Weldon's Profilology

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: Third rock from sun

My family tree is being entered here slowly, with many entries still skeletal. I look forward to hooking up my research to the research of our community at large, and to assist in creating concise and well-founded profiles of our earlier ancestors.

Contents 1 My Wikitree Credo 2 Things I Like About WikiTree 3 My Major Reservations Regarding Wikitree 3.1 1. Misuse of the uncertain tag for unsourced speculation 3.2 2. Hijacking of Notable's Profiles 3.3 3. Shabby Profiles (particularly with Multiple Profile Managers) 4 Wikitreer In Training 5 Interesting (To Me) Topology of My Tree 6 Auto-Validations 7 The Wikitree Community Is Growing A Great Forest

My Wikitree Credo

I try to accomplish the following in my profile expositions:

• In absence of physical evidence, I will ensure circumstantial evidence cited is in preponderance, completely consistent with timeline, locale, human biology, culture and behavior of the time, and with no contradicting physical evidence, in order to justify connecting a profile to my tree.
• I will read, and maintain currency with, the style and organization standards developed by Wikitree members. Such a requirement could perhaps be added to the WikiGenealogist Badge.
• When I come across a profile that fails to meet my minimum standard for evidence and/or exposition, I will lobby the profile managers or PPP project to make suggested improvement. (So far, my results are sporadic; apparently my lobbying style needs a softer touch. But I am pleased when my argument wins the day.)
• I will develop a consistent style for my profile biographies. My style will emphasize what we learn about the arc of an ancestor's life, presented in relaxed timeline order, and placed in available context of greater family and times, and will avoid certain shortcomings I detect in profiles here:
  • I will use no artificial organizational/hierarchical structure, such as headings for ORIGIN, MARRIAGE, CHILDREN, DEATH. These simply repeat the vital family statistics that we enter on the profile data collection form, and that are automatically displayed in the profile's header. The same information in multiple places in a database is always a no-no, from a data maintenance standpoint.
  • I will include all informative document content, including from wills, land transactions, and historical sketches, within the bio text itself, rather than linking to this information in sources. The source only tells us where we found the information; the interested reader shouldn't have to go there to find it. Text is cheap; no reason to be stingy with it. Copyright should not be an issue if only a few words are used and credit is given. For more than a few words, rewrite the text and give credit to the source (this is not Academia; plagarism does not exist here).
  • I will avoid referencing other family trees as evidential sources, and will reference no source behind a paywall.
  • I will make no assertion without a 2-way link to the evidence for that assertion.
  • I may have to link to lineages maintaining conjectural profiles, ones not meeting evidential standards of good scholarship. Failing to argue successfully against such conjecture, I will add a public comment linking to a free space analysis of the lack of evidence, and of what a better inference might be.

Things I Like About WikiTree

• Wikitree is something I am becoming passionate about.
• The people I have encountered here are friendly and helpful.
• Although I was initially discouraged with some PPPs that my own lines must link to. I have since followed PPP notices on my Genealogy Feed and find that good work is being done to clean up PPPs. I am no longer discouraged; the one really difficult disagreement I had here with a Project Lead was eventually resolved by Mentor Intervention Request (MIR). While no action resulted from the MIR process, MIR is the supreme court of Wikitree, so I believe I got a fair hearing.
• The profile improvement project offers the opportunity to collaborate on raising PPPs and other profiles to the level of published Wikitree standards; I have joined it. I plan to 'boldly' clean up some of mine, for starters.
• I am impressed with the DB errors facilities of the site, including MatchBot, with automated reports. Hopefully there are no PPPs generating database errors!
• I was initially concerned about a risk management plan for WikiTree. But I found the Back Ups page and see a basic risk management plan is already in place. Nice.
• The leaders among the Tree'rs are very accomplished genealogists. I find myself learning from them more than I would have expected. Big Thanks. (Of course, with hundreds of thousands of contributors, it is certain that several thousand will be more experienced and talented than myself, a comforting thought.)

My Major Reservations Regarding Wikitree

1. Misuse of the uncertain tag for unsourced speculation

The most critical considerations for any genealogy tree are, in my opinion:

• data must be sourced; BUT never by another family tree or GEDCOM; and if a book, give page numbers
• asserted ancestry is never purely speculative; one must believably express why we should accept it as fact

See my editorial page for further discussion of speculative ancestry and the Wikitree Uncertain tag.

2. Hijacking of Notable's Profiles

Another concern that I voice is the permitted hijacking of notables' profiles by distant relatives who desire a share of the notable's prestige for themselves (e.g. see Dickinson-53). What were they thinking?

3. Shabby Profiles (particularly with Multiple Profile Managers)

Shouldn't we expect profile managers to give their best effort at profile maintenance, particularly with regard to proper sourcing? I can imagine giving more power to the Profile Improvement Project (PIP) to flag profiles with non-responsive managers, giving them three months to make improvement, after which they would all be 'retired' from the profile's trusted list, and a new Profile Manager assigned from a volunteer list maintained by PIP. Every Profile deserves at least one responsive and responsible manager.

Wikitreer In Training

Wikitree has astounding ambitions as a massive data collection project, fueled by massively imperfect data, involving hundreds of thousands of participants of highly varied acumen. It will fall heavily to the more qualified and passionate members to keep WikiTree's quality meter in the green. I aspire to be one of these people myself someday.

I am growing as a genealogist. (But I have a ways to go yet; so far, my research ability and need has been deemed unworthy of a pre-1500 badge.) I am working hard at it, and am encouraged. And whenever I get down and think I will just take my ball and go play somewhere else, I realize there is no other place. If it is going to happen, it will happen at WikiTree. So put on a game face and go out and Fight For Facts (card-carrying member of the FFF team).

Interesting (To Me) Topology of My Tree

Genealogy provides many surprises that enhance its fascination. The highlight of my tree is finding that my former mother-in-law Alice was my 11th cousin. We share a 10th great grandfather, Mayflower Richard Warren:

• 1. Alice is the daughter of Frederick William Jackson [unknown confidence]
• 2. Frederick is the son of Frances Joslyn Landon [unknown confidence]
• 3. Frances Joslyn is the daughter of Theodosia Eldredge [unknown confidence]
• 4. Theodosia is the daughter of Seth Eldredge [unknown confidence]
• 5. Seth is the son of Barnabas Eldredge [unknown confidence]
• 6. Barnabas is the son of Adne Hammond [unknown confidence]
• 7. Adne is the daughter of Seth Hammond [unknown confidence]
• 8. Seth is the son of Seth Hammond [unknown confidence]
• 9. Seth is the son of Mary (Hathaway) Hammond [unknown confidence]
• 10. Mary is the daughter of Sarah (Cooke) Hathaway [unknown confidence]
• 11. Sarah is the daughter of Sarah (Warren) Cooke [unknown confidence]
• 12. Sarah is the daughter of Richard Warren [unknown confidence]

• 1. Weldon is the son of Howard Smith [unknown confidence]
• 2. Howard is the son of Carrie May Jackson [unknown confidence]
• 3. Carrie is the daughter of William George Jackson [unknown confidence]
• 4. William is the son of Orillia Bump [unknown confidence]
• 5. Orillia is the daughter of Ansel Bumpas [unknown confidence]
• 6. Ansel is the son of Deborah Bourne [unknown confidence]
• 7. Deborah is the daughter of Lydia Swift [unknown confidence]
• 8. Lydia is the daughter of Thankful Morey [unknown confidence]
• 9. Thankful is the daughter of Jonathan Morey Jr. [unknown confidence]
• 10. Jonathan is the son of Mary (Bartlett) Morey [unknown confidence]
• 11. Mary is the daughter of Mary (Warren) Bartlett [unknown confidence]
• 12. Mary is the daughter of Richard Warren [confident]

(This seems surprising at first blush, but once Wikitree matures a few decades, this situation may be seen as expected rather than exceptional.)

Thus my sons' bloodline goes back to Mayflower I and beyond, then back down to me again (by marriage), via another route entirely, then back to the 15th century and before in other ancestral lines of my sons' maternal grandparents, e.g.:

• Venetz-78 b. ~1490, Mörel, Valais, CH (Needed to fudge birth date to 1500 so Wikitree would allow this un-certified genealogist to enter his profile).
• Ancestors of Van_Heuckelum-1 b. ~1502, Lingewaal, Gelderland, Netherlands, maintained by the Dutch Roots Project (many of whom appear to be certified).

Auto-Validations

Note the Mayflower ancestries above have not been blessed by the Mayflower Society. Wouldn't it be neat if Wikitree Ops could acquire the resources to perform this validation for us, at least as far as any validation has been provided by the Society. Further, for all Great Migration profiles, it would be great to have automated validation of names, dates, and places via an index extracted from Anderson. Additionally, in this validation train of thought, I have just learned from this exercise that Wikitree itself has confidence flags at each generation. I will go back and see if I can set these more appropriately.

The Wikitree Community Is Growing A Great Forest

There is so much to do and assimilate in these main lines that it would require another generation of family genealogist(s) to follow many of these ancestor's sibling lines forward to the present, something I have not even attempted. But no fear. This is one of the great promises of a collaborative, public Wikitree. We get a whole world of cousins to help us fill in these sibling lines of our ancestors. And in distant times when our research ability comes up short, there are Project specialists to take up the gauntlet. Thank you all.