 Good evening or good morning. Good afternoon. Just depends where you are. How is everyone doing? It is the last day. We're done with Catherine's week. That's it. It's over. A lot of good things happened. And we will get into all those juicy details. I'm so excited. Soon. For those who are new to watching our live casts, we will introduce everybody first. Myself and Julie, we are WikiTree team members and Mindy, she is the captain of Catherine's week and also the total coordinator for the WikiTree challenge. And we have Sarah Mason, who is going to be the captain for Pat or Dear Myrtles week. And then we have Pat Richley Erickson, who are aka Dear Myrtles, who we're starting on this week. And then we have Catherine Wilson, who we just finished. That is everybody that's here. Sometimes we have a really full house. Smaller house this time. We've had nine before. I feel like a smaller house today. I'm excited just to see Catherine in person because we're missing her over on Facebook now that she's in the frozen Northland without internet. I know it's so crazy. But I love it. I really, really love it. It's so peaceful. It's good. I wish I could. It's so nice. Like I said, for those of you who are new, maybe don't know what WikiTree is. What is WikiTree, Julie? What is it? Well, WikiTree is a community. That's a big word for us. We're a community of genealogists, and we all work together on a single family tree. So if you're on another website where you do genealogy, you might build your tree and I'll build my tree. And even though we've got an ancestor up here in common somewhere, we might never talk to each other. So when we get to a common ancestor, we work together to find information. We share sources and resolve discrepancies. In other words, we collaborate. And that's how we grow an accurate single family tree that connects us all. The best part about WikiTree, in my opinion, it's free. Yay! I just wanted to mention because I saw some people in the chat. Yes, I do have a new background. I got a tapestry from the WikiTree store. I'm very excited about this. Beautiful. It looks lovely. Now, the WikiTree Challenge the WikiTree Challenge. What is the WikiTree Challenge? Well, it is our year-long event where each week we take on a different genealogy guest star. For instance we just finished Catherine's week and we're about to start Pat's week. And our goal is to make their tree more accurate and complete than it is anywhere else. And this challenge is part of our year of accuracy where our goal is to make WikiTree more accurate and also to make friends. We've made so many friends and so many connections and so much accuracy and broken so many brick walls. So we are really excited to show Catherine what we've found. Yes, and it's not just for the point system but it doesn't hurt to have that little bit of effectiveness out there for our team members. So we have different ways of collaborating while we're working on this. We have a spreadsheet where we mark which profile we're working on. That way we're not tripping over the same one and causing somebody to lose some work. It also gives you ideas of where else in the branches you can go that nobody else is at. We also have on the right you see the start of a G2G post. Now those we post interesting finds we post if a brick wall got broken through. Sometimes a question that needs to be asked but those are available for the guest as well to look at afterwards so you can kind of see what people were chatting about. And then for the next thing we have Discord. Now Discord gets pretty busy sometimes and this is our real-time chat. So we get together and say hey I need a second set of eyes on this profile. Do you think this record is right? Or I need a translation help. Or people just come in and go I don't know what to do today. What can I do? Oh well here you can go do this. That'll be really helpful. So Discord has been really really important to helping us collaborate. And I mean you think about it 40-50 people working on one small section of our global tree. Wow. They're certainly going to find things we didn't know we had Catherine. Absolutely. Okay I'm showing the chat and we've got a lot of people out there who are watching. We do. We've got like 67 people tonight. Well they all better click that like button. We are so lucky. We have work. We don't need to promote us. You will. This is where we started at. We started we took each great-grandparent and kind of each we went off from there. So can everybody see something? Is there like a slide that's showing us? Yeah. That's so weird. I just see like this black screen with all these little trees on them. Oh no. Isn't that weird? I'm going to try to see if I can help you with that but you guys just carry on. You'll probably talk to you in the private chat. I don't see anything that I could change but Sarah carry on. I'm so sorry. I can watch it the recording afterwards. Maybe you can open YouTube and like Pat has and maybe if you have the bandwidth. I'll do that. Okay so this slide here now once again going back to that point system we have two ways to get points. If you break a brick wall the first brand new ancestor line on each line that person gets 10 points for that. For any of the nuclear family members so children siblings you know and I like to do a whole family approach to my research anyway so I think this was a great way to do it. They get one point for each one of those nuclear family members they add. So our most valuable player this week our MVP was Dieter Luaranz and he was just amazing. We have several experts from that are good at German records but he was our one that was available and he just did my German line. He went non-stop all week let me tell you he was just amazing. Top five we had Dieter Luaranz we had Maddie Hardman Nick Donnelly Maggie N and Joan Whitaker Awesome. These are all of our stats for the week and for the totals on those now once again here we're talking about the points that they get for this and this is just incredible to me every week to look at these. The total points earned by our team members was 807 and let me tell you that was adding 125 direct ancestors Catherine to your branches. We added 342 nuclear relatives. So yeah you're going to be amazed. 340 bounty points now for profiles edited there were over a thousand unique profiles edited and then here the total edits now this is where every time we add a source we fix an error we add some narrative we do something that's one contribution on Winky Tree in that for the people working just on your branches this week there were 4,741 edits done to your part of the tree. Is that not amazing or what? The power of Winky Tree in one week. Yeah. What have you been doing all your life Catherine? Well you know what's really funny is when this started I was talking I think you guys remember last week my first cousin once removed Kristen was on and I got excited and so she and I were messaging and I realized that there's boxes and boxes of my genealogy stuff that I just haven't even looked at in decades because all my time is spent doing client research you know. So I started pulling out all these gorgeous gorgeous photos of my great grandparents and my grandparents and actually Mindy you were the one who put the bug in me to get the photos you messaged and said did I have any and I'm like you know I do where are they and I you know we recently moved so I was digging through some boxes and it reminded me of I was at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy a few years ago and Tom Jones was giving a presentation or a keynote or something and he said something towards the end of the presentation if somebody were to ask him what's the one piece of advice he would give them he said don't ever stop working on your own family and I remember when he said that I thought I have stopped working on my family I need to start that again but low and behold client work took over so this whole project got me so excited about working on my own family again. Yay! I think that's one of one of the main reasons why we're doing this is to branch out get more people interested. Oh it's so exciting. Somebody had asked how many did we how many people did we have working this week on the research and that was that was over 40 people so we had 40 people that registered contributions but you have to keep in mind we have other people that contributed that didn't get points. I know like for last weeks I only had like 14 points but I had 200 contributions you know so there's also people that are adding stickers additional research they're pulling maps you know it's teamwork so. Oh my gosh. Yeah I know I'm not technically registered for the challenge but every once in a while I'll you're registered your name's on there and we all learn from each other you know we have different ways of researching little tips that we found that make WikiTree easier or researching on a certain site easier and we've all learned just immense amount you know from each other it's been great. Well that global reach that you guys have with all these people from around the world contributing I mean my gosh I paid somebody an insane amount of money here in the US too because she moved here from Germany to work on my German line and in one week it sounds like you guys have done way more than I could have ever afforded to play for. Well and you're in the WikiTree family now so you're kind of stuck with us but anytime you come back and go further on one of those lines let us know. Yes. What is this a picture of? This is one of the houses that's on the profile this is where I was you know talking about people contributing and I honestly I'm not sure if I have it linked what that house is but Sarah if you scroll down just a little bit now Catherine I didn't have any glitter bombs for you but instead I used surname images so for people that could put them on your profiles you're laying in your model and so the ones I got done and when you get a chance to look at them later they're all they're glittery and diamonds and oh my gosh that's so exciting all right now this is where we started these brick walls every one of those yellow places it was a brick wall on this tree and of course that massive side on the left is the Germany the Prussian ancestors tell me what are people seeing is it a chart it's a fan chart I'm so sorry no don't you know what it's my internet in the country and then we did have some pedigree collapse all of us have that somewhere on our tree so that's just marked out in green so the participants knew they don't get double points just because the name is twice on a tree but there was a there was a lot of brick wall spaces now on Emma Broche both her paternal and maternal lines were extended oh my gosh oh my gosh I'm honestly I'm like sitting on my hands right now so I don't pull my phone out and try to go into wiki tree while you're sharing this oh my gosh no you get to wait now we had we had new parents for Christian Broche interesting bit of trivia for you Johan was the second son of Michael Broche Christina was the second daughter of Christian Betcher they married in 1829 in Prussia it just was interesting that they were both you know how they say there's a family dynamics they were both second children um Johan Gaul and Anna Marie Claus were new parents found for Anna Gaul yeah Gottlieb Yankee Wolke new mother for that she previously only had a father a lot of these they put just the father's name on those pressure records for people that don't know you know so you wind up with a dad and no mom but I'm pretty sure she was there for all of them so for all of them um Johan Yankee only had a maternal grandmother we kind of worked as a group you know and how we pretty much did this is people like me and Julie and you know people that are living stateside built the profiles up to the emigrant and help find starting records and that way our German experts could come in and go oh okay let me take you back over to that country and you know just spend their time focusing on that part of it so really the collaboration was important to be able to make this much progress on it absolutely because even if I could get my hands on the German records I don't read German I would have no idea what I'm looking at I don't either so don't feel bad it was very helpful when we got to another branch of your tree to find out what the correct spelling of the names when they came over of course they all changed and just so everybody knows like the box is an orange and cats are when you watch later those are the brick walls that were broken are the lines that were I wish you could see it is impressive for Gustav we're looking at a slide on Gustav Wehrmeister right now so we don't have a photo of my only great-grandparent that I have a photo of well see there you go you have a goal start reaching out to the cousins and see if anybody's got one he is we have Christian Tuchel was a new father for Godfrey Tuchel he was a farmhand and died in Prussia he was one of the very first new ancestors found so that was kind of exciting for us also on Gustav Gustav's line was Andre Schmittke he was a tenant farmer and a new father we have Christian I feel like I'm going to get ulteriority once again we're finding the kids and everything for this so you're going to see a lot of new names a lot of new names when you start looking for it then we go through and we add all those children in so it's been fun now Evelina York expanded a couple of branches this one was particularly difficult for some reason her records just were not showing up and you had that as a very definite strong brick wall but so did we at first and finally finally we found a record that said her father's name was Adam so that one was a really really good example of collaboration Evelina York her father was Adam Pelkey Frederick who was Adam Anna Elizabeth I put those two together sorry so that's not like there's so much that it's not confusing and that's back to 17 something for you on that on Anna's side it's just amazing Catherine that is like mind-blowing I'm crying for you I know all these orange spots this is wonderful can I interject for a moment Karen one of the creators and one of the people who worked said that a few DNA testers joined this week too and they will appear on your ancestors as well so that's pretty exciting you know that really is because one of the things that I miss is and I think I was talking to Mindy about this when there was that whole informed consent thing that happened with Judd Netsch all my family members wanted their profiles taken down the only time now that I know if I'm connected to somebody is if they show up on ancestry so how exciting and real quick before I go to Odie's side you didn't have Roma a lot on Paul and Elizabeth Lepinsky but they had a lot of children together and I know you knew a little bit at least about them but one of the interesting things I found and once again you were talking about the tragedies when you started that you found in the different lines they had at least five children together their last one was born in 1843 the mom Elizabeth she died in 1852 in Prussia Paul died in 1861 so shortly afterwards and you know there's no census records so we don't know who was left to raise these five children oh man now for Odie Maughlin I don't know if you had a name for that that's his actual name O period D period and it doesn't stand for anything that's what we thought and you know one of the other team members was like wait I think I know where they got that from and I said I'm pretty sure that was just what his name was really what his name was yeah that was different there was a lot you know of course there was a lot of guessing and trying to figure out the reason to try to order his social security application to see what did he write but then I found other documents and he filled out you know like draft registration forms and he really and it all said Odie yeah and we kind of wondered if the parents liked the name Odie Odie right and then just spelled it Odie for him we had Thomas Woods and Ann Davy Woods were added as new on Odie's line were added as new parents these are new parents for Edward Woods now Edward also gained nine new siblings I've really been stuck on the woods line you know ironically my husband and I were supposed to go to England and then the whole pandemic shut down happened I was still looking forward to researching them so this is even better love it we have Nancy Wilson who said that Odie had a lot of children that didn't make it to adulthood he did in fact his wife Mina died giving child yeah very very sad and apparently she has one of the DNA cousins who joined 400 family photos they are so well documented and photos galore and do the modelings have that many wow okay and this was John Sample now you know unfortunately we didn't have any better luck than you did I think but there's been somebody working on this like all week so there's what you see in the right side is just a snippet of the space page for that there's a couple of space pages and I'll make sure you have the links afterwards where it was thoroughly researched and he is not the John Sample that was belong to that family in South Carolina oh yeah there's been a lot of confusion about the South Carolinas and our sample line definitely did not come from there they came from England into New York I can't find when exactly did they come from England into New York right okay and then on to our Voorhees of course that's still on Odie's line now we had John Voorhees and Martha Teeple Voorhees added as a new father for George Martha was already actually on Wiki Tree but she wasn't connected so they have that proven and they have her connected now they had John and Martha had five other children Mary John Mary Martha and George now I'm not sure if they just wanted to Mary's or if they'll first Mary didn't do so well but right but yeah and I have a question uh huh I'm looking at the death date of John Voorhees 1863 although in Michigan was he wounded and sent home from the Civil War possibly yeah he may have been yeah so that's other record sets to look at sorry I haven't even touched the Voorhees line that was I inherited so much when I was pretty young and then pretty much you know picked the lines that were the most interesting at the time I've not even touched the Voorhees okay so I'm really excited to see that now on Lester Havens more tragedy you know they they died very young too Lester and his wife Cleo yes and then some of these lines stretched out into the Netherlands so that was one of the projects where I have to say you know we have these fabulous projects where you can go in and specialize on one location and the group from the Netherlands has been amazing these profiles go back into the mid 16th century and they spent all week error checking making corrections making sure everything was solid disconnecting reconnecting I mean honestly there were probably better points there somewhere but they made so many changes um they were just so incredible I I couldn't even keep up with all the changes they were making but those lines you know are confirmed in solid and they just did a lot of work on it a lot so so it's off to them yeah you're gonna have new things to look at there now Cleo sample on that line that was the only one that Emma couldn't get enough matches to get the DNA confirmed on but the rest of the the rest of the branches all have the DNA on it yeah I was pretty thankful when I had my parents DNA tested that I wasn't among you know that population that comes back with oh my dad's not my dad or my mom's not my mom and I was pretty thankful that both matched because I thought if they didn't there's like all those decades of research that I had done on those specific lines that wouldn't really be biologically fine and this was just out of order a little bit here Edward Woods parents were found Thomas and Anne Davey I mean you're just you're really gonna be shocked when you see how many names you get to get to work with now this was on Odie's line and although we have that once again that pedigree collapse the green section that you can't see Catherine so just keep nodding the two modeling siblings married the two sample siblings right so despite that all of those little dots that everybody sees on there every one of those is a broken down brick wall every one of those wow yeah it's amazing so on that side of the tree there were 17 brick walls broken down 17 can you imagine I mean it's so exciting the other day I said I'm just like bursting to I mean I just can't even imagine like at the end of the day how do you go to sleep after all that adrenaline of such amazing discoveries it's hard you lay there and you think about getting back up and researching now for the entire tree and this was actually this was a last minute change and it was interesting we wound up with a total 34 brick walls broken we had three last minute adjustments today after those adjustments were done you have exactly 17 on your dad's side and 17 on your mom's side wow it hasn't happened yet but 34 total brick walls broken oh my gosh you guys that is phenomenal I am so excited to dig into this and now I need a tutorial on how to so I can find all this good stuff so do people like post records on wiki tree so that you can see where they got this information from everything has to have a citation on it wow and then this was just going through all the new surnames here is can't really see it but it's an image of the after this was a chart that was pulled shortly before the live cast there had been a total of 466 new profiles added and trust me your branches look a lot more complete now the hard work begins right where I start taking all of that and fixing my ancestry tree yes but you have sources there so that is amazing with 40 people working on your on your account on your part of the tree it's going to take you 40 years to catch up right I'm thinking I just need to retire so I can spend all this time and you know and one of the other things that I like about wiki tree is that you know we're supposed to be keeping a research log of what we do and we do it for clients but wiki tree kind of is our research log so we do research notes right on the profile if we have a brick wall we didn't break down you can go in there and see everything we've looked at what found we couldn't find on the brick wall ancestors sometimes there's explanations oh you know I still need to look for this or find that document and then you'll see a note under it and it's all time stamped so you can see what went on with it and you can also look in the change history of each profile and see how many people worked on it that is phenomenal is there a way to download a Judcom from wiki tree yes man this is amazing you know what I would love to do I would love if there's time I don't know how you guys did this but if there's time for me to sign up to help with a future guest I would love to pay back by offering time I'm just so blown away and grateful this is amazing I bet we can arrange that if you've got anybody that you know you need Michigan Territorial or Midwestern Territorial records I would love to help with that we have space pages so if your research starts getting too cumbersome or there's long wills to transcribe something you don't want to take up a whole profile for we can put it on what we call a space page this is research done of John Wildley so trying to track down all the Wildleys in the area got us possible father narrow down to like three did not break that brick wall but I tell you what you have got a ton of information there now on who lived where how their household members were and that is linked to his profile so if you look on his profile there's a link to that space page and you can go oh let me see what research people had this is like the most magnificent example of genealogical crowdsourcing and generosity isn't it I'm just blown away it's incredible we're pretty proud of our community gosh can I pop a question in for Catherine excuse me if I can keep my voice Catherine Hondros was wondering if the Voorhees Road in Waterford Township Oakland County Michigan was named after your family I wouldn't be surprised because we did have a lot of settlers in Oakland County lots and lots especially the sample line which I think the Voorhees extends off that so I wouldn't be surprised but I'm writing it down so I can look it up and find out so how do I respond can I go into the YouTube thing after this is done and like respond there well she's on Facebook so if you want to send I know you're not on there anymore but if you wanted to get back to her one of us could do it for you you could probably just send it to Mindy because I think you've got her contact so do we have any other questions for Catherine or do you have any questions for us before we I have just blown away oh my gosh Mert I hope that you have as much excitement as I have this is like this is Christmas and birthday and anniversary and Easter and it's just filled into one right I was crying for you for all the orange boxes I started keeping track of just who it was on the pedigree chart they were boxing not all their children or siblings and I gave up after a while I mean because it's just incredible what work you all have done for our Catherine it's just wonderful it really did bring me to tears it was the generosity how do you do this in a phenomenal 40 people collaborating together on your tree you guys are such an amazing community and I honestly I'm so honored now that I get to be a part of the community too we're so glad that you let us work on your tree oh my privilege my honor well I guess we will switch gears over to Mert you can just call me Mert well I get the privilege of introducing you Mert so I'm going to call you I haven't written down as Pat because I didn't know what you preferred but give me just about a half an hour and I'll be able to say everything that you've done so yeah we have 1400 videos is that right and that's just on one channel it's not me doing it it's everybody it's another collaboration or I couldn't possibly do it yeah well for the people who don't know you and I don't think there's probably very many but Pat is best known for being dear Myrtle she has one of the top five genealogy blogs on the internet and she has used her experience as a corporate computer instructor to help countless genealogies new and old learn how to better document their family history excuse me as I just got an update she has more than 1400 videos covering a wide range of genealogy topics Mert is also the co-founder of Genia Quilters which is a Facebook group the sole founder I assume of GeniaWebinars.com and she participates in a number of ways with the association of professional genealogists in 2015 she received the president citation from the national genealog excuse me genealogical society she's written two books two big books the everything online genealogy book and the joy of genealogy in addition to magazine articles a chapter in the family chronicles a section to genealogy and she started a little a series of little books called I think I just had two examples of those the getting started with family history and internet research top 20 things to do online oh boy does that one need well you have to go to your about page no I meant I need to update that little book I'd sell if I was speaking in person and somebody was new and they just wanted to spend you know four dollars or five dollars it was an easy way to get into understanding some good principles of what to do what to do next yeah good beginning genealogy stuff it's awesome well and then you're apparently not busy enough because you also host a radio show so it's still ongoing no it's not ongoing when Hurricane Charlie came and did a direct hit there on the Gulf Coast of Florida wiped out two radio stations one of them was internet radio the other one was an AM station and the owners declined to rebuild so that's how I got into podcasting and I got into webinars because it's much easier to actually demonstrate something than to try to describe what it looks like I agree 100% yes yeah but you also do a lot of public speaking and I've met you before at Roots Tech I'm sure you don't remember me because you've met a million people there and I could go on but I think that Sarah and Mindy have a number of questions that they wanted to ask you okay sounds good and genealogy well a lot of people know that I'm Mormon and so when it's a combination of in my art class I was learning to do calligraphy and I had to do a project so I'm like why don't I do a family tree so I did my mother's family tree and calligraphy you know pedigree chart and that was the beginning of it and I'm like who are these people and then there's my dad's side yeah that's another thing they were in the same county in Missouri tarring and feathering my mother's side of the family so no wonder my parents were divorced it's in the genes I don't think you're expecting that answer were you that's how I got into it my grandmother Myrtle and I pray that I'm using her name wisely she's the one that we got to go spend time with on you know spring break stuff like that and can I share one story of course imagine that I'm about five and my brother's about four and grandma has to clean the house she was smart big bucket of water and those big house brushes that our grandpa Harold used to paint the house with and she said here I want you to paint the front steps they were dark green wooden steps and we were to start at the top and yeah water make it look pretty nice by the time we got to the bottom step the top steps it dried off so I had to go up there again and do it again she got her house cleaned that way we giggled about it many many years later I died of Lou Gehrig's but before she did we went to visit her and she wrote on one of those member magic slaves where you'd lift up the whatever the covering was but you'd write on it with the stylus and she used to tease me that I was into genealogy because when I was about seven I had the audacity when visiting her that I did not want to go to Aunt Graces to be with all those old people of course now I am an old people person but anyway my grandma Myrtle just has lots of memories I miss her dearly and she's my dad's side of the family that's really cool it's a great story so do you have any more stories to tell or any interesting stories about any of your ancestors well I have I never looked for famous ancestors you know how some people say oh this is the last name of this famous person and it's the same as mine my grandmother Myrtle's maiden name is Wiser and when we literally worked up the tree really pallentines that came from Germany up the Rhine River and had to pay taxes until I went to Germany and France to see that Rhine River you can see one castle and another one at the distant and there's one right behind you and each of those principalities charged for the barge that my ancestors were on to go north the river flows north to pass through that next year they literally put chains across in the 1700s early 1700s so they lived in downtown London in a tent city for about two years and the parliament wanted to know what should we do with all these Germans it's a big problem they sent a few families to Ireland not mine that I know of and the very German names that show up there in certain places in Ireland and then there's our group that was sent to upstate New York and the idea was they were to extract tar or pitch from the trees to make the tar that would then seal the wooden ships for Her Majesty's Navy but it didn't work either the trees weren't good or they weren't trained my people were bakers for many generations my wiser family and so they were abandoned my father had his son Conrad who was a young teen at that point he hung out with the neighborhood people in the wilderness which would be the native Americans so he learned to speak the language and when he moved to Pennsylvania and into his adulthood he was a translator between the natives and the colonial government yes that's my guy that's the son Conrad Weiser Homestead in Wummelstorpe, Pennsylvania how he managed to do this though I don't know he was also a colonel during the French and Indian war and had troops along the blue I think it's the blue mountains there so that one is kind of interesting somebody's mentioning the AOL Golden Gates Genealogy Forum yep Diana I know Diana from that Q-link before that on our Commodore look at all these people that we've been doing genealogy for years and now we got a lot going on in the chat here too but anyway I don't know I think he's pretty cool to figure out how to I mean just as a young teen how to learn language and to play games and then develop these relationships of trust with the natives in New York and in Pennsylvania and to effectuate a better relationship with the colonial government in Pennsylvania I think that's pretty cool I wish I could be a builder of bridges like that I think you are I just like to get together and talk about family history it's all good when did you first discover wiki tree well your wonderful illustrious leader when it first came out I always love hearing all the new stuff and he said why didn't you upload your jetcom and I'm like okay because I had gone there and entered my name and then realized I don't want to type in all these generations so we uploaded a jetcom and I combined the two which is completely different from how you combine two profiles now and I'm like yeah he says well I'm experimenting with a tree where the family photos will show up which you know that's a standard thing now particularly the one where it's the actual outline of a tree and so we experimented with that and so it was from the beginning but I found in preparing for this event I should have made it for October Aowyn said could you come in January I'm like no I want to clean up my profiles so then she I settled on March with her but each week since the beginning of the year we've been learning new things about wiki tree and that of the people that have been coming to my mini-merch they're in the same boat they started anything for a while and now there's so many resources available and it helped to have Hilary and Frank beyond standby to you know I try something I mean I could upload a picture I could do that still the same it's all good what's Thomas saying he wants to know if and I'm going to butcher this for a second here is the language of the region that your ancestor learned I honestly don't know what language it was but I do know that skill comey was the name of a native leader who was a good friend to Conrad Weiser and upon his death he said something to the effect that this is really a loss to both communities both the Native American and the Native American peoples to have Weiser pass away so if skill comey S-K-I-L-L-K-E-M-I-E you'll probably get it on there's a statue at the Weiser homestead which is a Pennsylvania historical site and it quotes him Yeah Rob's GEDCOM cleanup tool is amazing This is one of our members has created a tool that will go in and take out all of the flotsam that comes in with the GEDCOM and reformats everything to make it look a lot nicer and make it easier to read Yeah we did a little bit of that but not on all my lines I mean I'm like Catherine so many other things that I hardly ever get to do stuff even 20 minutes at a time in a week and I love that I got to and I want to continue meeting with my group on Wednesdays on many more for 20 minutes because they're now to the point where other people not just we're looking at other people's part of the tree at WikiTree and helping solve their conundrums so I like that when we started with my example and they saw one of my horrible citations Oh my gosh Do you want me to tell you about it? We're all friends in here I am so old that the first census record research I did was at Archives 1 and it was when we had wet paper copiers that were 11 by 17 and you had to fold them in half and now the ones that were in page protectors all that powder has come off What I did to cite the source was to take two pictures of one of the actual entry because my guys are never at the top of the census page where you could see the column headings and the other thing I did was zoom in on the heading so I knew the year, the place, the stamp page number, the written page number and I just plastered them together into one image and that was it. I never wrote a citation and I was shocked when I brought it up because I don't ever remember doing that but at least I tried You gave people the tools to find the records Yes I just wanted to make a point you helped build Wiki Tree and build the base of what it was so while you had to enter a lot of your ancestors manually a lot of people are like I don't want to enter my stuff manually or go through that whole Gencom and we usually tell people well you'll get a couple generations in and then you'll notice you already have ancestors on Wiki Tree because it's such a vast community you've had so many people, so many people are on Wiki Tree that more than likely everybody will find at least some ancestors on Wiki Tree This is what we noticed today with Karen Cave our friend from Balmore, Maryland where she had a lot on her list to compare and you don't need to go too far back on your generations before you meet up I've got to tell you it's amazing because Hillary Gadsby who's one of your people She's on my panel for Mondays with Mert and every time I turn around you guys are doing a source-a-thon or something like that or you're planning on doing one or you just did one and so what we're getting is the message that you really care about having sources and not just random let's put this guy because his name is John Smith Senior he must be John Smith Junior's dad Nah, we want documents that tell us something an image so she's been doing a lot of leg work that made it really easy for me to come back in I can't believe what you all did for Catherine this week, that was just incredible and speaking of what are your current brick walls that we might be able to work on this week I am very interested in knowing okay these just go back to your great grandparents but yeah I see that so on my Goring line they came over somewhere around 1848 and I don't know what's my grandmother Francis' maiden name, my maternal grandmother's maiden name I have some inkling about Weisers over in Germany my biggest problem is Dolly Yackey who doesn't show up yet on this, she's one generation back on which side? On dad's side of the family and I think it's Y-O-C-K-E-Y Cheryl P-O-L-O County Michigan in 1858 and it was always said that she was from Franklin, Pennsylvania well that's a county, it's also a town and I had it narrowed down to a couple of possibilities so there I am okay yep there she is married to Daniel Weiser she's my brick wall now there is someone on Family Search who thinks she knows who her dad is but I've never heard of them being in upstate New York but on the other hand when Dolly married her husband Mr. Weiser how do you say S-C-I-O-T-O County in Ohio you came that way whether it was Pennsylvania or New York you came down that way if you were going to go farther west you found skill comey thank you Thomas now after watching and received for her gift what are you hoping to see participating in this challenge well I need to get my DNA connected I'm not sure that it is and I've never done that part other than it's very obvious on my dad's side that I'm connected to a lot of people but I don't know about my mom's side and I know that she's my mother we all love our step mom let's put it that way but I wanted for the first time bring the DNA over and see what happens and I know that challenges can happen and I'm prepared to handle whatever shows up I'm ready I'm prepared I've heard stories and it's okay but we have our DNA expert Emma we can see if she can help with the DNA aspect of your tree so you want my Jed match or what do you want she can yeah they'll get in touch with you all right so in order to get an email to me you have to put urgent in the beginning of the subject line okay now everybody else don't listen to that part he just receives 100 urgent emails cause I look at those first I get about 700 emails a day and that's what leads and that doesn't count the mail list and stuff like that that I subscribe to these are people who have a query and that informs my decisions about what we might be talking about during my webinars so yeah and it's I need to tell you all I am so happy to be here do we have any before Mert has to go cause I know she has to go in a bit do we have any other questions for her Sarah do you have any questions do we have anything in the chat before we I haven't seen anything else pop up in the chat that we didn't already share so I think we're doing okay somebody thinks that you might be connected to her Higgins I don't know that far back into New Jersey my Higgins are Tolbert and Talbert Higgins father and son one or the other of them served in the Civil War and I'm not sure cause I have to go look at the actual file and service file as well as pension file to fair it out which man is which man that's a little confusing and that's all I know about Higgins it sounds like a chore sounds like something for our wonderful wiki tree yeah sorry did you have anything that you wanted to ask or I can't think of anything else I think we've covered a lot okay well thank you Mert for letting us tackle your tree and thank you for coming on we're all really excited alright rest well yes thank you I know you have to head off and thank you everyone in the chat for watching things all our participants in the challenge thank you wiki tree in general and don't forget you can go on wiki tree dot com check us out and also like the video subscribe and they are all recorded so you can watch this later so we will see you next Wednesday for when we wrap up Mert and we also have our Saturday livecast at 10 a.m. Eastern time so don't forget to check that out and we will head off now guys it was nice seeing everybody