas. He was Latin America's first Nobel Peace Prize winner. He was a foreign minister and also worked as a leader in the League of Nations which preceded the United Nations and he brokered peace between Peru and Bolivia and that's what he won the Nobel Peace Prize for. Wow. Second, we have Jose Maria Sobral. He was an explorer of the Antarctic. He's the first Argentinian to have spent a winter in the Antarctic and later on, he became an ambassador to Norway. Now the next one, and what I'm wondering if you recognize her, Violet Jessup. She ring a bell at all? From the Titanic? From the Titanic and the reason I'm asking is because you are her profile manager. I am. You are. From a long time ago. From a long time ago. That's I wondered if you still remember. That's so funny. But I don't know if you wanna tell the story but she was more than just on the Titanic. You'll go for it. Yeah, she survived three shipwrecks. The Titanic, the Britannic, and the Olympic shipwrecks. I think after two, I maybe wouldn't get on a ship again. Yeah, that's probably, although you probably figured if you did it twice, what's the odds of it happening? I know, what are the chances, right? But she found out. Yeah, three for three. But she was a nurse, apparently, I haven't read her whole story, but I believe she was a nurse with the shipping line. So she wasn't just going on a pleasure cruise. Next we have Victoria Ocampo. She was a magazine publisher and a writer. She did a lot of writing for women's issues and serving head of the underprivileged, getting them recognition. Antonio Burney, he is an artist. He was part of the, forget what they call it, the Nouveau Revolution or something like that. I'm not an art person, but realism, that's what Nouveau Realism or something like that. But yeah, so I'm not doing a good job of explaining what he did, but you can go learn more about him by doing some research. The next one, Antonio Zerilla. He was an Olympic swimmer. He was one of the first individuals to bring a gold medal home to Argentina. There were three individuals that year, so I don't know which one is considered first, if any. And I believe that four years prior, there was a team gold medal for I think the polo team. He was one of the first three to bring home a gold medal to Argentina. Libertad, and I don't, this is a French sounding or looking name. Oh yeah. And I don't speak French, but Libertad, Lamarque or Lamarque, I don't know how that's pronounced. She was a very famous golden age actress from Argentina. Juan Manuel Fongio, I believe. He was a Formula One driver. He has the second most wins. His wins were surpassed at the time. He had the most wins in Formula One racing, but again, it was surpassed by someone later on. He's currently in second place, but he was very famous worldwide. Raul Alfonso, he is considered the father of modern Argentine democracy. Argentina has been through a lot of turmoil in its government, and I found that out when I was trying to summarize its history up above. That was not an easy task, but he was a real key figure bringing democracy to Argentina. Great. And he has no connection so far. Isabel Sarly, she is a glamour model and an actress. From what I read, she's kind of like the Marilyn Monroe of Argentina. Looks like it with that picture. Yeah, not so much known for her talent as much as maybe for her beauty, but that I can't say, because I've never seen her perform, so I'm judging. And this one I'm gonna pronounce Kino. He is a cartoonist. Let me see if I can click on his character. I recognized his character. Here she is. Oh yeah. So it's a very, very popular cartoon in Argentina. And he is the animator. Mercedes Sosa is a folk singer. Then we have Christina Fernandez de Kirchner. So some of you may know her from the news. She was in the headlines for a while. She was the former president of Argentina. And after serving her term, she became vice president. So she's now the vice president of Argentina. And previously, she was married to another president of Argentina. So she was the first lady of Argentina. So she's had a number of roles there. And then she and Alberto Fernandez, who are not related, but Sherry, last name, he is the current president of Argentina. Those are our two living personalities this period. So again, if you're interested in working on those profiles, drop me a note and I can give you some access so that we can get them built out. And then the final one is Emiliano Sala. He was a football player, a very popular football player. And sadly, he was killed in a plane crash when he was, I believe, 29 years old. Yeah. That was back, pretty well exactly, but over in Europe. It was a very devastating event for the country. There's a lot of news on that. So that may give us some leads for him. But again, none of these people have family. None of them are connected to anybody. So we can get in there and... That's a really cool, diverse group of people. You know, I try to look for a variety, try not to get too many people in one category. So it's got some, whatever you're interested in, maybe you'll find something that strikes a chord with you. Yeah, I like it. I'm gonna have to work on Violet now. Yeah, I know. It's gonna be fun, there's some... Like I said, each one, you know, I only, I try real hard not to do too much advanced research on these people. So I just get that, you know, the bare minimum. But even that was enough to spark my interest in several of them. I don't know which one I'm gonna start with, but there's some really interesting stories here. And Violet's not the least of them. Oh, there's many, many more. So we do have a... Well, I will be posting tomorrow a G2G announcement that we've moved on to Argentina. So we'll have a thread there that if you have any questions, comments, you can share them there, successes. And we've also started a Discord channel page. So if you're a fan of Discord, you can go over there and I'll post the link on the Argentina. It's already on the India thread, but as I said, tomorrow I'll have an Argentina thread. I'm gonna put two threads up. I'm gonna put an Argentina thread and I'm also gonna put a wrap up for India as a separate new thread. Oh, great. We'll have two places you can go depending. And again, if you're still working on India, go ahead and post there because we'll still be checking in on the messages and that. So keep us updated on what you're doing. Keep going because just because the three weeks isn't, it doesn't mean that if you're loving working on India, keep working on India. Yeah. And even if you're kind of all done on the research, if you've kind of stretched yourself in on that, you can always just go back and start doing some cleanup. There's some really good profiles up, but some of them are a little bit disorganized or maybe need some headings put in. One thing I would ask is that when we're doing the profiles, we don't want to do too much cutting and pasting from Wikipedia. I did notice on a couple of occasions there were large amounts of material that we just kind of brought right over from there. So we want to put our own spin on it and make it ours, not theirs. But otherwise- Yeah, that's a good reminder. Yeah, but otherwise there, the profiles were looking really good. But again, we can use more, find more sources if you can make a connection. I would love to get one of these people connected. And it's tough because we don't have a lot to connect them to, but I'm hoping again with Nora Jones, maybe she'll have some connections on her mother's side that we can- I don't think so. I would be surprised if she didn't. Yeah. Except I think her mother's name is Sue Jones. Oh, then yeah, perhaps. That's a good question. I don't have trouble there, but. Well. You know, maybe her grandmother has an unusual name that we can trace. We can hope. Well, that's exciting. So cool, that's exciting. Argentina, onto the next stop. Okay. Anything else before we go? I think that's it. Cool. Well, we will try- And again, I encourage people to communicate because that's part of the fun is knowing what everybody else is doing. A lot of stuff got done in India that wasn't really shared. I kind of had to go back and find it, which is fine, but it would be, it's fun to hear as we're going along, kind of sharing your successes. So make sure you're posting. Either in Discord or GDG, we love to see that stuff and you can interact with other people who are working on similar things and that's always good to do. Yeah. So. All right, we'll see you again in three weeks. Okay, thank you everybody.