Hello WikiTreers!
Week 49 of the WikiTree Challenge for Marian Burk Wood has wrapped up. It was a whirlwind week full of collaboration, deep rabbit holes, record reading or translation from other languages, and incredible discoveries! Team members once again took on the challenge and impressed us thoroughly with their dedication and tenacity!
Challenge participants added 13 profiles to her branches. There were 12 direct ancestors and 1 nuclear relative added to WikiTree. Three of these direct ancestors were beyond Marian's brick walls and completely new to her! With such difficult record sets to search in Marian wasn't expecting anything big, so this was amazing! Those Hungarian and Lithuanian records were new territory for us, but weren't enough to stop our team.
Altogether, more than 22 members made 397 edits to her ancestor profiles. Many hours were spent paging through unindexed records, hoping for clues to her ancestors.
Here are some highlights from our discoveries:
- Solomon Elias Burk was born about 1845. He was listed in a census record as living in Gargždai, Kaunas, Lithuania on the 16th of April 1901. This record showed that his father’s name was Meyer. The first brick wall down of the week!!!
- We found the death certificate for Meyer Mahler, which hadn't previously been discovered. It supported that he was a tailor, which we knew. What we didn't know was that his birthplace was listed as Kovno, Russia. His father was said to have been born in Riga, Russian Empire, and his mother in the Russian Empire. What amazing genealogy bread crumbs for Marian to follow!
- Marian wanted to know more about the siblings of her direct ancestors, and boy did we deliver! This included Tillie Rose (Jacobs) Mahler's brother, Joseph “Joe” Jacobs. He married Eva Michalovsky. In 1900 they lived next door to Tillie, along with three of their children. Joe was a peddler. He lived to the age fifty-four, dying in the Bronx in New York.
- Extensive research was done by our team members on the Farkas individuals living in Bot Palád, Hungary. These contain records for people that may wind up being siblings, cousins, or descendants of Marian’s Farkas line. Marian was very excited and grateful to have these incredible clues!
- Our researchers worked right up until the Livecast, but it was still a huge surprise to see one of them found the parents of Samuel Kunstler at the last minute!! Profiles were quickly created for his parents, Josef & Ruchel Kunstler. While the Livecast began, the profile for a new brother to Samuel was created by Louis Kessler and thoroughly researched. This was WikiTree collaboration at its best!
Team Captain: Emma MacBeath
MVP: Cheryl Hess
Top Bounty Hunter: Cheryl Hess
Honorable Mention: Jaki Erdoes
For more information see the challenge scoring explanation and check out the week 49 statistics to see a summary of all contributors.
If you missed the wrap-up LiveCast and want to see Marian's reaction to our endeavors, you can view it at any time on YouTube.
Quotes:
- These clues are wonderful! I am going to follow up on them all!
- You did a fabulous job! You took me a generation back, taking my work to the next level.
- Thank you so much, I cannot tell you how much this means to me. I cannot thank you enough!
