 Oh, there we go. Hey, everybody. Hello. Sorry for the brief delay, but I think we're pretty much on time. It was a struggle getting here. I'm glad, after posting the wrong time and a number of other things, we got here. So I'm David Randall. I'm your tour guide for the 15 Nations Global Tour. And Aowyn is not feeling so well today. She just got back from Rootstack. So she wasn't able to join us, but Julie Ricketts is here in her place. And we've got quite a bit to talk about today. I would like to know from the top. Oh, good. You must have had some successes. Yeah, we did. Surprises. We were surprised. I was surprised. I'd like to know from the people that have tuned in, though, if you could post a note telling me if you've been part of the project already or if you are new and just turning in for the first time, perhaps. And if you are part of the project, I'd like to know what countries you've participated in. That'll give me a little bit of a guideline as to which direction to go here. But let's start before we get into summarizing Ukraine and announcing our next country. I want to touch base a little bit on some things that happened over in India and Argentina. For those that don't know or are not aware, we do keep our nations open indefinitely. So even though we're working on Ukraine right now, you're free to go back to India and Argentina at any time and continue. One of the things that we've done is add some more notables to both of those projects. So if you are feeling like a particular country just isn't doing it for you or you're stuck and you don't know where to go, you can always go back to one of the countries you enjoyed and do some more work there. We added 50 notables to the India project. And all of those notables have connections to the original 15. So that was pretty amazing that we had that many. And I think I'm going to be adding another 20 or so notables who again are already connected to the first 15 that we chose. So that's interesting. And they go all the way back to close to the 1700s, all the way up to some living profiles that we've connected. For Argentina, we did not have so many individuals who were connected to the original 15. So I picked another 10 important Argentine figures who, like our original 15, have no connection to anybody. They're blank profiles right now other than the work that some people have done over the last week. So those are people, again, they're important figures in Argentine history. And it would be great if we could, if not get them connected to the global tree, at least get some profiles developed with a few connections. The two countries were very different in their, in our experience in the two countries were very different. But one of the things that was probably the most different is that India tends to be very insular, meaning that the families did not move very far out in their local communities. So unless we have people already connected from those local communities, it's going to be very difficult to make connections. And we didn't make any connection to the global tree there. With Argentina, I mentioned in a previous talk, after the United States, Argentina has had more immigration than any other country in the world. So they have a few. In fact, I think it was 95% of their citizens have ancestry from somewhere else in the world. So that made it easier to do some connections because we weren't, again, working with an insular community. And we were able to connect, I think, seven of our 15 people to the global tree. So Ukraine, and then let me look down the list here real quickly and see what people have posted. We've got a couple new people, which is great. Hopefully, you'll find something of interest here and maybe join us for our next adventure. So you have a few more people who have trickled in. If you want to ask them the same question, they might be able to answer that question. The question was if you would just post, if you're new, if you would post that so that we know. And if you're not new and you've worked with us previously, I'd like to know what countries you participated in. Again, that'll just help me kind of guide the conversation a little bit. So that's India and Argentina. And if you recall, we had probably, we added about 250 profiles to India and we added over 500 profiles to Argentina. So that was really amazing. Ukraine was quite a different experience altogether. I was nervous putting it up in the first place and that nervousness didn't go away for about the first week and a half because we really had a hard time getting off the ground. Ukrainian records are not easy to come by. We had to use a lot of alternate sources. But once we got going and we had a few people who really stuck with it and dug deep and we kind of got the ball rolling, the last week or so, we've done some pretty amazing work. We have a grand total of 144 new profiles that we were able to connect. That's amazing. Yeah, and that took, again, I think after the first work, the first week we were at like 30 profiles or something. So it was really tough figuring out how to get this going. But once we figured it out and got some things going, and again, we had a couple of people that just really didn't give up. But I've mentioned this each time and I think it's really important. Counting the number of connections is one way to keep score. It's an easy way to keep score, but it's really not the only way that we measure success. The idea of this program is to bring awareness to countries that have been overlooked and passed. So whether we make connections or we just build up the profiles and get the resources up there, kind of do some beautifying of the profiles, that in and of itself is a win. And for me personally, I have learned so much about these three countries that I did not know. And Ukraine in particular, it's just been an amazing journey. We make a lot of metaphors to being on a global tour. And this was actually very much like being on a tour to Ukraine and learning about the history and the people. And I grew up during the Cold War, which as many of us probably did. And all I really knew was Russia bad, U.S. good. That was kind of the summary of as a kid, what I understood. But going back and learning about the history and how it impacted real people and families and the genealogies of these people. To give you an example, the very first person on our list, I wanna pull up his name here so I can make sure I pronounce it correctly, Mikhail Khrushchevsky, I believe is how it's pronounced. He was an intellectual, a philosopher. He was a playwright and a poet. During World War II, a number of his relatives were killed fighting the Nazis, particularly when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. But after Germany had been defeated, things got even rougher in the Soviet Union for a lot of people. And the vast majority of the men in his family, because they were intellectuals and because they were outspoken, they were rounded up and sent to the gulags, where they died, almost all of them, almost all of the men. There were almost no descendants in this family. The women were left to struggle raising their kids and that a lot of the women were intellectuals themselves for whatever reason, the women didn't seem to be sent away like the men did. But the women were notable figures in and of themselves. They primarily carried on the work of their husbands once their husbands were gone, published their works and kept it going. That's really sad stories there. We had another couple of women. Tamara Press and her sister were Olympic gold medalist, but they were, well, their father died when they were young girls. And their mother then went to Moscow and enlisted them in what was called a gymnasium and they were raised to be athletes. In, you may recall this, if you were around during the 80s and before, there was a big scandal that the Soviet Union was either using men disguised as women in their competitions or providing them with steroids and boosting up their strength to compete. And Tamara Press and her sister were both accused of that as being, initially as being men in disguise. And later it was determined it was more likely that they were heavily pumped up with steroids. And their careers were then ended, but these were young girls that fatherless were sent over to the state to be raised. And that's just, that's what they were, was kind of pawns of the state to win gold medals. So again, just another really kind of tragic story. There were a few elders that we heard about that were just, one of the things that was really interesting was when you look up about these different celebrities, even movie stars and singers, it's really hard to find anything on even their immediate family. Who was their wife? Who was their kids? And this is kind of my estimation of it is that back in the Soviet era, the Soviets weren't interested in who your family was in your personal story. They were interested in you winning gold medals and being the first into space and all those things. And who your parents were and how many kids you had was irrelevant. And if you even think about the Soviet leaders back then, we never knew who the wives of the Soviet leaders were. And even today, how much do we know about Putin's family? Almost nothing. Our presidents know every detail of their family and every little scandal and misstep that they've taken. They're family pets. Exactly. But the Soviets just didn't publish that and I think some of that's lingered to this day. The Ukrainians have done a significant job of separating themselves from the Russian and the Soviet history, but that family, the damage to the families is gonna linger for a while. So it really, these people were, they had their identity was based on their profession or their success, but not on their backgrounds, who they were, where they came from or not. So doing genealogy is therefore a challenge, but once we got through that, it got a little better. And I think today things are improving. You'll have to excuse my phone, it's on the other side of the room. But anyway, so that was the challenge, a real challenge that we had in making the connections, but the fact that we now have under and almost 150 more profiles up on Wikitree, at some point somebody's gonna come along and make further connections and hopefully our Ukrainian friends who may be just located at the moment, but once things settle down, we'll be able to get on and see that they're represented here. And that's really what I'm most proud for this project that we've got going. So let me see if there's anything else I wanted to address with. Oh, and one of the things, when I gave that 140, 150 profile number, one of the things, there's actually two things that we have to keep in mind there. We did make one connection, I forgot to say that after talking about how we couldn't make connections. We did actually make a connection with Lisa Ukrania, who was a poet and a playwright back in the late 1800s, early 1900s. She had some family that immigrated to Canada and we were able to, I believe it was Canada, but we were able to connect her through her, through her immigrant families that immigrated west. And so that was great. So we did get one and we've got another one that we're working on, that's why I said I might have been in Canada because there was another one who had come really close to connecting and I think we're gonna connect him at any moment, but that was Nazari Yaromchuk. He was a singer, really a huge pop star in Ukraine, died in the 90s, but he's got three children who are pop stars currently in the Ukraine and a number of other families. And he had a relative who moved to Canada and we've made some good progress with the Canadian relations. Haven't quite gotten connected to the tree, but the family is expanding enough that I think we may actually do that. So that's two out of the 15, that's not bad. But what I wanted to say regarding the numbers is there's two things that distort those numbers a little bit on the low side is one, once Lisa Ucrania was connected to the global tree, I can't keep track of connections anymore because at that point, anybody that is connected is gonna be a relation. So the count stops, I still counted 35 relations that we got before she was connected, but I have to stop counting at that point. And then the other one is we found a lot of, Ukraine only became a country in 1995. So their history, they don't have a lot of old time notables because those people were Soviets, they weren't Ukrainians so much. They might have been born in Ukraine, but they consider them Soviets. I had a few of those on there, but most of the ones, the result of that was I had to pick more recent notables. And the result of that is that they have a lot of living relatives. So for a lot of our notables, including the current prime minister, we found a number of living relatives, but we did not create profiles for them because they would have been locked and they didn't have any purpose. We probably have about 15 relatives for the prime minister but we have zero new profiles attached because they were all living, his wife and his children and so on that are not considered notable in the level of themselves. So if we had created profiles for those, we'd probably be a lot closer to the 200 mark we've discovered members. So anyway, I just wanted to point that out that the 140 number is probably a little skewed on the low side. Now, if we needed one of those living relatives to connect a non-living relative, we would have created the site, but unless it was me, there really is, there's not really a point to connect a profile that nobody's gonna be able to see. Okay, so are we ready for the big announcement of where we're going next? I have a little comment from Lisa Grovese, if you wouldn't mind. Yeah, if you want to read that for a minute. Let's do that first. Sure. So hold off on that one. So Lisa said that she added a bunch of people in Canada who were from, I'm gonna say Bukovina, Austria, which is now in Ukraine. So I don't know if that counted into your total or not. It may. So one of the things that, well, there were two things that were a little bit interesting this time around is first off, one of the issues that we talked about in our introduction to the Ukraine was defining what is a Ukrainian? Again, I mentioned a lot of these Ukrainians who actually consider them Soviets, not Ukrainians, but the borders of Ukraine, Ukraine as a people, Ukrainians as a people have been around for 1,000 years, but their borders have changed and the country itself has disappeared and reappeared. So we have people that are born in Poland or born in Austria, that considers themselves Ukrainian or are now in Ukraine. What I determined for choosing our notables was that they were born within the current boundaries of Ukraine, regardless of the country all at the time. So we did have some Polish and Austrian families. The other thing that was different this time around was I had a lot of people check in and ask about posting their own Ukrainian families as opposed to working on the notables. And that was perfectly fine with me. The project itself is about connecting notables, but we also have, oh, she's got her dogs. I do, I'm here. I'm back. We just heard a loud scream on the... Oh, that was the door. I'm sorry, it squeaks a little. My apologies. But it was perfectly fine if people wanna work on their own families. Again, the idea was to get a bigger footprint for Ukraine on WikiTree. So if you can add your own family and get them up there, that's great. And it gives us more opportunities for connecting. So I have no problem with that. But we had a lot of people, a number of people asked about putting their own family up and that's fine. And you can use our resources we have with each of our countries. We have a resource page. Some of them are a little bit more detailed than others. Some have, again, most of these countries are not known for their genealogy, genealogical footprint, I guess you'd say. Argentina actually was. Yeah. India or Ukraine in our next country. Yeah, Argentina has a big genealogical society and a lot of records online. They're not connected typically through, I didn't see them through, say ancestry and find my past in those, but they have their own programs down there. So that was pretty cool. So anyway, do we have any other questions we wanna hit before we move on? I see my phone. I didn't notice anything. We had Lisa again, she said the people in Canada were connected to Ray Ramon or I'm not gonna try to pronounce that. So she's kind of serendipitously came across that. When I introduced the Ukrainian project, I'd read these names but I hadn't actually said any of them out loud. And when I started to try to pronounce them, it was a little embarrassing actually, but once you get- Yeah, I get it. There's kind of a flow to them. If you kind of break them into their syllables, they're actually not that, I would say. The one thing that we find is that as here an HN, we don't make that sound in American sense. Exactly. So is it a silent age? Do we pronounce it? You know, that's interesting. And in our next country, I don't know if this will give you anybody a clue, but our next country, we're gonna find a lot of names that are spelled with an M-B, which is a weird name, yeah. Oh, I think I have an idea of the continent we're going to. Yeah, okay. Okay, well, no reason to delay the suspense any further. For this next three weeks, we are going to be going to Kenya. Yay! Like in the heart of Africa. Fantastic. Kenya, and in a moment, we'll pull up the list of notables and I'll tell you who we're gonna be meeting there. Kenya, I'm kind of excited about this. I have a feeling it's not gonna be as hard as I initially thought it might be after doing a little bit of preliminary research. Number one, Kenya used to be an English colony. So a lot of their words are based on English system. They speak English in Kenya. So the names are not real familiar, but at least the alphabet is familiar and the pronunciation isn't that hard. And we can read their documents. I didn't find a lot of genealogical resources online at Ancestry or FamilySearch, but there is a lot of information I think we'll find through online biographies, obituaries, newspaper articles, that kind of thing. A lot of them seem to have well-documented families. So it's just a matter of finding them and getting it. And I see a comment here that the Obamas should be there and you're absolutely right, except for the fact that the Obamas are already fully developed on WikiTree. So we didn't add them to our list, but the Obamas are a fascinating family in Africa and there's actually a free book you can read on Google Books that's all about the history of the Obamas in Kenya. So I would absolutely have put them there, but again, their tree's already pretty much fully developed so that didn't work within our needs. The other family that I was really hoping to put up, there were the Leakies, the anthropologists who discovered all kinds of early primitive fossils on that, but they're already fully accounted for on WikiTree, so we missed out. Let me pull up, let me just a second here to pull up the list of notables. And okay, so if you wanna get a jump start on this, if you go to, I don't have any links posted yet, but if you go to any of our other nations and up in your address bar, you just change the name from India or Ukraine to Kenya, you can get to the webpage. And if not, I'll be posting the link shortly on GTG. Okay, let me, I'm still kind of new to figuring out the thing here, so there we go. Okay. Screen sharing, or do you need to share your screen? Oh, there you go, you got it. Okay, you see it? Yep. Okay, so here we are. This is our list of 15 Kenyan notables. The very first one is Jomo Kenyatta, and he was the very first president of Kenya. Kenya gained its independence in 1965, so very much like Ukraine, they've been around maybe 30 years longer, but most of their notables are gonna be more recent. You know, unlike, say, England or France, that you can go back to 1500s or even the Middle Ages and find famous people, you didn't have, you know, in the 18th century, you didn't have pop stars and sports figures in Kenya, so they didn't become fully integrated into the modern world until closer to the 1900s, and so most of your figures are gonna be more recent. And that's the one challenge that provides is that you're gonna have a lot of living family members, as opposed to somebody that was born, you know, 100 or 200 years ago. But Jojo Kenyatta is the first president of Kenya, and that is the first person on our list. The second person is Joy Adamson, and she was a naturalist that lived in Kenya, and if you're familiar with the movie and the book Born Free, she wrote that book, and it's basically based on her life. That was one of my grandmother's favorite movies when I was growing up, and we used to watch that all the time. So I made a little bit of an exception for her just because I felt that kind of personal connection. She has a couple family members already listed on some of her husbands, but just a handful, and she's not connected by any means. So I did include her nonetheless just again because I kind of felt a little bit of a personal connection to her. Daedan Kimyathi, he was a revolutionary leader. He died fighting for independence, but he's considered now a national hero. Daniel Arup Mui, I believe is how he pronounces the name, the second president of Kenya. I usually try to get a little more diversified, but Kenya's only had five presidents, so I've added four of them up here. I've got a few more political leaders than otherwise. Again, because Kenya just hasn't been around long enough to have a whole lot of movie stars, sports heroes, astronauts, all those kinds of things. So the political leaders are the people that are basically their notables at this point. Tom LaGoya is an independence leader. He is known for having been, I believe, the primary negotiator with the British for independence. So he is also considered a national hero. Grace Ogatt, she's an interesting individual, very famous in Kenya. She was a nurse and an author who eventually became a politician and was one of the first women to serve in the Kenyan cabinet. Maui Kebab is the third president of Kenya. And he is, again, I was a little bit, had a little bit of trouble finding a lot of famous Kenyans that worked within our parameters. So I added him just because, I feel we might as well get them all up there. You will not see the fourth president of Kenya because he was the son of the first president of Kenya. The second, the first president of Kenya. So by default, he's not gonna be on our list because he's already related to one of the other presidents. So Daphne Sheldrick, she was an author and a conservationist. She worked primarily with elephants and the conservation of elephants in Kenya and is, again, kind of a national legend there. Daniel Owino Missiani. He's a famous musician. One of the first musicians to really create kind of the independent Kenyan pop music. They have their own kind of style in Kenyan music and he kind of brought that to the forefront. Wengari Mathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Cool. So one of the things I really try to do is to get women represented. There's some really, really fascinating women out there and they do get underrepresented a lot. So I do try to find them whenever I can and this was one that has a very impressive story. Muhammad Amin. Muhammad Amin, he's a photojournalist and his pictures of the famine in Ethiopia were the primary motivation for the live aid concerts back in the 90s, if you remember those. Those were a pretty big deal back then and he was one of the catalyst for that. So I've got him up there. He died actually in a plane crash, fairly young. So it was kind of a tragic ending there. Naftali Temu, Kenyan's very first Olympic gold medalist. They have a number of, Kenyans are very big on track and field sports and running marathons and which is what he won, but he was the very first. I think that was in the 1960s, if I recall. Saiditi Oyan Oni Yulu, again, I'm wrangling that word, Oni Yulu, he is a, he's an actor. He was in a couple of movies and I'd have to click on the profile to see it, but I believe he was in an Academy Award winning foreign film winner. He was a lawyer in a small tribal community that somehow got picked to be in this movie and received some pretty great acclaim for his performance but he was not an actor by nature. William Ruto is one of our two living people this time around and he is the current president of Kenya. I always try to keep deceased people up over living people because we've got greater access but I do always put up the current leader of the country and that again is William Ruto and I made an exception once again for our final individual. She is very well known here in the United States. She's an Academy Award winning actress, also an Emmy and Tony award winning actress and I'm afraid I'm gonna probably mess up her name as well, but Lupita Nyong'o. I think you did it perfectly. That's the way I've always heard it. Like I say, I read it all the time but actually having it come out of my mouth. Exactly. But I put her up just because she's so famous, she is not connected. Right. She comes from a number of famous people. I was reading a little bit on her story. Her father is currently the governor of a province in Kenya and she has some other famous relatives. She has an uncle that was tragically murdered by the opposition during the revolution. Yeah, so there's some interesting stories there but again, she's not connected. So I decided even though she's living, we did get her profile unblocked so you can see it and if anybody needs to add stuff to any of our living profiles, they can reach out to me and I can get them on the trusted list and that but their family should be able, we should be able to connect them. So anyway, there's our 15 individuals. It's gonna be very different from our three previous countries but I think it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be a lot of fun and it's definitely very different. If we keep in mind also that our goal is not specifically to connect them to the tree as much as just to get Kenya's presence on there. We have not a lot of action profiles. We have African-American, but not actual African profiles. So we'll see what we can do there. And I always remind people that if Kenya's not your thing, you don't like the mosquitoes or whatever, you can always head back to Ukraine where it's much colder and when they don't have mosquitoes currently, I would imagine, or to Argentina or to India those. We wanna keep those going as well. So again, if this doesn't float your boat, head on back to one of the other countries and- Fantastic. And if you're not great on connecting, if you don't feel comfortable doing the research, we need people to go in and just kind of clean up the profiles, make them good looking. If you can find photographs, if you can work on formatting sources, just looking for typos even, that's a help. As some of us get really focused on the connecting and we don't take the time to really develop the profiles. So that's where we can use your help if connecting isn't your thing. So for those of you that are new, feel free to join right in. Go on over to the website and pick an individual and get started if you need any help or guidance, give me a, drop me a note and I'll get you going. But hopefully, hopefully we'll have some fun with this one. I think so, I think I'll be really interesting. Okay, well, does anybody have any questions before we sign off and get back to our research? I'm looking through the list real quickly here. Oh, GSL gave us the little tip on using a template or a sticker probably. Yes, we do have an African project. We don't have a Kenya project, but we do have an African project. So I'm gonna be checking in with them and seeing what resources they may have. And I'm not sure what the Charlie story. Oh, that was for me. Lynette knows about my daughter's dog. We'll say that for another time, Lynette. Okay. That's fine. I don't have any good stories for him right now. Yes, and I see a lot of lions notations. So we will just have an extra couple. I had a friend from Kenya probably back in the 80s and she had come over from Kenya and she said, when they used to walk to school, they would throw sand in the air to see which way the wind was blowing because you wanted to walk downwind from the elephants, not upwinds, because you had nothing to stampede. I wasn't sure where you're going with that. That was a very, very different childhood than I experienced, but. Yeah, no kidding. I have to think about that or lions or any of the other predators they are. I swear about the lions, but they definitely had a problem with elephants. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, I think that we'll wrap it up for today. And again, you have any questions or anything? I'll be getting a post up on G2G tomorrow, summarizing all this and providing the link. And feel free to join in if you're new and if you've been with us on the past trips. I hope to see you continue with us on this one. And thank you, Julie, for helping out today. Oh, I'm happy to be here. I'll go ahead and click the button and we'll catch you all next time. Bye.