 I know you guys have got to be just as shocked as I am that 2021 Wiki Tree Challenge has come to an end. Tonight, I have with me Melanie McCow and on the end there, Dieter Leverence, which we've all talked to a lot during the challenge, down below two of our fabulous captains, Karen Lowe and Emma McBeth. We had Cheryl in here, she might be back. AOMOM is going to try and be with us and she's not feeling it. So AOMOM, if you're out there listening to this, I hope you feel better and hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Yeah, well soon, drink all the fluids. Yeah, definitely. And I am going to go ahead and we're gonna start with some of the info we have got going into this year. Now, I know anyone that has participated at least one week knows what these images are or even watched one of our broadcasts. So I'm not gonna tell you all about our ways to collaborate and our spreadsheets and G2G posts, but who knew that all of this would lead to such an outstanding year, like the one that we've had. Of course, Discord, we've had our live chats with WikiTriers from all over the world. We've made friends with a lot of them and it's just fabulous to be able to see people around the clock. Let's see if Cheryl's gonna let us add her back in. Okay, and so we had 12 captains and it kind of doesn't seem like it, but you look at the list and you're like, yeah, that's right. We had 12 captains during the 2021 challenge. So thank you to Azure, Cheryl, Christine, Donna, Emma, Janet, Joan, Karen, Laura, Lucy, Maddie and Sarah for all that you guys did for our guests and for WikiTree this year. Now, at the end of this, we'll be revealing which captain won the physical trophy. But first, let's take a look at a couple of highlights from this year. Now, this one for the top captains in no particular order, they were top five were Cheryl Hess, Christine Daniels, Emma Macbeth, Joan Whitaker and Karen Lowe. It was an amazing year and you guys definitely helped make it that way. Now, most of us remember the first weeks with AJ Jacobs. We started out unfamiliar with the process and the scoring and then things kind of changed a little bit as we tried to improve it at the start of the challenge. But even with all of that, we broke down brick walls for AJ. So we added 21 new direct profiles, 17 nuclear relatives and broke six brick walls. And hey, at the time, if you remember, that sounded like a lot, it was a lot. It did. It was, there was a lot of Polish Jewish folks that week and we learned a lot. Right. And it was our first venture too into the Jewish and the German ancestry. At the start of the year, we had that and then consistently throughout but at the start of the year for some of us, there was a lot to learn. Now we had 41 Wicked Traiers joining in the fund that contributed, including our forest elf, Aowyn, the big boss, Chris and several team members. We forged other friendships along the way and started out what would become a very, very successful year of accuracy. So our very first MVP, most valuable participant of the year is here with us. That was Karen Lowe, great job, Karen. Yay. But over the entire year now, we actually wound up with 27 unique bounty hunters. And of course some of those were showing up on the list over and over again. Dieter, I don't know if you kept track but you were an MVP for an incredible seven times this year. That was awesome. Wasn't it? Yes. With a total of 1106 points those weeks. Now Maddie was just behind them. Unfortunately, she couldn't be here. This is out of the time zone for her also and she's not awake at this time. But she got MVP six times, earning 836 points for her MVP weeks. Donna was the other top bounty hunter in the top three. Congratulations to all of you. Now the highest score, this was crazy. And I know you guys all remember this because it wasn't that long ago. For bounty hunter during a top week actually goes to Greg Clark with 285 points. He was awarded his very first bounty hunter badge during week 44 for Claire Breson Banks, which was a crazy, crazy big week way to go Greg. So, you know, we also had Andy Stam, anonymous Sharkey, Carol Keeling, Sheryl Hess, A Fanhut, Elizabeth Feiney, Elsa Vanderville, Emma Macbeth, Greg LaVoy, Jamie Errington, Joan Whitaker, Yuha Swiney, Karen Lowe, Kathy Rabenstein, Lewis Kessler, Marta Johnson, Melanie McComb, she's here with us, Nan Starjack, Oley, lost my place on the list. Selver, Patty Waldron, Robin Baker and Roy. So thank you to all of you and congratulations on making that MVP list this year. Now, though we've recognized the top scoring participants each week, there's also been so many wiki-triers that have added value to the challenge. They've let their time, their expertise and their skills in ways that we couldn't have duplicated anywhere. And I'd like to say a big thanks to the following projects. And I'm sure I'm missing some, but these ones for sure I know we're there for us this year. So we had Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden and Wales, not necessarily in that order. I know we relied heavily upon the Netherlands help, Dieter for our German help and a few other people in that project. England, always a big one, they're on so many trees. These projects and their project leaders have been an incredible help throughout the challenge and hopefully will be for the 2022 challenge as well. Oh, Emma says, thanks to the US Black Heritage folks too. Yes, I know. I know we just had so many groups that have done a lot of good in the challenge and helped us out. Now we've had a nice variety of experts too throughout the year. I know I'll miss some, but these are people that volunteered at the very start of the year before they even knew what they were going to be getting into to volunteer their time. And so that's Kitty Munson Cooper, Ava Kajawa, Chris Ferrielo, Joe Whitaker, Yuhaswini, Amy Gilpin, Dieter Leverance, Frank Yatzik, Jelena Eckstat, Norbert Gitzel, Afon Hoot, Astrid Spargerin, Maureen Fern, Edwin Ruffel, Marguerite Beers, Lave Christensen, Evelyn Astow, Rich Devlin, Maria Lundholm, Leonard Van Hofton, Hilary Gadsby, Ole Selmer, Kylie Hase, and Isabel Martin. Thank you guys all so, so much. I mean, we're hoping that you're going to, I'm working on it. I might lose my voice, Emma, you may have to do the second half for me, but we're hoping that they definitely want to help out this next year now that they kind of know what's involved. Now, another part of the challenge dynamic we couldn't have done this without is our quieter participants. And these are the wiki-triers that have kind of shied away from the spotlight, but they have been there consistently for us. And their help in finding those articles and fleshing out the biographies and motivating us has just been a really important part of it all. And so here's just a few of the names on that list. And I'd like to thank Anne Browning, Anne Guglick, Deb Johnston, Donald Lindgren, Eileen Robinson, Elaine Weatherall, Ellen Smith, Aya Winwalker, Isabel Caruso, Jackie Erdos, John Tyner, Kathy Evans, Kathy Nava, Kay Knight, Maggie N., Michelle Warren Hood, Michelle Enke, Nick Donnelly, Nicole Adams, Robin Baker, Steven Tomasowitz, Thomas Kuhnlein, and Tommy Buck. And our very own Olesh Tertnack, our server and report whiz. He has always been there behind the scenes and we definitely couldn't do this without him. So we also had, yeah, I see Chris down there talking in the chat. So he's definitely here. We have the continued support and recognition of Chris Ferrielo. Now with his usual amount of humor, he has made sure to post each of this week's challenges to the genealogy squad. He's also popped into Discord channels frequently when he wasn't participating to let us know how well we're doing. Thank you, Chris. Here we have, and we all had so much fun this year saying, okay, I'm this many, 11th cousin to this person and 22 degrees from there. Now people suggested throughout the year that we should see at the end of the year how these guests are all related to each other. Because after all, we're all cousins, right? Well, Maddie and I worked quickly to get this chart made up that showed the relationships. But I couldn't quite figure out how to show it or it wouldn't just be a chart with a bunch of Xs, which would be too small for you to read on this. So I went to the one person. I knew you could come up with something if it was possible. And that was our data expert, Alish. And what we quickly found out is that there's no way to show all these relationships in a really cool graphic because of how many guests are connected to another. And here you just see an example. This is CeCe Moore. That's every guest that we've had this year that she was related to. And if you go to the category for our guest stars for this year, you can see which ones you're related to or which ones you are just certain amount of degrees from. Now, this is not all the connections. This was just the green line or the closest cousins and the red lines are the furthest. So for example, CeCe has a line to her closest and CeCe has a red line to her furthest away cousin. Now, if we would have done every connection there would have been like hundreds of lines there and you really wouldn't have seen anything it just would have been a blob. And I mean, Alish just kept trying to find ways to, he worked for quite a long time on this. And luckily he's creative and patient. So we kind of worked together at the end and this is what he came up with. Now here you can follow the week number and I'm gonna post this where people can go in and look more closely. But here you can follow the week number and see where the next connection is starting with week one, going to week two. These are still the greener the line, the closer the connection, the red line obviously is a far one. Now we did have some that did not connect to cousins. And Melanie, I know you see your name is up there. She's like, you don't have to tell me, I already knew. And they are connected to the global tree but AJ, Daniel, Ellen, Skip, Jared, Johnny, Lewis, Marion, of course, Melanie and then Nathan were not connected to any of the other guest stars. So this just means that we have to try and get some more of those sideways lines done and we're gonna find a way to get them connected to us somehow so that we can work on. Now I am gonna say that these are our totals for this year. And you guys, every time I thought you were done amazing me and you did the huge tremendous job, you do something else. And these numbers really reflect that. So this is for the entire year of the challenge. Now total points are 22,468, created ancestors are 3404, created relatives are 10,308, bounty points, 8,690, profiles edited, 31,915 profiles edited, which is just crazy. And then total edits over the year was 126,382. So just totally nuts. Let's see if I can remove that down. See who we have left. We lost Emma for a minute. We never got Cheryl back. Okay, so I am going to start with the first question for somebody and Melanie, let's go ahead and start with you. What was your favorite part of the challenge? What was your favorite part of the challenge? Ooh, that's a tough one, because it's like, I think I'm a little bit biased to probably be in a guest star and having my tree done for the week. That was definitely an absolute pleasure. But I think overall, even just doing the challenge as a volunteer, I think just any excitement when you can share something that you found, just see how someone's like, just like eyes, just like eyes, just like eyes, just see how someone's like eyes just light up and just giving someone back. I remember when Amy, Johnson Crow, got really emotional over the Johnson line connection I helped look into. That was really the moment, because that's the moment I live for every day when I work with clients is just being able to give someone back a piece of their heritage. Right, you know, and that is such a big gift to give somebody and we've done it over and over this year, I know a few of our guests have cried, but I think sometimes we get just as emotional, you know, we feel like, I mean, we feel so much closer to them by the time we're done and this is just a crazy, crazy fun way to do this and to share our skill and everything. Do we have Cheryl and Emma back yet? I'm back. Can you hear me? Okay, yeah. Do you wanna take the next question or do you want me to ask you a question? What is one thing you learned this year that will help you in upcoming years? Yeah, let's give that one to Karen. You want me to do it again, Karen? Okay. Yeah, sorry. We're having some fun times at our house too, so please hit me with the question again. I sure will hit you with it. What is one thing you learned this year that will help you in upcoming years? Oh, you know, I was gonna say that one of my favorite things this year was how we got to learn to do research in new places. You know, I started the year not being very familiar at all with, say, like Polish-Jewish records and I learned a lot about how the efforts of the Jewish Records Indexing Project has made that so approachable for English-speaking Americans to get into those records and have some findings or English-speaking English speakers around the world. And similarly, that you can get into Dutch research and go to WIWASWI and with the attention that other countries and other organizations are paying to indexing their records, it's just amazing what can be accomplished. So I think what will help me is, is it just the confidence and the willingness to try a new location, a new culture that I don't know anything about and see what's available, you know. That was a good answer, Karen. Do you wanna give Dieter the next one, Cheryl? Sure. Are you ready for me, Dieter? Yeah, I think so. Okay, what set of records location-wise was the hardest for you? That's different because I used several pages to search the records, but if you see the Lutheran directors in Germany, there are 400,000 records, about 400,000 and 120,000 are online. So sometimes it's very hard to find something because less than one third is online available. That's the biggest problem we have. Otherwise, I like to read those old records. For me, it's easy. Most of them I can read fluently without any problems. I was very impressed with the work you did this year, Dieter, just amazing. Sometimes for me were long days because 10 hours were nothing to work in the challenge. And I must stop. My wife said, okay, come down and help me now. There were seven of the people incredible. It was not, it had so much information for them, but it was possible to put that online in that one week. The time was too short. Yeah, it is. I'm sorry, Mende. There were a lot of brick walls we wouldn't have made, Dieter, without you on the challenge. Yeah, I would have find more, but as I said, the time was too short sometimes. And I stopped mostly midnight, half past midnight, and then okay, I did mistakes. I see it's all next day that I did mistake. It's translating and transcribing so that I came, you must stop at some time. Sorry, my English is not so good. I speak to not enough English. Chris, Deer is a machine, he says. Yeah, we're okay because you communicate well in English and we love your skills in German. I know we had so many trees this year, though. Trees, they're part of the tree where a week was just not enough for any of us. And you get to the end of the week and you're desperately trying to get that last profile done. And you're like, no, or I want to get this brick wall done. I know it's a lot of times when we had a week off, which wasn't very often this year. And people spend it still trying to touch up things even though they didn't get points for it. What do you have next, Cheryl? Okay, let's see what our next question is. I think this is a good one for Emma. Which set of records did you feel the most comfortable with? That's an obvious one. Definitely be the French-Canadian ones. Those are the weeks where my score was way higher. And as Karen and I discuss all the time, it's like fish and a barrel. If you know which parish, you can find the entire family and who knows how many generations, generation after generation after generation. So yeah, I tried to stop by any time I saw someone had French-Canadian and have a little fun with their records. Now for you, which one would you have picked as the hardest set though, Emma? Well, all the ones that, like the last one that we did for marriage, I couldn't even touch that. Like I just sat back and watched people because I was like, I don't know what you're talking about or what these records are or where you would find them or, yeah. And also I'm not familiar with Jewish genealogy to any extent. So anytime that, like when we were working with Lewis and Marion and other weeks, I just kind of stepped back and I learned a lot from just getting back and listening to the discussion and where people were picking up. Like, you know, I mentioned the candle tax that you brought in that last week. I was learning a lot about what is available, what isn't available and how they manage the types of records for Jewish genealogy. I think the Jewish genealogy for me was one of the saddest ones to actually dig into and the findings that we got out of the weeks. Some of it made me cry when I was reading parts of it. I think that's probably one of the most interesting ones. The weeks that I did. I don't know about everybody else, but... Yeah, I remember we wrapped up with Johnny Pearl on Holocaust Remembrance Day. And so of course that part of Jewish history is just devastating. And then looking at families with all the infant deaths, you know, and the one whose parent knows that things aren't certain, you know, even today with modern medicine and we look back just a few years and there's just so much loss in some families. Yeah, some of those big families, you know, and only three or four of the children would grow to adulthood and actually marry. I mean, just had to have been devastating for the family, but you know, I would say more for the mothers who, you know, this is what they did. They took care of the children in the home. And then, you know, these babies kept dying off and there really wasn't anything they could do. They'd get up the next day, feed the kids and, you know, help work the farm. And I mean, just really sad. It was right around that same period, there was a special on TV with one of the survivors that actually saw her brothers and sisters being killed. It was right around the same time we were doing the research on that and to watch her talk and us researching at the same time. I was very emotional about that. So it was rough. Okay, we had a question here from Paul and he says, how do I get my brick walls in my tree to be worked out or just certain people? Now for the actual challenge, Paul, we had this year we had genealogy stars. So they were anybody that was an influencer in the genealogy world or an actual genealogist in the genealogy world. Now next year, we're taking that out to be celebrities, you know, and unfortunately, I mean, we have some just super, super outstanding stars of our own on WikiTree, but anybody that uses WikiTree already as a primary tree can't be a guest anyway. So even if they did fit into one of those slots, you know, like we can't take Emma because she's already been working on WikiTree with her own family. But you know, you can always get in touch with one of the project managers and see if they'll do a mini challenge based around your tree. And sometimes you can get a lot of work done that way. Right, or even just asking questions in our forum, I'm just always amazed by the knowledge and the generosity of our members even when there's not a certain project and a score sheet. I've posted letters that were in like Germanic influence cursive Yiddish, you know, or like I said that mid 1800s cursive Russian that are just indecipherable to me as an English speaker and gotten answers back, you know. So even if you're not in the challenge, just use those forums or hop on our Discord server. And that's not just for the challenge, it's available to all of us. What else do you have for us, Cheryl? All right, I think this'll be an interesting answer. Do you have a favorite guest star? Melanie? Melanie, yeah. You can't pick yourself, Melanie. I know, I know, I'm not going to. Or your PIC. That's true. Ooh, I was thinking of the ones that we worked on everything. I would say, I think I actually really enjoyed working on Lisa Lissons' tree. Hers I found to be just pretty interesting. I think there was a lot of variety there, which was nice. Okay, Karen's question, partner in crime. And that would be David Lamber. So she's my co-worker, I keep it my co-worker, so she could not pick him. Yeah, David was my partner in crime at the famous table 41 at a conference when we sat together and had a big trivia contest over dinner. Yeah, and Lisa's was, I thought interesting because I think we was probably one of the more difficult ones for the US was a lot of Southern research. So that definitely proved to be a nice challenge, which was good. See what we can kind of cover. I think a lot of people will probably agree with Emma only because he's so well known that Dr. Henry Lewis Gates when he took the time to come and be on our show, that was pretty incredible. He was a lot of fun. Right. And those folks like Dr. Gates and C.C. Moore, who will, of course, a lot more attention has probably been paid to Dr. Gates's personal tree and we've had whole television specials about it, but the opportunity to work together and to make these guests who are such excellent researchers and writers say, wow, I can't believe what you found. That's fun. I mean, if you all worked on my tree, I would be amazed, but not that surprised if you found a lot of great stuff, but someone who's had so much attention and just show the power of wakitry and how there's always something new to discover. Right. Dieter, did you have a favorite? I don't remember the name, but I remember the week because he had, or she had, I don't know, anchors from Prussia and there's a man who needs from Prussia. They learned a lot of new things because man who needs baptized their children with 18 or 20 years or something like that. It was very different to other weeks. So that week I liked very much because I for myself learned a lot. Right. I don't know the name. I don't remember the name. Yeah, and I know it was shocking because usually when you find a baptism for somebody, it's around the time of their birth or within a day or two. And here we were seeing like families were baptized or they were 18, 20 years old before they were baptized. So it kind of made it hard to look for those records. You didn't know when that was gonna occur. Better late than never is always fine, Betsy. It's fine, we're glad you made it. Now I'm gonna go ahead and ask a question. Melanie, have you formed friendships during the challenge that will continue on in 2022? Oh, absolutely. I think I've met a lot of friends along the way and some of them I think I've been talking to pretty regularly ever since just getting on Discord. Close to almost a year ago, roughly. So I mean, figure like last, I think I got involved like last April or so. So yeah, I mean, I definitely think that there's a strong friendship that we find with a lot of other people on a wiki tree, especially here on this challenge. Okay, now I have to ask though, besides me, how many people when we had a week off went into Discord with draws? Or went, oh wait, I want somebody to look at this marriage for me. Oh, nobody's in the Discord. But what do you mean with draws? I'm always on Discord in the day. Well, we were in there, but you know what I mean? We weren't doing the challenge, active challenge chat. Yeah, I think I was always in Discord too, Emma. I think the only time it was when I was actually booted out of the challenge one, but I was still in the general chat, you know? So I mean, it's funny because I think my friends have been like, I'm gonna take Discord away from you if you don't stop. Yeah, that's one of the very first things I do in the morning is get my Discord light turned on so everybody knows that I'm there. Nice. So let's talk about what that means. What do we mean by Discord? As far as our chat platform. Yeah, it's so cool. I saw someone who said Discord withdrawals, right? So that's the chat server system that we use. Right, and Eileen, I don't think any of us ever actually leave Discord because we are so used to chatting in it now. I definitely think it's an improvement over when we were doing Google Hangouts or just using the Google Mail groups, you know? And so it really wasn't a dynamic conversation. It was kind of delayed. And then somebody could say something back and then you had to kind of wait and now it's all live chat, you know? Which is what we're used to in other parts of our life. So it makes sense. We could also do that with WikiTree. Yes, and I know every time we had a week off or even sometimes when it was out of, completely out of my expertise, I would just pick a different challenge which often was our US Block Heritage project, you know? So there's always something going on, even if not the challenge or this project doesn't excite you. There's something else that will. Okay, Cheryl, we have another one? I think we do. Do you feel that the work we did improved the accuracy of WikiTree? You wanna take that one, Emma? Yeah, I'm like shaking my head, yeah. Yeah. Even like, so with French Canadian, for instance, we have extensive French Canadian community at WikiTree already, which means we have extensive family lines already on there, but that doesn't mean they're always accurate. So when we came, you know, you know how things can get convoluted and mixed up and especially when everybody has the same first name and it's easy to get people confused. So one of the great things was, as we were adding new people, we were also cleaning up some of the older, like going back within the lines and making sure it was accurate that we had all the sources we could possibly find and we were nipping branches wherever we needed to and taking two people who were conflated and separating them out. And this isn't just a WikiTree thing. This is an every website everywhere that has family genealogy on it thing. And so it was a great opportunity for us to spend dedicated time cleaning up the branches and making them as accurate as they possibly could be for future generations to come along and have that. So that was one of my favorite parts about what we did is we weren't just adding new, we were cleaning up and doing the deep stuff that takes time and we were only doing it in a week, which was amazing. Yeah. Now, Karen, how would you answer that same question? Do you have anything to add? Oh, I would say that is definitely true. Just the diligence that people put into the work and when we had lines that already existed to go back through every step. And how carefully we looked at, I saw Chris commenting about the Lakapo week and how even up to what we, Mindy was trying to finalize the slides and get ready for the broadcast and we thought we had this whole line going this way, which of course is also a student documented on Wikipedia. And then at the last minute, we were like, no, we're gonna swing the connection over this way. I think we've made a mistake and added 20 ancestors from a related line. I would say that was our closest tree chopping to the live cast that we had all year. That was like heartbreaking. Right. But it wasn't working. Right, to say, oh, this whole line and it's so easy to do with. And that's the critique that so many people have of our wonderful collaborative global trees is the accuracy. And so shining a light on that this year has been really great. Okay, now Lewis has a question. He says, I'm curious what guess you were able to connect up to the main tree that instantly gave them dozens or hundreds of new ancestors. And I think that's actually too many to respond with just a name or two there, Lewis. And looking back through the year, right? I mean, we had so many of them that we did that at least on one or two of their lines where the lines were already existing. We worked our way out carefully. We proved the line and jackpot. We hit a line that's been there for a long time. And all of a sudden they've got 115 new ancestors on that one line and you're just like, wow, wow, okay. It's stunning. And then that takes them so much further back in their own personal trees, back to the profiles where the projects are covering and protecting them and some really beautiful profiles. And I noticed a lot of those guests that had those instant ancestors, I guess we'll call them, were really ones that had maybe some early New England roots especially for the ones in the United States. I found that once we kind of connected them with the gateway ancestor, we were able to really sometimes even bring them back into England, for example. So that's a good example of like how we were able to bring a lot more is you get those published lines that have already been documented so long and now it's just connecting the dots. And Dieter, what do you think would be the cutoff range for finding accessible records for the German people? Like for each area there's, you can't find anything before 1800 or do you have kind of a century or an area where you think there's a cutoff? Yes, the cutoff for whole Germany is a 30 years war. The most record starts after the 30 years was in 1650. Most of them 1670, 1690, only a few go before the 30 years war. So 1620, 1600, one Catholic from 1550, from Ebbe is mostly, but it's very hard to have a lot of things are destroyed. And for the Eastern Territories and Brandenburg, East Brandenburg, a lot of things are destroyed during the Second World War, 1945. There's a lot of things burned. So you will find them never again. So the 30 years war, the Second World War, where the two breaks, the most secret noise. Now, Emma, how would you go ahead and judge that with your project, the Black Heritage Project? Because I'm sure anything, or there were enslaved persons, anything before that especially would be difficult. Well, the big wall that everybody thinks of is the 1870 wall because enslaved people were not enumerated officially until 1870, but what you find when you really work on black genealogy extensively is people were recorded in more ways than you could imagine. So one of our goals is we're working to pull those documents out that aren't necessarily indexed and get all these people documented because the records are there, they're just not easy to access or quick to access. Now, I know early on this year, when we had Sherry Passi and we came across some US records just location-wise that there wasn't a lot of availability. I'll tell you what, and we all say that we learned a lot this year, but I love those Quaker records. I'm so in love with those Quaker records that everything that could have possibly happened within somebody's life was in those Quaker Minute meetings. And we just found so much for those people where we wouldn't have found anything without them. You didn't necessarily have census records, they were destroyed, the vital records weren't there, nothing else was there, but you could dive into those Quaker records and go through those meeting notes and just find everything out about somebody's life. Now, Patrick says I'd like to see a discussion about accuracy. So just what is the standard of proof expected before recording of birth and death certificates? And I think that really depends on the area the person's in and how legitimate the source is. So you wanna keep in mind that you want records, hopefully, that are done as close to the event as possible. So you may have somebody when they marry and it says they're 21 years old and it's perfectly acceptable to use that as a birth estimate and just not mark it as exact. But at least that is a vital record, but that's not as good as something if you can find the baptism when it says they were born yesterday and baptized today. You know, and once you get into the pre-1700, it really depends on the project. You know, if you go to each project, there's usually a set of standards as far as what they will accept. It was a huge undertaking a few years ago that the projects went through and set up what reliable sources are for their particular projects and the different era so that you would know, you know, hey, this will work, but this won't. And you know, and it's not to say don't use anything else, they can be good tools or clues to help you find what you do need. But you know, you really wanna look at what the era is and you know, which project is covering that if you have questions. And then would you say, because I know I would, that there are projects where oral history just has to be believed, you know, I find particularly with black and indigenous people that you know, if a woman is saying this is the father that that may be the best evidence that we have, particularly in the case of enslaved people with white fathers, you know, the woman knows and this is the story that has been handed down through the generations and to me, that's the proof, you know, that we have to use these oral interviews sometimes or family knowledge and I wouldn't want to leave people out of our wonderful genealogy community because they come from a culture where birth registration came very late to that country or you know, these written records just aren't gonna be there for your family. Yeah, and I do agree. And sometimes, you know, I don't even know if it's in the wiki tree help anymore, I'd have to look at used to be that sometimes the oral history is an acceptable source but there again, you're looking at what the source is and when that person was living. So, you know, is this somebody saying I have a story passed down about my eighth, sixth great-grandfather was the baron of this and you're like, no, that's not an acceptable source. Now, if somebody says my grandmother told me that so and so had this happen, she was living during their time and so, you know, yes, that may be the only source there is for that. We have a Daughters of the American Revolution sister who just joined our chapter and she has a generation where that's pretty much what it is. You know, she had her mother was the grandmother was enslaved and the male was the plantation owner or his son. And so, you know, that kind of had to be taken into account and it made it a little bit difficult, you know, but if you do a thorough analysis on it and you're documenting that analysis and where that information came from that can make all the difference in the world. And you're wonderful that society is not excluding someone who would have traditionally been excluded but welcoming and saying, yes, that is the documentation. That's what's available and that's what we accept. And Lewis is asking or saying what amazed me most was how many brick walls were broken for long-time expert genealogists such as James Tanner. And I do agree, you know, and sometimes when we do these brick wall bounty points, it's not necessarily something that they have done wrong or they didn't figure out. Sometimes it's just that they haven't been back to that line for a while or, you know, other times it's not that we are correcting what they did it's that we're correcting what we did. And I actually was surprised because I had somebody tell me at the end of the year that they weren't aware that you got bounty points for correcting a mistake on Wiki Tree. And if it was a relationship with a direct ancestor that was definitely bounty. Trust me, I gave those points out all year. There were enough people that knew that and they were getting those points, you know but sometimes we were just correcting what we had and, you know, we're not 100% correct. Just like my genealogy is never gonna be completely done Melanies is never gonna be completely done. You know, Wiki Tree is never gonna be 100% perfect but we just keep striving to make the accuracy keep up with the amount of new profiles and whatnot. I'd have a few empty spaces on my nine generation chart still. Yeah, she's leaning over in front of that part. I'd be leaning over on to how full it is. Yeah, that's my Slovenian line. And then, you know, with James Hannah it was fun and I do wanna say, you know one of the things that I left out is we did have so many people throughout the year and now for one thing, the Family History Library and I'm not gonna talk bad about them because we just absolutely love them to death but it's really difficult when you're doing a challenge like this and you have so many records that are locked away and every time you get a look at something it's like, nope, you gotta be at an affiliate or nope, you gotta be at the library but for the last two months of the year, you know, for this last part we've had people that could go ahead and look those up for us and made themselves available now like Melanie or Kathy that have done that for us but, you know, Melanie, this is what we did before as I go. Karen, we can't get at this. It's not accessible and Karen would drive to where her Family History Library was which was not open due to COVID. Well, big, you know, the original FHL Mecca here in downtown Salt Lake City. So that's really fun. You know, we took some selfies there and had to post them in the Discord chat. Yeah, and she'd sit in the parking lot and look the stuff up for us. We'd all be like, oh, wait, you're there? Let me give you some records. So we did have some challenges and we definitely had people going above me on with James Tanner. Of course, we had one of our members that wasn't even signed up for the challenge. She hasn't been signed up all year as Lutz and she went ahead and, you know, accompanied another member and actually drove to the courthouse and to the, you know, two different counties to where the records were and looked through it. And, you know, and then I did let Mr. Tanner know afterwards that if he wants more, there was more there. It's just that that was done at the very end of the week. And so, yeah, talk about a time crunch. But we have had so many people that have done those things, gone, oh, that cemetery's near me. Let me go look. I think I can get a photograph. You know, people have just gone above and beyond with what they've done for the challenge this year. It's incredible to see what our community does. I think it makes me think we should revive. We have a, like a genealogical kindness set of categories that aren't really used on the wiki tree. And it would be fun to have more folks just identify what region, you know, is local to them what resources they have access to that are difficult. Yeah, and I know, you know, we tried at one point trying to put things on. There's an obsolete page somewhere on wiki tree that was like, oh, I can, I have these books and oh, I have, I can go these places for you, you know, but there's just so many different needs on wiki tree. There's, and so many people that have their own resources, you know, that there's no way we could put it together on a page and make it meaningful. So then you kind of go back to using the G2G where you just have to go, hey, you know, hey, I need a German translation and Dieter isn't around, somebody quick, you know, and hope somebody's looking and following the German roots tag in the G2G, you know, but what a great resource pool that is to have the rest of the community just out there. Louis, yes, there was always a time crunch on Wednesday. I'll tell you a little bit of a secret, don't tell anybody, but in my instructions where I had to write things down, like in case God forbid, I knocked on when something happens to me tomorrow, somebody could do my job next week. One of the things I put was do not schedule anything for a Wednesday ever, because not only do you have the last minute stuff, but everything that can go wrong will go wrong on a Wednesday and you will just work your butt off trying to fit it all in and trying to get it all done. So yes, Wednesdays were always a crunch, always. Well, Nancy, that's something, you know, you're talking about the collateral families and the younger siblings, but that's something that will happen naturally on WikiTree and especially with the upcoming year and we've got these connectathons, we've got three of them this next year, you know, for those profiles where we just didn't have enough time to get all the, you know, we went down a rabbit hole and we started adding all the siblings and their spouses and everything, you know, those kids can be added later on and it's just another way to eventually improve our tree. What I think is really valuable is that anybody that's Heather Tree done, being able to go into the Discord after the fact can help you see like what maybe what hasn't been finished. It's kind of like gives you almost like a to-do list in a way, so that's something maybe we can see if we can maybe pin like almost like a to-do list after the fact if anybody had like, okay, here are the things we know that haven't been done or something like that, you know. I found that's helpful. Yeah, or the space page. Yeah, or the space page kind of like, hey, I didn't get a chance to add ex-siblings and all that too, but sometimes just going through and just seeing the flawed process helped me see, you know, maybe where there's more work to be done. Well, that's one of the things too that kind of ties into, you know, where I'm encouraging research notes. And I do and there's so many people that are awesome at them, but sometimes I see this conversation, conversation in Discord, you know, flowing and it keeps going and then you look at the profile later and there's nothing. There's like nothing written down. You guys, even if it's negative evidence, if you say I looked through all three of these sources or sites and there was absolutely nothing, write that down on the research notes. If you say I looked in this site, that site, that site for the marriage record and couldn't find it and then you find it later, don't go back and delete the other notes because the person that, you know, is related to that ancestor or the people rather that are related to that ancestor are gonna wanna see that and go, oh, well, that's why I couldn't find it there. It's not there. It's not just that I couldn't find it. You know, it's really not there and they wanna see that or they go, hey, I wanna try and find this marriage record on my own. You don't want them to go back through and spend all the hours that you've already spent on something and, you know, basically which is wasting their time because they should just be able to look for other resources. Now, Cheryl, are you with us? I sure am. Well, what did you enjoy most about the year? I learned a lot this year, just researching the different, like Germany. I have a lot of German families. I enjoyed following Dieter and what he was doing. Like I said, the Holocaust, that was very emotional for me. I just learned a lot. I gained a lot of friends with this challenge that I wouldn't have if I hadn't done it. It was just very fulfilling for me. Right. And I think, you know, we've all had that same sort of experience with it. We just, we've met a lot of incredible people if we didn't work with them before in a project, you know, we got to work with them this way. And it's just really fun. I think seeing the different resources everybody has and we all learn so much off of each other. You know, we all have our own experience and our own skill sets. So it's really good to be able to share it. It's kind of fun to be watching TV and you see CeCe Moore on there solving a mystery. And then you could say, I worked on her tree. And then she is on TV and she's solving a murder mystery and I worked on her tree. Yeah, and Kathy is bringing up an important point, you know, which was, and I know we have this several times throughout the year is, you know, we research, search our own trees and we want to do everybody. People are looking at, oh, well, how are we going to prove the great grandparents if we can't do the grandparents? Well, you can. And you know, you're more than welcome to put private notes in your own private computer, but don't put them out there online because, you know, we are trying to respect the privacy of the living people and many of them, their grandparents are still living, you know, or if their grandmother died, they're still siblings or if it was recent, it may still be painful, you know, and really that special close relationship is meant to be honored by the person themselves that stems from them, so which would be our guest star. So, you know, even if you're just bursting to go add the 12 kids, you know, or the deep dark secret you think you found out about a grandparent sibling, please don't, because I'll tell you what right now is sometimes I have like literally felt ill from it. I have to go and I have to disconnect those people and I have to undo that work because we have given our word that we will not work at the grandparent level and, you know, and we need to uphold that. But it breaks my heart to have to take some of these research that they put a lot of time in and take it back off the tree and I'm telling you it's just, let's just not, because I mean, yeah, we just need to save that for the guests to do their own information and share their own experiences, yeah. Yeah, I think that was a lesson for me to learn as well because, you know, so often now when I'm working on other lines, I might add anyone who's passed away more than 10 or 20 years ago. And part of it I learned when talking to someone else is that some of this is just their work to do. Like I can't hardly work on these lines without reaching out to other researchers outside of Wiki Tree who are working on them. And it's not my place to be, you know, talking to Claire and Melanie's second cousins and asking them all these questions about their family. You know, that's for them to do. Yeah, Steven, it is very phenomenal how much of an impact that, you know, that we can have. And I mean, this last year has just been so incredible. You know, I worked a lot with different projects before we started the Wiki Tree Challenge and with a lot of different people. And so that part of the interacting was not new to me. You know, and I knew that there was just so much available in our community as far as being able to reach out and get specialty help and, you know, get advice. But just watching how all of that has been brought together into this challenge, you know, and how people have expressed how much that they can do for others is incredible. And, you know, volunteering their time. I mean, this is all, I remind the guests, this is all for free. This is, you know, nobody's getting charged for this. If you have 35 people working on your tree, you got 35 people working on it for nothing. And they could be doing something else. So they're doing it because it's their own passion and, you know, out of the goodness of their own heart. We're not bringing the dog back, Chris. Yeah, we have two dogs over here that are trying to have some stand up. Yes, Luther. And we're gonna be ending here in a minute, but this is definitely our last live show for 2021. I'm sure you guys have seen the sign up for the first guest we have, which is Jimmy Wells in the new year. And that'll be on January 5th, and we're really excited about that. It's gonna be a little bit different, but you're also gonna see a lot of things that just really look the same. So, yeah, definitely sign up if you haven't done so yet. So are we ready for the big? I wish I had the physical trophy to show, but I don't, I'll do a drum roll. And our winning captain won from two different directions this year. And so that was interesting. Now, we had it, and if you read back through it, you know, I think some of us had something set in our mind and it wasn't necessarily what the intention was at the beginning of the year, but there were two different totals that were available. And there was either the total for the entire year or for that captain. So like Emma over her year had a total, Karen over her year had a total. That's where I got those top five totals. But also, if you look at the very highest scoring week, that one week that was the highest scoring over the year, this captain had that week as well. So they kind of won it from two different directions. And this person will be getting an actual physical trophy that we'll list off for each month, who, which one had the highest scoring week and who the MVP was for that week. And so that's kind of exciting. It's not going to just be, you know, their winning week, it's gonna have information for the entire year. And once again, they do get a physical trophy. So as soon as we can, we'll post a picture of that, probably in the G2G, so you guys can see it. And now for our captain of the year, this was Joan Whitaker. And that's off to Joan and her team. It was incredibly close with some of them. Emma, you were of course really high scored. Cheryl's team was really high scored. And so it was kind of a touch and go at the end there, but that's how it worked out. So congratulations again, Joan. Janet Weil was her assist this last year. Janet will be taking her own team for next year. So hopefully we'll see good things from that. And I know we're gonna have another fabulous year. Anybody else have anything they wanna add to that? Just lots of congratulations. Congratulations Joan, a job well done. And a job well done to all the captains. It's a lot of work that you put into it. And it really shows and another year's coming. So we'll see if Joan can keep her first place or if she'll have some competition behind her. So, but I think it'll be a fun year ahead and you have a whole new lineup of people that are gonna be coming in. Yeah, and I agree with that. There's still gonna be a whole other exciting new year. And who knows what it brings. Some of these week challenge weeks we're gonna go into not really even necessarily knowing a lot about them. Just looking at the few that I have looked at already. Some will be just like this year we'll have a good foundation of a start. But it's gonna be doing something else. We're gonna be making connections. I'm focusing on that instead of, you know, brick wall ancestors. So it'll be fun to see how this plays out. And I want to thank all of our captains. Once again, they worked really hard this year. Kept everybody motivated, kept things going. For all of the participants, thank you so much for putting your time into this week after week. Some of you guys have been with us all year doing this. Our MPPs, definitely and our specialists like Dieter, thank you so much. You know, we couldn't have done it without that specialized kind of help. Oh, and Betsy says thanks to Mindy for, yeah, I just kind of keep a little of everything going in the background, so. There's something we should add. Wow, just thanks to Mindy. There's the amount of work you put into this every week, you know, phenomenal effort and keeping everyone organized and getting your own hands into the research as well. Such an honor to get to work with you and to get to know you better. You're here and you put so much heart into it too and it really shows with everything you do. So I like to say a big, big, you know, thank you for everything you do, Mindy. It's been an absolute pleasure working with you on so many different levels and I think that, you know, this challenge wouldn't be what it is without your work. Well, I definitely appreciate it. I agree with everything you guys said. It has been an amazing, awesome year and I'm just glad that I get to share my passion with others while we do this. So I think we'll go ahead and say goodnight for the evening and you guys watch for us and January for that first challenge week, we'll be back. Happy new year. Happy new year.