Requesting a custom query.

Question

I have a request for a one-time custom query matching on profile source citations and possibly other criteria to limit the scope. Could result in maybe 15,000 rows of extended family members. Because this would be a one-time query, not interested in learning WikiTree+. Would like to keep the details private. Happy to pay a reasonable fee. How might I proceed with this?

Comments

Can you give an example of the sort of query you want to do, but not necessarily with the exact parameters you want? For example, if you are looking for all Jones profiles that cite the UK 1901 census you could ask about Smith and the 1900 US census.

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Yes, thank you for your positive response. I'm looking to have created for me a cross-reference table with two columns: a WikiTree ID and a "Nellis ID" which can be extracted from matching strings within the profile's source citations. The Nellis ID would match the IDs in a set of Nellis family history books. I would use the cross-reference table in my own webpage whereby family members could enter a Nellis ID, and it would take them to that person's WikiTree profile.

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Looking at a random Nellis profile: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Nellis-2409 would you want to extract something like this:

Nellis-2409  and  Vol. 2  page 423 #8248

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Ideally, I'd just want the WikiTree ID and the "Nellis ID", 8248, but I could do my own stripping down to the Nellis ID if necessary.

Answer 1

You might like to re-read the Terms of Service:

https://www.wikitree.com/about/terms.html

Comments

I skimmed the TOS and nothing stood out as relevant, so still hoping for an answer to my question.

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Specifically #3 'General Use of the Website', which includes 'Non commercial use only', 'No automated copying', and 'No personal information harvesting'.

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Right. None of that applies. This is for personal and family use only—non-commercial—and I'm asking a team member to do a query for me, so I, personally, would not be harvesting any data. I would like to open a discussion with someone who might do this for. That person can decide whether this request falls within TOS.

Answer 2

You could use Biocheck app to retrieve all the profiles, based on last name and output the searches found, which you could then sort out and strip to get what you want

1. Profiles to report = 'Sources report'
2. Report all profiles - checked
3. How to Find Profiles - Wikitree+ search results
4. Search text on wikitree + = LastNameAtBirth=Nellis (run it a 2nd time for Nelles, or whatever else)
5. set the qty to 5000 not 1000 on all the options that initially come up at 1000
6. select Check Profiles to run it.  When it gives you the totals of Found nnn profiles with style issues, etc, click on the Source header, which will sort it and you should find all the profiles that have the Nellis-Nelles source sorted together
7. Download CSV will create the exported file, so you could then strip out all the other records and you could do what you want with that Source line and have the link to Wikitree Profiles and the name.

Comments

Linda mentioned some "funky" results. These no doubt are due to the non-Latin1 Unicode punctuation characters in the citations. But a bit disappointing is that the # symbols seems to be stripped from the CSV file. For example, see Hurley-1605, which contains the citation:

''Nellis-Nelles Immigrants From the Palatinate 1710'', Vol. 2, published in 2004 by The Nellis and Nelles Family Associations and the Herkimer County Historical Society #2336b page 28

The # is missing from #2336b. This character would be helpful for extracting the ID (2336b) from the citation.

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relation=addnuclear adds the nuclear relations of the people in the previous criterion. So AllLastNames=Nellis relation=addnuclear finds everyone with a surname Nellis and then adds to the list all their immediate relations.

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I will ask Kay to check on that coding issue. Don't use creator if someone else created profiles unless you want to check with that person's ID to see if there are some that might not be managed by you. Check watchlist sounds best probably.

Change limit to 10000 is fine. It will remember what you used last time usually.

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Well, that's the rub—"immediate relations". I'm talking about 12 generations. My 7th great grandparents had a daughter who married a Krauss, so none of their offspring will carry the Nellis name. The nuclear option, as you explain, would only get her immediate relatives, but I want all of her descendants, not just the immediate ones. So, I don't see that matching on surnames can work. In case it's not clear, I want to capture all 15,000 or so recorded descendants of my 7th great grandparents.

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In that case you can just use a query of the form

Descendants=Tudor-18

but using the Wikitree ID of one of those 7th great grandparents.

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But, Bio Check only lets you descend 5 generations. I need 12.

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It will take some investigation to determine why the # is removed. I suspect that it was because it is used in other source citations, and just putting it back in could break other uses of the Bio Check app.

I did a quick look at manager=Nellis-1011 (would be similar to your watchlist) with a search for the phrase Nellis and Nelles Family Associations then did a detailed report, sorted on the Search? column and there were just under 4000 profiles found that contained that phrase. Not sure if that would help.

When I looked for creator_Hayes-5281 it found 13249 profiles. and 9424 of those had the phrase.

But the book is not in a space page, so we don't have the ability to use what links here.

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Biocheck with Check Profile only allows 5 generations. But Biocheck with Wikitree+ Search Results uses whatever WT+ gives it. I tried it with Tudor-18 and got a 12th generation descendant of Henry VII.

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So, I set the 3 limit fields to 5000. Now, to get the next batch, should I leave those fields alone but change "Check starting at" to 5000, and then to 10000 for the 3rd batch?

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If you just want the 13249 created by Hayes-5281 set all 3 fields to 15000.  Otherwise set max to search to something large (like 30000) and page through results. Click on the Help button for more information