 Hello everyone Merry Christmas Happy elfness. Happy new year. Happy new year That's right. Yes, we're on the second day of the new year. Yes 2024 happy eighth day of elfness everyone. Yes so You know there Murray has joined us excellent. We have a few people coming and joining us Uh, it is scheduled. Yes, it is scheduled for today noon. I mentioned that yesterday, but there I guess there was a little confusion But that oh, I mentioned it again at the end. You did mention again at the end. I saw that In the I was like, oh, let me go check the document and it wasn't I hadn't put it in And um, so tomorrow will also be at 12 noon. Okay all the livecasts on discord are listed at noon. So Yes, when it's out, we're probably here at 12 probably here at 12. Yeah, I can change the time and I will I have been when it Is better for the elf But but as you see you just have the three lead elves today Because the elf who did who did all the work for today's Is stanley baraboo or jerry baraboo. He goes by either of those so depending on When you met him or how you met him there, you can call him stanley. You can call him jerry. Um, we call him one of me He deals because he deals with a lot of french records But he is already double booked and he said he'd be getting trouble if he booked himself one more time right Don't want you to get in trouble So and I have invited the wishy, but um, he has not a rich life. So Uh, we will uh Wish he will watch after the fact hopefully Um, but let me Let me sing to begin. I won't forget now and actually I will I can even share my screen No hat today. No hat. I do have my hat. Wait a second. Let me get my hat on And I have so many things to so many things to remember Oh It was terrible. I know I I'm sorry. I'm on the west coast of the united states. I tried getting up I tried getting up, but I just couldn't couldn't I'm sorry I was nice to get up to a quiet household bill yesterday and do this Three lead elves are not Flesh and bone so I guess we're meat elves and I'm way Uh, yes, so um But uh, yeah, and thanks. Thanks also to betsy who popped in yesterday and held the fort while I had to go off and play at church and stuff. So There we go. So for the eighth day On the eighth day of elf mess two kind elves gave to me eight direct ancestors And again, you'll get the full the full Full verse at the end on the 12th day, which is going to be this coming saturday at 10 a.m. Eastern for three p.m. UTC but Uh, christine, would you like to read the wish again? Sure Uh, this wish says dear santa. I've been relatively good this year But I've also been too busy to add my stepmom and her family to the wiki I'd be very grateful to you and your elves if you could add her and some of her family darryl Harry nice And uh, kathy kicked this one off. Yes, kathy is going to say something about this Not only as I was going through the wishes thanks to the newsletter that we just got slammed with wishes um, it was It would be really helpful when you request a wish to make sure there is a profile for the person on wiki trees so that One of the three of us don't have to Try and see if there's one and if there's not one go and create it and this is one of the ones that I did create Thank goodness. I was able to based on some information um If I did not have that information This wish would not be for this day right, so Please I mean the wish might not even happen Yeah, right And honestly, there are some wishes that do not have a profile. Um, it's a common name Mm-hmm, you know, there was an elf yesterday that was saying hey, is there a profile for this person? No They tried They tried to look to see if they created it. Would it come up a duplicate? Nope didn't happen And there just wasn't information Enough information to be able to create the profile for this kind of common name So that wish is already Dead in the water as Some of us like to say because we can't do anything with it You need um, yeah And I would say if you even if you don't have the profile created If it's connected to somebody it has to be usually it's connected to somebody in your tree Give us the profile That you're working off of if you're looking for somebody's mother or father Give us the child's profile and then we can leave the research notes there Yes, I know we've had a lot of Requests for can you find the parent? Can you find the father the birth father? Or find the right person and as long as we have a place where we can leave all those research notes Then we don't we've got a starting point And and yeah, and sometimes when they're requesting Find a birth father or birth mother Because it does happen for some people Some of that can't be done without dna So we also need to know if if that's the case. Did you dna test? That also Many things are helpful And we do have an elf that has been working on the ones that are are needing the dna So I did check with that on the last day. Yes. Yeah to help That's good, but uh, you were able to get enough information. So we do have yes Darryl stepmon. So and her name was judy carol wyatt Um, and then she married perry, which was dylan's father uh, and so there you can see There was two two parents Two grandparents two great-grandparents two great-great-grandparents. So all together eight direct ancestors And the fact that elf kathy started this off and then elf stanley Uh, finished this off and added those eight Isn't that nice? We got two and then two to the exponent three to the power three two cubed A number of ancestors of direct ancestors. It's perfect for the eighth day of Christine you knew he was going to have to put some math in one of these Just what do you think you're like math free it just sneaks in right? There you go. Um, so You thought you had escaped um, but anyway, so this is the profile that uh kathy created uh for judy carol wyatt um and then She yeah Yes, sister. Uh, oh no, that's her. Um And there's nice little biography there Uh, she was born on the 24th of february in selma in dallas county, alabama Um, she was living with leon whitebud With her parent that's her her dad and uh her mother ida may And then she was mentioned in a memorial. That's her her gravestone right there So if you look at the dates 49 to 91 She was only 42 when she passed away sadly. That's so young. So young. So, um Yeah, that's too young. So she married She married joseph. She had two marriages one two marvin rape Personal and then in 1982 she married joseph and perry and at that point she adopted Joe's two sons rob and derral derral being the wischer wishy Um for this one. So and then so after they got married She adopted them. So that's how she has his stepmother that he was talking about in his wish but Look at those dates married in 82 Passed away in 91. It's only nine years later It's too sad now. It doesn't say what she passed away from my guess would be I don't know. I I shouldn't guess but um something tragic I would suspect No matter what it was tragic Accident or disease of some sorts. That's too bad I'm going to confess. I did not make this profile as pretty as this so Oh Well, we could um the elf did this because On the back end there's so much work that we have to do Yes So it was just kind of a bare bare bones as you can see all those changes were you created it Then elf stanley did a lot of the work there and then gerald did some more editing as well Yes, so Good the elf is getting the credit for that because Like I said for those that those that I had to create I just kind of did a bare bones and I know Another elf was saying well, why aren't why isn't this profile connected to anybody? um because this lead elf Was probably the one that had to create the profile for the other elves to have something to start with There we go. Okay Well at 300 plus profiles or wishes Um, yeah, we have a lot. There's a lot of work to do. There's a lot of work, but no, yeah The majority wishes did have profiles Yes, they did they did so we thank the majority of people who wish how we should maybe tell them how we do this Maybe we need to spread some elf secrets Yeah, so when we when we post the for the wishes Then we ask for your wishes we go through all of those and we try to find We read every single one. We remember every single wish We try to find the profile that you're trying to work from we enter that in our We have a master spreadsheet Which greg then at the end does some math magic Or something and it turns into the free space page that you guys are all working off of to To find the wishes that you want to work on there's a lot of A lot of coordinating behind the scenes coordination and and sometimes when you Make your wish Less is more Because I had gone to sleep I was all caught up on this spreadsheet because that I took that over this year and I wake up and thanks to the newsletter the wishes had Exploded by the time I got online and I was working in a way and And It's hard because like Christine said we read every wish so when you see like brick wall on the wish or What happened to or they want to find a death record or they find a birth record That's information that's in there. We have to pull out what The wishy is wanting so that we can classify it um And some of that takes time especially when you get the wishes that are kind of lengthy and it's talking about three or four different people then it's like You're confusing. Yeah, very confusing and and I'm very easily confused So that doesn't help but I I did ask if they could help and they jumped on and they helped with what they could so That was good Before we go into details about this one Yes Do we have my last count is 49 on the solve list And nine in the officially brick walled list Uh, but I haven't gone through that this morning So if you are working on the free space page and you have solved it feel free to edit That free space page and put solved in the heading beside the wish number Yes, and I will see it and then I can Pull that out. I can put it in the other list and Then I could look at it and we can talk about it in the live cast on saturday yet So, um, I'd like to go through and show off these eight ancestors That's okay. No, I'm glad you yeah, we we wanted to we need that other information there too But so judy's parents were Leonard Um And so now one thing I should say so stanley went through and added Those eight ancestors and I think he added some he added some other people as well um To the tree, but we're just for the number eight. We're just going to look at the eight ancestors and Stanley did a great job. He found he did all Great research found the genealogy for each of them sit parent sibling spouse. You can see here If there was military service he put details about that that was found In the records and also the memorial if he found a record on find a grave Or something like that and then all of course the sources are listed Under here now one thing that he didn't do when he set it up He set up all these categories biography narrative genealogy military service memorial for this one not all of them have a military service heading but Those are basically the ones but the narrative he left blank so that the profile so that someone else could come back and add that because You know, he was he was trying to get it done in time So he didn't uh, he left that part blank and then and just you know, put the meat and bones But when I was going through this morning, I thought, you know, it's kind of nice I like to have I like to have a little paragraph or a little information on the bio um, so I added the the narrative for many of these profiles but not all of them because i'm going to show you how I added this narrative at the end and um Spoiler alert i'm going to be using some of the tools that have been developed so I use the tools all the time So but anyways, so here's the narrative So i'm going to read the narrative because it's a little more uh, so he was born in august 21st in madison alabama Served in world war two and then military service below Details about that and then he got married in 1929. He was married in 29 in birmingham Before he went to world war two, of course had the three kids there judy being one of them The stepmother and then he died in 2004 at the age of 80 And has commemorated the jefferson memorial funeral home in alabama And his wife ida may Her Oh, I didn't do I didn't do um, I did not do the narrative for her But again, she was born in birmingham as well And passed away in alabama in trustable alabama So let me go back to uh, let's climb the the tree and check on his father Virgil was born and again born in alabama. So all of this is um Most of this takes place in alabama Um, virgil virgil was born in 1899 in alabama And married in 1920 And then died in 81 at the age of 82 So they lived nice long life. So that that's nice What we another thing we could add to these profiles, which um a couple days ago If they hadn't we're in the newspaper at all think of think of the The profile we saw a couple days ago with all those newspaper clippings and whatnot to um, yes, so that would even that would uh Paint an even fuller picture because here we're getting the You know the key points birth marriage death But we don't we don't and we know the number of children But we don't know a lot of the other flesh on the bone So it'd be kind of nice to add that too if we had more time Um But then again and then there's also a lot of profiles there Siblings that are listed that don't Look like they have profiles yet. Yes Yeah, that's true, right? Yeah So there's a good opportunity to put on the maintenance category Yes for profiles needs to be created for alabama. So let's see. What categories do we have? We have the birmingham color category the jefferson memorial gardens cat and a barn's name study category. So You're suggesting if there's a category You go into edit mode. Yeah, okay. Let's do that the Show the category picker Okay Do I go to add any category you can do that one or the one beside the citation button? You see the one with the uh, oh that one there Yeah, we can type any word a portion of a word. This is how I find my cemeteries Alabama and then needs and profiles And there you can see alabama needs profiles created There we go. You can add that and then at some point when we're doing a connectathon any team member who is Working on alabama can pull up this profile and add all those people that are missing. Excellent. Yes Okay That's great. And we have a connectathon coming up. So we happen to have one in a couple weeks Nice nice, um, so now Uh, when stanley added the profiles he state stayed on the mail line Uh, so let's flip back and there we have david's Uh, so now we're at the great the grandfather of um of um, the stepmother stepmother And here he he was born in tennessee. So we moved to tennessee Um, but he married mary martha and smith Uh, they married in tennessee, but then they eventually moved to alabama. That's where they had their children and then the rest of the children Um, the family from their onion, but here's one now I did this profile or this narrative this morning And when I was checking it one of the things that's one of the links That elf stanley had put in was the link to the family search page And on the family search page there are five sons of david and martha and Uh, but only two of them have profiles here So I did add a profiles needed created to this and there's these there's the three that are missing But I put their family search ids. So it'd be easy to grab to them. I didn't make it a hot link I should have done that too, but you know Someone else can come in and add that make those hot links or whatever uh but if we go up to the His father and this is the Not necessarily the end of the line, but the last one that stanley had done um You'll see this is what uh the profiles all looked like Um, so there's room for the narrative There's the person's full name and then there's the genealogy and the the facts basically right birth spouse list of children Now we don't have obviously see we only have one child profile so we obviously need more profiles created to to Get all of these children in um The entry from the east Census and then the list of the sources So here's what I did this morning when I went in and added the narrative I clicked on the edit button of course and Then I used So I I did a couple things so first um Oopsie Okay, I have No to the idea There we go. Okay, so this is my trusty little text editor Uh, it's called sublime text, but you can use any text editor I'm just gonna use this to sort of as a holding point to store some information because what I'm gonna do Is I'm going to first of all Go into biography and I'm going to use the auto bio Uh button So I'm gonna click on that And then got the little shaky tree. It's thinking about it and it's reformatted the profile Using some logic and and putting together in sentence paragraph form basically all the information But when it does that I mean it reformats it and you it's it's possible to lose some of the stuff that you've got there And I didn't want to lose any of the work that stanley had done So, um Let me just get back to here. See how that looks. Okay. Um, I didn't want to lose any of that work So what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy that all I'm going to put it in my Paste it into my text editor here And then I'm going to go undo auto bio So you might think well, what's the point? Why'd you do that? Why bother going through that if you're just going to Forget about it. Um and The reason is there we go. Sorry. Um The reason is because I like some of the stuff that it has the auto bio does So I'm just going to copy and paste the stuff I want And that way this currently right now, this is all jerry's work Or stanley's work wherever you want to call him This is all the elves work, right? And if I go to um Preview you can see there it is right. There's the biography Just his name narrative is empty genealogy the spouses the children All the stuff I showed you before so this is all his work But I'm going to copy and paste parts of the auto bio that I like So for example, there was needs profiles created it already figured out that that so I don't even have to go looking for that category tag Because it's already there Um, and then I'm going to take I'm going to take out this single line Bio and I'm just going to put the story all since he's already created a heading for the narrative portion of the story I'm just going to put it all underneath there And so I'm going to take this Copy all of this down until The death which is I think right there Now you'll notice when you look in the text editor There is all of that information is there so I could have done all of this manipulating back and forth inside The the wiki tree editor itself Um, but I didn't trust myself To do that so I wanted to make sure I reverted to the original one So that that's how I work, but you couldn't do it all the thing inside You just have to you know as long as you're comfortable with it with doing that that's fine, but With with a short period of time I didn't want to ruin I didn't want to risk ruining things so I That's this is the method that worked for me And so we've all done that so now let's look at the preview one more time to see if it looks the way we want it to So now there's the biography With just a narrative No, that's not exactly what I wanted. What have I done wrong? What have I done wrong folks? Let me undo hit preview narrative narratives empty genealogy. Okay, so What do I want I want to copy this Oh, I just I only wanted to copy this first first part of it. I copied too much That's what I did wrong And now There we go. We've got the three headings we had before so there's the narrative was born about 1836 in alabama married harriet newell baker their son was david and There's not another marriage entry there We probably don't need two marriage entries so I could probably take out that second one because it's probably a repeat Uh, yeah it is Okay so That's what we have So I'm gonna save that right now So that was step one of what I did this morning narrative added and we categorized something but there's the possibility that if we go to his um The space his place on family search there might be even more information And more sources that we can copy over So turns out here we are. There's james williams Wyatt, right? James william Wyatt 1830s Uh, and so here's his marriage. We already have his marriage record um Do we have Let's see and they're here. We already have the links also to this the census in the 1870 80 um Here's an entry For him in alabama deaths Now is that his death or one of his children? That's for one of his children. Yeah And I suspect the other one is as well but If we come across one that wasn't there so say the um, we wanted to add that What you could do is we could go to that entry that record entry And I did this for some of the other ones where It was just a shell and it didn't have the full marriage or it didn't have the death record I was able to do that. Um And so once I'm here at this record then I would use the wiki tree sourcer So open that up now. I know that's kind of tiny on your screen there I can't blow up I can blow up the screen But it doesn't blow up the menu that dropped down. So I'm sorry. I can't make that any bigger But what I I'm going down the wiki tree sourcer Um menu and I'm going I'm going to choose build narrative with citation. So I'm clicking on that And then I can go back to the profile And I can go edit the the narrative and add that line to the narrative and copy and paste James's daughter died in 1933 while you're in there greg. Do you want to do the secret santa stuff? Oh Yes, we should okay Where what do I what do I add? Where do I find that? That's it. So we need the secret santa category for 2023. Okay Can I just type secret santa? Yeah, yeah Look at that and then you want to put acknowledgments. Okay the bottom put your sticker at the bottom And there should be a sticker picker under the templates. I wonder I haven't Searched the templates too much, but there should be a sticker picker included. Oh Okay, um acknowledgments Is it a two or three? It's a double double Caps lock is on All And what do we say There was a brand and then just put the sticker Oh template Add sticker Secret santa profile, right? That should be the one In the year is 2023 even though we're in Update There we go Let's preview that There you go, there it is. Yep done. Done like dinner Yeah Okay, and there we go. So that's how I added to the work that Alf Stanley had done and he did a lot of great work So thank you for doing that Stanley and creating all these profiles and putting all of this in from like I mean, this is the main information, right that he's he's got the The primary information there. So plus the list of children. So we know Where which ones do we need to add and more Profiles created were needed. So that there you go good stuff So if you're curious at how many profiles have been worked on during the the secret The challenge look at all these These are all the profiles that have been done during the secret santa 2023 Just the ones that have had the category added just to the one. Yeah, there's others that haven't had the category added When you think about that, that's pretty amazing. Look at all these french john franches Okay, um Yeah, and if you want to go even more down a rabbit hole, you could click my connections and see How many you related to oh and some cousins some of these Oh, it's oh it's because i'm french canadian Oh anyways, um, there we go. I think we'll show is that is that enough for I I do want to point out when you use the autobio That there are times i've done it myself um Is that some people will leave? both The old profile plus the new one after using the autobio and just save it without deleting The old profile which throws up an error. Oh, okay So we like to try and keep errors Down to a minimum sure So but like when you have the the death of the child That's something that can be added to the child and if you have the needs profiles created category on that person Then what they can do is they can create that child if it's not there with that Death Information or if it's a birth you can do that. Um So i've done that where i've added You know the children in the list, but i've had a link to whatever source it may be as verification So when somebody does come along to add them that they have a valid source right there that they can just Kind of grab um I would like to mention Something that if you're researching an area In a certain time frame it would be nice to kind of Do a little bit of research and find out like the labels. I know canada has different Um like upper canada and the different labels as far as the country. Um, the history different historical periods. Yeah the history um In england one thing that i I always Clearing suggestions on is the united kingdom was not the united kingdom until 1801 So before that you need to use The country so scotland or england or wales and not the kingdom Northern ireland was not northern ireland until i believe 19 21 or 1922 Just like the united states was not the us until 1776 um We do have people that go through and clear those suggestions But anyway, we can prevent those in the first place It's it's nice and i know a lot of people just kind of use the drop down and just click whatever Look at the different choices you have please it is it is very easy People like greg and our other web developers come up with these apps to make life so much easier For us so we can do some things quicker and sometimes we forget That some stuff you have to do manually Sometimes so yeah Yeah And if you say you're gonna put a source on it by a certain day Please try to get back to that profile and source it Thanks for those thanks for those messages katty I know it's um, uh, it's important. Those are all important things to remember. Yeah Because we want wiki tree to be as accurate. Yeah as possible. It's free I know a lot of people are trying to get their information on wiki tree because it is free because they want that History of their family some place where anybody can Get to it. Yeah, so we just want to make our tree healthier and kind of starting off and like the Uh profiles you showed today, they are different than the ones from the other day that had the newspaper clippings and everything That's what makes wiki tree so unique is in that edit box. It's You can put whatever Text you want and I think that's the one thing that puts wiki tree a step above Say the other ones Well, and that's the one of the reasons I wanted to show that was the sort of the power of collaboration that Some wiki trees. They are really excellent at you know tracking down, you know The meat and bones and putting that together and that's that's their forte and that's all they want to do for a profile Which is fine. Yes, you need that skeleton before you can do anything else But then there are other wiki trees who love putting together crafting about now I use the tool for the autobio and I was yes, you know doing some some tweaking with it And I when I'm working on my own I do like to craft the sentences myself and tweak it But when you have that starter that does I mean that make that's that's a great starter because you can That can speed up the process a lot But some people like to craft their own and do wonderful jobs and those people are amazing So and we need all kinds and then there's others that go and add all the different bells and whistles with the The new people who are amazing at searching for newspapers. I'm not really good at searching I hardly ever come up with what I want the first five times But other people are amazing at searching at newspapers and find really interesting articles and stuff So it takes all kinds and that's and a lot of that is just where you are And what yeah, what area you research in when um, you were talking about that profile the other day And everybody you know all of these we're talking about all of these different repositories for newspapers I would never know that because I don't research in that area. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, so that's great. Well, we are going to be back here at noon tomorrow, uh, eastern time 5 p.m. UTC and um Well, I think that's 9 a.m. For uh in the pacific coast in the pacific time zone Very doable for me very doable. Yeah any time all the other time zones in between we will we will be here So we look forward to seeing you then and uh, have a great day And um, bye everyone. Bye