 Thank you for joining, we're going to be going over the highlights for the Challenge Week for the DNA Chef, Mellie Alexander. Welcome Mellie. Thank you. And we have Mellie here with us, one of our volunteer researchers. And Celia is also on audio for us here, so I'm just going to go ahead and share my screen so we can get started on the highlights. We'll do that real quick, there we go. So just to briefly explain what the WikiTree Challenge is, it's our largest ongoing community event. Every other week, volunteers collaborate to grow seven degrees of connections for a special genealogy guest star. So this week is all about Mellie. So for the week we have what's called a free space page where we use it to collaborate on all your ancestors and your family out seven degrees in every direction that we could go. We use Discord, it's a real-time chat application to also do a lot of collaboration. So we'll start off. Let me take you first through an explanation real quick what CC7 is. You'll see us say that a lot. And it is basically a person's number of connections on WikiTree within seven degrees of them. So that's any type of family relationship, including relationships through marriage. So the degree measures the distance of relationships. Nuclear relatives, for example, parents, siblings, spouses, and children are one degree away. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, in-laws, grandchildren are two degrees. So they are connected through two relationships and so on. So that's how that works. So the higher your CC7 number is, the fuller your branches and the tree are. So just taking you to your profile on WikiTree. When we first started, the CC7 number was 660. And today you can see right here it says 2,245. So you got two new badges on your profile, the CC7 1,000 connections and the CC7 2,000 connections. And they were, we hit 1,000 connections pretty much the next day after the challenge started. It was like pretty soon. And then the day before the challenge ended we hit 2,000. So. Wow. Yeah, it's really amazing, really. So you'll see on the score sheet that we have, where we track, you can see all the, let's see, I think I passed the score sheet here. You'll see all the different WikiTree volunteers that worked on your tree. Okay. Wow. Yeah. So you can see we increased it 2,227, I think it's up a little bit more now just because people kind of still work on it. Okay. Even after the challenge ended and so 849 profiles were added to your tree. But there were already some people on WikiTree. So when a profile is added and then connect to one that was already there, then it expands even more. So that's why there's that big growth, the difference between how many connections you got increased versus how many profiles were added. Wow. So many people. Yeah. I got it. So a really nice graphic we have from an app that's available on WikiTree is called the seven degree or six degrees app. And what it does is it shows you in this graphic form, these are all the connections when we started within seven degrees. This is what it looked like. And this is what it looks like now. You can see it really jumped way up. Yeah. Well, when we first saw it for our challenge for American ancestors, I think we joke we can make this into some lovely, you know, some like almost like placemats and dishes or something. Think about that. You could have your CC7 on your, you know, your permanent dishes or something to keep with you. Put it on your wall. It makes me think of one of those braided grugs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's almost hypnotic, hypnotic, like looking around it. I mean, it's gorgeous. It's beautiful. I just can't believe that these are all my people. It's like, wow. Yeah. Yeah. And the more connections, the more profiles that are out there, the more connections that are out there, then those are places where other people can then come to WikiTree and connect in. Wow. My God. It's never a permanent number. It'll go up anytime someone wanders across and makes a connection. Yeah. Yeah. It's still gorgeous though. Wow. And then the next one we want to show you for a graphic is this is within seven degrees of you. This is the migration patterns basically of the people connected to you. This is where they all went. Wow. So this is a static image, and we'll get these images to you. But if you ever want to explore it, I'll send you the link for this too, but we have WikiTree Plus, which allows you to really delve into the database on WikiTree. Okay. So when I'm, I just put in, show me seven degrees of your profile ID here. And then if you click this WikiTree Plus map right here, that's what takes you to that map of profiles. So it's even a little bit different now because that snapshot I took of the map was right after the challenge ended. So there's even more profiles now. You can see all over and then with the WikiTree Plus, you can zoom in then into. I believe that that dot that's confusingly off the coast of Africa is an unknown or no location. Yeah. So that's not an actual. Yeah. But yeah, you can, you can zoom in with WikiTree Plus. You can zoom into these locations and really get down to, you know, street level basically of them. So yeah, it's a lot. There's a lot of tools that you can use with the, with WikiTree, the database. So it's a lot of fun to explore. I had no idea there was a map and especially something that's so interactive. Yeah, like delve into like specific towns or cities. I just, yeah, it's just I'm seeing, you know, a lot of the European ones and I'm kind of familiar with already, but to kind of get more specific towns would be really cool to really do more research with. So it's, yeah, it's incredible. Wow. I had no idea. Yeah. The red dots are birth locations and the blue dots are death locations. Okay. That's good to know. Yeah. Cool. I'm just like. Yeah. There's a lot, a lot of tools to play with on here. Okay. Yeah. It's like I could barely see it without my glasses because I'm on my phone right now, but yeah, I'll go into a bigger computer and like really play with that map for sure. Yeah. That's going to be so cool. Yeah. And we'll, we'll, like I said, we'll send you the link to that query so you can kind of play with it. Okay. Cool. So on the space page that we talked about, we have a section where we ask the volunteers to share, well, where are they working? Where, where did they go? Where did this challenge week take us? And so we have six provinces in Canada. And then we have a whole bunch of different countries. And we have 29 states. Cool. That it went to you. Yeah. Wow. Kind of a list version of what that map shows you. Okay. And then we have tell us, have, we asked them to tell us any interesting finds that they, they found out. And so there was a whole section on the different. Maybe one on social media. That was it. Yeah. That was really cool. By the way, I appreciate that Melanie. It's like, you don't want to take this webinar. Oh, that was, that was about my other subtle hint though. Yeah. That was so cool. So there's quite a few. You'll want to go check that out when, you know, when you have some time to spend looking at it. And then there's also a section for military profiles. So you can see that, you know, within seven degrees of you, those that served in the military. Awesome. So a couple of the interesting lines we wanted to share with you was the one that Melanie shared on social media about Yosef Gordon, your second great grandfather and how he was. So here's his profile. So you can kind of get an idea what that looks like. Wow. I didn't realize that was, he was a teacher. I had no idea that that's just. Yeah. At least when he came here, as far as we know, we don't know what his occupation was back in the old century, but at least when he came here, he taught, taught Hebrew lessons. So that's so cool. Okay. I don't think we can extra income in. Yeah. I don't know any Hebrew whatsoever. My grandfather did try to teach me before he passed away, but I don't remember any of that. Unfortunately. Yeah. Another interesting find was this gentleman, Edwin Pearlstein. He was an entertainment attorney. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So some of. Yeah. Some of his clients included Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx, Liza Manelli. Yeah. That was kind of interesting. And so on his profile, then is linked newspaper articles about him and then also more about who some of his clients were. Wow. Okay. I love Groucho Marx. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. So he is a spouse of your first cousin, two times removed. Oh, okay. I was like, how do I, how do you connect? I never heard of this person before, but okay. So if we go, if we go right up here to his, the menu option up here, you can just do connection to me. And then you just right now it's looking at me, but if you just change this right here to your, it will automatically fill with your ID for you when you're logged in. But we can go ahead and check that. Oh, I see. Okay. So there's the six degrees from you. Okay. That's really cool. Yeah. Wow. Huh. And then the next find we wanted to just share briefly was Samuel Rosenberg. He was the oldest voter when he died in New York. He was 106 when you passed. He had voted for Lincoln in 1864. No way. Oh my God. Yeah. That's really interesting. Wow. Okay. So he is related to you. Sam's daughter, Jenny, married your second great-grand-uncle. Let me put that in. Okay. Your ID just comes up now because I've done it so many times. There are different things. Yeah. There we go. Okay. Cool. Yeah. So that's fun. You can check your connection to anybody because you have several connections to each other. You can also check your connection to the tree now in different connection paths. Right. So Melanie and Celia did a lot of research and work and a lot with the Jewish research. So Melanie or Celia, do you guys want to talk a little bit about what you worked on or what you did? So you want to go first? I think most of what I did was just sort of moving stuff to the tree that others had found. But there was a lot of the Brodsky family. Okay. And we went through, we did a lot of, we did a lot of work and didn't get a lot of results. We went through a lot of various sources looking for them in the old country and just absolutely could not find them. We found the, we got a very clear idea of where they came from, found the actual town names on some documentation. I can't remember off the top of my head, but it's a couple places in Lithuania. And they all, a lot of them came from the same area. It was Vrbalis, Lithuania and little areas around that. And they just, they must not have digitized those censuses yet because there just was absolutely nothing on them, which was disappointing, but we did our best. No, I'm sure that whatever you found was great, especially if you could like isolate it in a particular area of Lithuania. Yeah. We definitely found there was, I mean, I'm not, I spent a little while now, so I don't remember exactly where all of our sources were, but we did find enough things like naturalization papers and that sort of stuff that, that spelled out what countries or what the towns were. And JewishGen.org has a really great tool that lets you just plug in a town name and it will, you can do a town name very vaguely because of course this is being relayed from somebody who doesn't speak English very well to somebody who has no idea what that word is and is writing it down blindly. So spelling can get really creative and they're really good at finding the site is still really good at finding the right places. We dig through something. I'd be like, I've never heard of this place and I'd plug in and they'd be like, oh yeah, that's like three miles from the last place you asked for it. I guess that feels really good to me that we are on the right part of the country and a huge amount of them came from that Revalis area. The Brodsky family and everybody that they married into and and all that came from the area. That's awesome. Thank you. I don't remember exactly where the Brodsky's are on your tree. Yeah, the name changed from Brodsky to Harris. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, but Simon Harris is his family. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so there were a lot of them and they married and one of them, one of my favorite things was one of the guys, one of the women married somebody had kids. She was a second wife. She had kids with him and then her, her youngest sister married his oldest son. And also had kids. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what? It was his second marriage. It's okay. Wait, I had no idea he was married a second time. No, no, it wasn't him. It was one of the, one of his siblings. Yeah, it was, it was a Rosa, I think. Okay. Her, she married Kaminsky and her younger sister married the oldest son of the, of her husband. Wow. Met a met a family reunion, you know. I almost had a heart attack for a second. I'm like, yeah, no, no, it's okay. I know. I find it badly the first time too. Okay. A little bit of relief. Okay. But even still it's like, you know, marrying into it again. Wow. Okay. I mean, I had my grandfather married three times. So, and, you know, there was a marriage that nobody knew about and I had to kind of find out by accident. So, yeah. And Azure, I worked and Mali, I worked on the Gordon and Malvin line and a little bit on the Levine as well. So I don't know if you want to turn over to that Azure. Maybe look at. So with, with Herman Levine, we at least were able to get lucky in that. And this actually find was, I believe, through Don Marie and another volunteer found the declaration of intention for him at least that listed where he was from. So a lot of the other branches from your family are really in the Minsk, Belarus area. And for Herman, at least we were able to identify that, you know, his, his talent, he was from was the acid, which I think is now the Ansqa. He was on the profile there. So at least be able to give you a little bit more info. We were just completely stuck on, could not find a positive ID on where he was buried and his death record. So that might be a follow up for you to look into that because that would help to see if what his parents names are listed to help you go back further. Okay, that's cool though. And we had more luck, I would say on Joseph Gordon and his wife, Maryam, who we identified her actually her name was actually like murky murky. I think by saying it wrong. Malben and there was a lot more on them and they also seem to be coming from probably the probably the Minsk area, it seems. So Azure, if you want to turn over to turn over to the Malben side. Yep. And if we look at, so we were able to at least go back on a little bit on her. And we noticed that there was also some intermarriage amongst the Grazowski family, which Mary, which Burke is a daughter Helen married to Grazowski and then her brother also married to Grazowski. So it's likely there is some connection there. And we got back to at least with Maryam's death record kind of identifying at least her parents name. So that is helpful and a confirmed brother. Oh, cool. Okay. So I think that was exciting. So there was a lot there. And even the kids were were named on the profile for Barnett Malben as well, which is one of their sons. Right. That sounds familiar. Okay. And then when we look at the her husband, the Gordon, so his, his name was Yosef. And there was, you know, that was the one with, that was the teacher that we mentioned. And we, you know, have his death record, obviously confirming his parents. And you have a Cohen line. So there's very much likely to be a lot more if you can take them backwards more via a little more info on exactly where, since you have that ancient priestly line going through like the Coens. So awesome. Wow. That's so cool. Yeah. It'll take a little time to flush out, but I think we had some good ties on some of the cemetery records. I think there was on some of these lines, there wasn't a lot of naturalization records. So then we weren't able to get as much, but there might be some clues, especially since you've done some DNA as well. Awesome. Yeah. Cause like sometimes I'll look on ancestry and just see third cousins and fourth cousins. And I see Collins. I'm like, Cohen's where is Cohen even coming from or Kaplan for that matter? Yep. Yeah. So yeah. So yeah. Kaplan was, was Joseph's mother's maiden name. And then the Coens was Merke's mother's name, Cohen. So that's where those are coming from. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Cause it was really confusing cause I'd never heard these names before until I started doing DNA tests and thinking, Cohen and Kaplan, that doesn't make any sense, but I guess it doesn't make sense now. Okay. That's so cool though. That's great. So Melanie and Celia, did your connection to Mellie decrease? I don't, I thought there was a slight change, but not overly. We didn't directly connect cause I have a cluster that goes into the Minsk Belarus area, but not directly that we connected. They might have known each other at some point, but it might have been a different schedule too. So hard to say. Okay. But yeah, I'd have to go back to the chart to see if our numbers went down or not. I think mine went down one. No idea where. Somewhere. Yeah. I think we got closer by two degrees. Let's see. Okay. Yeah. I just got the steps. No change, I guess. I thought it went down, but this is no change. But maybe that was just since the, we did have some problems with the spreadsheet. So it might not have captured. Yeah. Cause it was 22 when we first started. And now it says 18 on your profile when I'm looking at it. So yeah, it did go, it did drop. So that's cool. Cool. All right. That's what all those different connections gets you. You know, if you have multiple connections and there's different paths to, to people. Great. And of course we're ninth cousins. We're all related. You know, we have to go back. Maybe a long time, but you can figure it out eventually. You know, just calling everybody cousin. And I think it'll solve real peace right there. There we go. Yeah. They all connect somewhere. We do. We really do. And I think we need to be more aware of that. Yeah. I don't know. That's my tea sense, but yeah. But, uh, I think we're all connected. And we're all connected. We're all connected. We're all connected. But, uh, yeah, this is so exciting that I was like, all right, what are they going to find? What do I know? What do they know? Yeah. There was a couple of stories that we didn't put quite in the highlights though, but I remember I saw there was one of your relatives. I think it was. Let me try. Oh yeah. If, uh, Azure, if you go to profile Gordon dash 21657. There actually was a story I uncovered that made, uh, the news a couple of different places. Yeah. I'm sorry, Gordon dash 21657. I was going to type it in 75. So I'm glad I asked. Yep. So, okay. So, so yeah, so this is, uh, from a sister Dora. And when she was approximately 17, she might have been a little older. It was a little hard to say. Um, she was actually working as a bookkeeper. Um, and she actually, after coming back from the bank, she got robbed by three youths. I'm being, being nice there. Um, and she had no money on her because she deposited the bank and they, they roughed her up, but they, they caught them and they charged them and everything. But apparently it made a lot of the news, uh, nationally as well. Wow. Cause of that story. So yeah. Okay. It kind of gave us a little insight into who she was. And I think cause it named her address. Um, at home with her parents, I think that helped kind of tie that together a little bit too. Uh, she worked for an employer that helped manufacture, uh, naval uniforms. Wow. So thinking about, especially, you know, living in the Lower East side, a lot of these families were, you know, they were, you know, in Schmatte shops and other things. So that was a little more of a full on business that she was working for. So, okay. Okay. So she's, she seemed to, okay, you know, and then she married a few years later. So, but I, but it was just kind of a, an interesting story that kind of happened though. So interesting how you could find these stories, you know, you try to go to like newspapers.com. And sometimes it's really easy to find things. And then sometimes it's really difficult. Yeah. And that's where it actually came up though. I think cause, you know, a lot of it is really, especially I found with a lot of urban research, um, having a good idea of all the addresses, I try to list them on the profiles in wikichery, because I find that that's a really easy way to kind of know if you're having the same person, if they have a similar name, if you can tie the addresses together. So that makes a lot of sense. No, I appreciate that. Yeah. I know when there was one story that, um, happened in California, but it got reported clear to Australia. It was on Trove. Uh, this one, Ernest Wiley, he, uh, started out life in Massachusetts, migrated to California. And unfortunately the girl he was in love with was a little fickle, I guess. There's a whole newspaper, several newspaper articles about the story and his letters. Um, but he, he had an overdosed dose of ladenum by his own hand. So it's really a sad story. He was a very, I mean he was only 26 when he died. Oh my God. So just really sad, but it was, you know, they reported it clear to Australia. So we were trying to find out, well, is there Australia where there are family members that were in Australia or something, but we didn't, we haven't come across to me yet. So, but. Yeah, I know I have, I have cousins in Australia from my mom's side. It was one of my Campbell ancestors that left Canada and emigrated all the way to Australia. And I, Oh wow. But I should probably read about it a little bit more. Cause like sometimes I have a tendency to, to focus on my immediate family instead of cousins or aunts and uncles. And I know I, I should be more aware of looking at their stories too. Cause it's also part of my story. So I, and sometimes that in those collateral lines is where you can find some more information maybe about the direct, your direct ancestors too. That's really true. That's really true. Sometimes I just feel like when I do research, I get really overwhelmed sometimes. And so I become really laser focused, but I think that now that I know a little bit more about my family and that I could feel more confident about my resources, I could kind of relax a little bit and go, you know, maybe I should check out his brother or check out, you know, this cousin and kind of see their stories too. Cause they're still part of my story. Yeah. That that's, it's good to know that there are like these articles about my family and more resources and then stories that are fleshed out. So yeah, that's the thing I need to be more aware of for sure. And there are, you know, one thing that we have on wiki tree too, that not a lot of people know about is the wiki resource library, which is kind of a place where we've gathered together free books and resources that are online and kind of like made a library out of it. So that's linked down here to the bottom of the page too. So they're just a lot of great, you know, some resources that maybe people don't think about or know about. So that's another good thing about these challenges is that the learning opportunity, you know, I've learned a lot since I started working on these. So just from different people from across the world, bring in their knowledge and sharing. Yeah. And where we could, we also added research notes. So if we check something and we couldn't find something, we have a theory, we also put it in research notes too. So that gives you something to kind of pick up from as well. That's really cool. That's really cool. Wow. I just can't wait to play with that map. I know. That's a great thing. It is. I love it. I mean, when I'm flying cross-country or flying internationally, I'll get bored with the movies and shows. I'll have the map. Yeah. See where I am over the ocean. Yeah. That's like my favorite thing when I fly. So yeah. Yeah. Wow. Well, we had a lot of fun doing your week. We had, I think we had a total of, yeah, 38 participants for your week. You just had a blast. And I think that's all we have to share. Is there anything that you'd like to see or questions that you have? I know. I just want to thank everybody for participating and to kind of helping me flush out my family tree. I know like with my tree and ancestry, I put it in private just because I'm still kind of a private person. And also I don't want people to see what I have and it's not correct. I don't know if that makes any sense or not. Like if I know that my sources are correct, yeah, go, go, go at it, you know, have a field day, whatever. But, you know, sometimes when I would look at, you know, somebody else's record on their tree and I'll look at the sources and sometimes they're incorrect. I kind of get mad. Yeah. Kind of like, um, that's not right. I can tell you why, you know, like ancestry will say, do you agree with us? And I'll say no and they ask you why. And I'm like, I'm not going to tell you right now. But no, I, again, thank you all so much. I really appreciate all of your hard work. I just can't wait to play with that map. You know, read these stories and learn about my cousins and aunts and uncles that I really don't know too much about. Yeah. Well, thank you. I know that being private and having us do this was a great way to work together with you. And I just want to say that we are very proud of you. You know, I know that maybe out of your comfort zone. But so thank you for allowing us to, to do it. We had fun. I appreciate that. You know, at least I know you in person and I know Melanie in person. So it's like, OK, I trust them for sure because I know them. So yeah. Yeah. I've had my dream done too. And it's one of those like, yeah, you're, you're, we, we, we try to, you know, Showed you some different stories. I mean there's a lot of like just even just some of your collateral cousins We found a lot of even like them on the military profiles I'll say there were quite a few that had some really interesting stories of newspapers on there You want to take that, you know and just there might be one she didn't know about Because yeah, you had a lot of people I think in World War one World War two that were being called out as well Yeah, I can only imagine I know that my dad never served You know, he was around for the Vietnam War, but he never served for instance And I know that I've seen draft cards of my ancestors and my uncles and stuff like that I know I had one uncle That served the World War two and was killed in action. So and I know he had a purple heart And I think my cousin has it. I don't know he says he has it So we'll see but um, yeah, it will be interesting to kind of read more about some of the military profiles for sure Yeah, and and too if you have pictures of any of your ancestors There's a you know Definitely if you want to add them to we could treat we'd love to see their faces if you want to add them Yeah, I have some photos for sure. Yeah, and I'm still you know trying to get more family photos from sibling I'm not gonna name who they are I've been on their case for a while. It's like I Need to add I need to add a leak to the Wickey Tree 15th anniversary cookbook where you're you shared your grandmother's recipe Yeah, and yeah, it was It all brought back a lot of memories for sure And I was really surprised that it wasn't added in the the roots tech cookbook for whatever reason even though I know sure I was literally one of the first people that submitted a recipe through email I don't know what happened, but whatever Yeah, well, I'll be sure to add a link to her profile that goes to the page For her for that recipe that you submitted because we loved we love to have in that Thank you. Yeah, I know it's it's a fun recipe, you know, my grandmother wasn't the best cook But she had her moments and those were one of the recipes that was a big hit every holiday for sure. Yeah, it's great Yeah But yeah, thank y'all so much. I can't wait to start playing with everything in Wickey Tree and Yeah So yeah, and be sure to reach out We're all happy to help you find things or you know talk about what we found or anything so Yeah, there's always the discord chat if you can get if you sign up for it you can actually see your archive for your week I like seeing that when I did mine. So oh really and you'll be kept busy for a long time with this This will take you a long time to really go through and you'll never be done You'll always find something new that was added. So I'm sure I will and I think that's like the cool thing about You know joining a family tree is there's always gonna be something different something interesting something new Something I'm gonna be like, huh, that doesn't make any sense. But you know, that's why I have you guys. So yeah Yeah All right, well, thank you everybody for joining us for the for the reveal and thank you again Meli and Melanie and Celia. We'll see you around the tree. All right. Thank you guys so much. Thank you