It's Your Turn to Share a Tip

Question

It's been about 9 months since we tried out the idea of a weekly tip feature segment on the Saturday Round-up livecast.  Now it's time to tap into our brilliant hivemind because I'm just betting that some of you have a WikiTree hack or two that the rest of us would love to know about.  Here's where you see the tips that we've already given.  To share your tip(s) please answer this post.  You can also let me know if you'd like to revisit a particular tip.

See you Saturday!

Betsy

Answer 1

These tips are great.  

One of my favorite tips is the auto-citations available for online books in WorldCat.  I know there are some external apps you can get, but I like to use WorldCat.  Most archive.org books link directly to WorldCat (just click the icon next to the "External Identifier." To get a citation, click the double quote button on the left side of the WorldCat record.

Technically, not a WT tip I suppose, but helps make it easy to be good WT sourcing citizen.

Comments

Good one!  I bet not everyone is aware of the citation maker built into a number of the internet book sites.  Thanks, M!

Answer 2

I do this so often I forgot it is a hack!

When using the Sourcer browser extension in Family Search to make citations for "all sources", and pasting them into a draft profile, it's not uncommon to get multiple copies of a marriage record, even 5, 6 or 7.

But they are not all the same. Some have images, some don't. Some have better images than others. Some are transcriptions vs. the original record book entries.

What I do is paste them into my draft profile, the use the Preview function to give me the draft in a form that has "live" links in it.

Then I can right-click, open each one in a new tab, look at the records in the order that they would appear in the profile and whittle down the number to the best one or two, with the most useful images.

This way, there aren't a bunch of duplicate records for the same source. If none of them has an image, I can still leave the best one, go to another site and add another link from there.

I can also do this for multiple marriages, when applicable, and change their boldface titles to add detail, like "First Marriage", "Second Marriage" and so on, to make it easier for the reader to find a record they might want to check out.

Comments

Thanks for sharing this, Sally.  It's a good step to include in the clean up after running the amazing "Build All Citations" feature in Sourcer.  If anyone wants to see a live demonstration of this tip, here's the segment featuring it on October 7th's Saturday Roundup.

I also love your suggestion to adjust the boldface titles for multiple marriages. 

Answer 3

Here's a simple tip for finding relatives with common names on WikiTree.

Suppose you have an ancestor named Alexander Thomas Smith. If you search for "Alexander Smith" you will get 1845 hits. That's far too many to sort through, especially if you don't have a solid birth/death date and place. Instead search for "Thomas Smith." You'll get 6415 hits, which at first looks three times worse. But then alphabetize the list. The Alexander Thomas Smiths will be brought together at the top of the list and you will see you now have just two to choose from.

Comments

That's a great tip!

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I love it, David.  Thanks for sharing.  We'll show this off on tomorrow's Saturday Round-up livecast.

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What a great idea David.

Answer 4

When greeting new ones to WikiiTree that mention they are looking for ancestors, I first try to find who they are looking for before I reply to their post. Let say for example they mention they would like to find "Fred Draper". 

MY TIP: The first thing I do is a Google search: WikiTree Fred Draper   Eight possibilities are listed along with Draper Genealogy (5844 names)  

By doing that sometimes I find who they are looking for on WikiTree, open the profile to see if I am that person's cousin and then I click on Sourcerer to find Family Search and Find A Grave sources.  With-in the span of one minute I am armed and ready to answer the post, with where I found the person and how I am related hoping to boggle their mind!