 Hello. Good day to everyone. Hello, everyone. What are you doing? Oh, Cathy. Is Elf Cathy frozen? Oh, no. You're having troubles. Anyways, welcome to everyone who are here live and in the chat and those who are watching this after the fact. Oh, now she's waiting. Cathy, you might have connection problems there, but anyways, if you drop out and come back in, I'll let you back into the room. Anyways, welcome to everyone and happy first day of Elfness. This is December 26th and it's the first day of Elfness, the 12 days of Elfness. Celebrating that here on WikiTree for the next 12 days. And so if this is your first time ever watching a WikiTree video, welcome and that's an interesting place to start. But WikiTree is a free genealogy website where genealogists collaborate and there's amateur genealogists like myself, some retirees, some people who work full-time and then also do genealogy on the side and they're professional genealogists and we all work together and collaborate on one world tree. And this for the two weeks between starting last Saturday and going for two solid weeks, we have a special project called the WikiTree Secret Santa. And so the 12 days of Elfness will be revealing one wish that a fantastic Secret Santa WikiTree Elf has granted to one of their fellow WikiTrees. And we actually have one of those elves with us. Margaret was one of the first ones to solve and so we are going to highlight one of the wishes. Now we actually have more than just one wish solved already and we're only three days into the project to the challenge. What's the count right now Christine? The last count I had was I think 13 but we're probably more than that because I didn't update it yesterday was Christmas. Okay, wow. So we are going to reveal all of the wishes and all the things on the final day, the 12th day of Elfness which will be on January the 6th 2024 next year. On a Saturday, the normal time when we would do the Saturday live cast which it was 10 a.m. Eastern time or 3 p.m. UTC. So join us for that and you'll see all of the wishes that have been solved and revealed then. But we're highlighting one wish per day during the 12 days. And for the first day, let me lead on into. On the first day of Elfness a kind elf gave to me, a dad's family on WikiTree. So with that Margaret solved a wish and she provided a dad's family to someone. So Christine can you share with us what that wish was? Yes. So one of our WikiTrees, Lisa Murphy, had submitted a wish for everybody else who's following along. It's wish number 24. She said, I'm very hopeful that Santa or his helpers can help me find more and extend the family for Sarah Melissa Winchell and her husband Christopher Lorenzo Horning. This has been a nightmare of a brick wall. Thanks in advance for even trying. That's great. Yes. So yeah, I had it up here. So let me share my screen and I will show you quickly what Margaret was able to do. And then I'm going to turn over to Margaret to share. So there we go. So here we are the first day of Elfness. There's a little jingle in case you want to write it down so you can sing along with me in future days. And there's the wish. And Elf Margaret here was able to extend the family of Christopher Horning. So he was the dad of nine children and added his parents, brothers and sisters and some spouses and nieces and nephews. So let me just show you what that looks like on the family tree. So here is Christopher and his wife, Sarah. And the wish was for her to extend one of the, at least one of them. And Margaret's going to talk. She's actually done some work on Sarah's side as well. But we're going to focus on the Christopher side. So the dad of the family, she added his parents. And then she added his siblings. So along with their spouses. So oldest sibling, Anna Maria, then Jeremiah. And then he had two younger siblings, Nelson and Eli. And Nelson and Eli, she filled out not only their spouses, but two kids each. So that's a lot of work, a lot of profiles added there. And that's a nice addition for that dad's family. So thank you very much for doing that, Margaret. And why don't you share what you did and how you got that? Because I think as genealogists, everyone who's there in the chat will be curious. Well, okay, I'm going to share my screen with you. Okay. So I apologize. That's okay. Margaret, unlike me who has a laptop and two extra monitors, Margaret has to do everything on one single screen. And that's hard to do. I've had to do that before. And it's very restrictive. Only working on single screen. There we go. Okay, here is William Horning's profile. Well, let me get to his son Christopher. Here is Christopher's profile. And you can see he was born in 1824 in New York. And New York's a fairly big state, but there was some clues and some hints here. I could see that in the 1850 census, he was living in Alabama, Genesee, New York. And I thought, well, I wonder if he has any horning relatives in the near vicinity. So I pulled up the 1850 census and tried to determine, I was going to look 10 pages before and 10 pages after to see if I could find any other hornings in this county. Well, on the exact same page as Christopher lived an older man named William 50 years of age. And then I noticed that there was another young man, I believe it was Jeremiah, and his family also lived on that same page. So I thought, oh, that's that's pretty interesting that here's this man, the right age to be Christopher's dad, and possibly a brother. So I decided that I would focus on this William age 50. The first thing I did was I looked in wiki tree to see if he was already on wiki tree, and he was. He was an unsourced profile and he had, again, he was an unsourced profile and he didn't have a profile manager. So I adopted him and immediately started working on him. I don't know much about New York research. So I went to Family Search wiki just to see kind of what was available for New York. And then I also went to Ancestry to see what records they had for New York. And I quickly found out that for Genesee County where these people were living in 1850 had lots of records. And so on the Family Search when I pulled up New York records, this is what they had for probate. It was every county. And here's Genesee. Okay, so Margaret, we're still only seeing the page that says William Horning. You're seeing William. Okay. Yeah. So if you show your entire screen, we'll see or just share the different tab that you're pointing to. That'd be great. Yeah. Well, maybe I'll just talk through it. Okay. It's hard to navigate. This is Margaret's first time on the live cast. I was so impressed that, you know, this rant, you know, that she accepted the invite. So keep on going, Margaret. You're doing well. I'll just talk about it a little bit then. But I did go to Family Search. I think most people that are elves are familiar with Family Search. And I went to records and I hit New York. And so when I pulled up the New York records for Genesee County, I realized for probate records, they had a tremendous amount. And the very first record at the very top was probate records for the around the 1850, 60 time frame. So I looked through that and they did have an index at the front. And I quickly found this William Horning. And I looked at it and I would like for if you can to go to the profile and look at it because I did put a picture on the profile. These records are not like Genesee records or Alabama records. These are fabulous records on the probate where they are announcing his death. It actually gives his date of death and it gives the place of death. And then I scrolled down and I noticed it gave his heirs. And one of his heirs was Lorenzo Horning of, I can't pronounce that word in Michigan, but anyway, it named him in the state of Michigan in that county. And I was like, here he is. There he is. Can it be that easy? No. And so there he was. And so then I went back and it had his other siblings listed on that same probate record. Now, Wim didn't have a will. He only has a probate record, but it has so much valuable information. So with that information, I went back and I was able to discern who the other children were. And I started working them out. And I went ahead and connected this profile instead of doing it on a space page because, A, Wim already had a page on WikiTree and I just adopted it and I completed it. And I don't know where I'm going to be on January 6. I could be deceased or anything. So I just went ahead and connected this. Oh, you never know, you know, I could be anywhere. And I want to be sure that the profile got connected to his son because, you know, he's the same name. And the really cool thing about this was I started studying where these folks are buried. And if you pull up this profile, I created a cemetery for this family, Alabama Cemetery in Alabama, Genesee, New York. And as I started connecting these people with their find a grave memorials, I've got a nice little group of people that this Lisa, she can come back to and probably look at that and see her connection to all these people that I added to that cemetery because they're all related to the horning family. So I thought that was pretty cool. That's another one thing I like about wiki tree is when you are doing, I do big research, I don't ever just research a person, I tend to research communities and groups of people. So as I started researching this group of people, they're all in this one little cemetery. So that's how I found Lorenzo or Christopher Lorenzo's dad and mom because his mom is there too, Magdalena. And again, she already had a profile. She already had a surname. I just adopted her and connected her to Christopher also. Nice. So that's pretty cool. We gave dad a dad and a mom. That's great work, Margaret. That's fantastic. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. Wow. Christine, Kathy, do you have any questions or comments you'd like to ask Margaret? Does Margaret want to talk about his wife? I can. Her name is, I think, Sarah Jessie. And I forgotten her last name. I apologize for that. But anyway, she, I started looking for her parents. Lisa has a dad connected to her and Lisa may be a thousand percent right on who the dad is that's connected. But I didn't just see that right off the bat. So I used my same methodology that I used on William to see if I could find who I thought might be the dad. And so, and I haven't connected this family because again, that's up to Lisa, if she wants to review the research and decide which one is the correct dad. But I found a guy named Samuel L. Wichell. And I really liked Samuel. I've kind of fallen in love with him. He, from 1840 through 1850, he lives kind of guess, guess who he lives next door to? Oh, he lives right next door to the Horning family. Nice. And so he's like in 1840 census, I think he's two pages away. And he's always a couple of pages away, but definitely in Alabama, Genesee County, New York. And his family is basically from Montgomery County, I believe in New York. That's all in Western New York. But anyway, so they were all right there. And I started filling them out. And I can't remember, excuse me, I'm so sorry. I can't remember if I don't think Samuel had a, I can't remember if he had a page or not. But anyway, I haven't connected him to this family, but I've linked him and put research notes for Lisa. So she can read all my notes and she can go in and look at the census records and guess where this family is buried. Same cemetery, right? Alabama Cemetery in Alabama, Genesee County, New York. So you know, in 1830s and 40s, you didn't go across the state generally to find a spouse. You generally got married. Yeah, it was somebody you met at church. It was somebody you met at school or they're in the neighborhood. And Samuel is a blacksmith. So I can see where he's probably the neighborhood blacksmith. Now there are 33 blacksmiths in Genesee County in 1842, but Samuel is one of them. And he also here, his son one does some mentoring because they have some blacksmiths in their family, like boarders who are blacksmiths. So I'm like, oh, they're learning this trade. And Samuel has a son named Lyman who served in the Civil War. And so I found some information on him. And I added that to his profile. He served with the 19th industrial something. I can't remember. But anyway, he served in a New York regiment and his papers say, you know, he is from Alabama, Genesee County. And he's born in Orleans County, which is one county up north of Genesee. So he's, you know, he's in the neighborhood right there also. So I put his family, I think there's some other siblings, but I couldn't firm them up as well as I did Lyman and his family. And then Lyman dies in 1901. And right before he dies, he and his wife, they deed some land to a person that was in the newspaper. And as I looked down that newspaper, it mentions the heirs of Samuel L. Winchell. And I looked and looked, I went even to 1901 looking for some probate records. I couldn't find a great probate for Samuel. But there's a deed out there somewhere. So I'm going to put that in my notes that that and I've looked on family search and all around and I cannot find this deed. But the deeds are there about 1901. And that might actually list the exact heirs and put Sarah Jesse as a name with her family. But that was pretty cool. That's that's fantastic. Wow. That's that's great work. Really neat stuff. It was fun. Yeah. I'm really not quite done. I'm still, you know, a question about a little bit. Doing a little few other little things, but the rabbit hole is very deep. Exactly. That's a good word for it. It is. Yeah. I just wanted to highlight some like some of the things that Mark was just saying about research notes. So she's put research notes on, I think, every profile or almost every profile that you've worked on in this several of the primary people. Yeah. So that's what all of the Secret Santa Elves are doing. They're adding the research notes. So even if your wish isn't actually solved completely, there'll be research. There'll be research notes. There'll be lots of things you can investigate. And judging by just the depth that Margaret has gone into, I think Lisa has like a whole year's worth of work to have a fun investigating and connecting and and stuff. And we're looking forward to, you know, seeing what other people do. So this is great. Thank you so much for coming, Margaret. This is great. Thank you for asking me. I've enjoyed it. No problem. No problem. Maybe you can become another regular and join us again. But we do have, we've got a nice lineup for coming up. Tomorrow's live cast will also be at 12 noon. Now, because we have Elves from all around the world, the time of the Elf mass videos will not necessarily always be at 12 noon. The one for tomorrow will be at 12 noon. But we do have some Elves that are in Europe. And so for those, we might move the Elf cast a little earlier in the day so that it's just sort of mid afternoon for them and not, you know, super late at night. And for those who are working Elves from Australia, New Zealand, we might make it a lot later in our day. So it's in the morning when they, so it's not in the middle of the night. Like we don't have to get up at 2am online. That would be just rude. So we'll know at least the day in advance of when the next one is. So I can tell you now that for tomorrow, the second day of Elf mass, our video will be at 12 noon. And I won't tell you who it is. And I won't sing you the jingle, but you'll have to come back tomorrow to hear us to hear what it is. And thank you for all that came that came out. Thank you for those in the in the chat who joined us live on YouTube and those who are watching this after the fact. And we'll see you tomorrow for the second day of Elf mass. Bye. Bye.