Hi everyone!
It's time to get to know another one of our wonderful WikiTreers. This week's member is Mark Dorney.
Mark became a Wiki Genealogist in January 2017. He is Team Leader for the Western Australian subproject.
When did you get interested in family history?
Late 1980s, I was 15 or 16, my high school put on some short courses and I chose family history. I put it down after that and didn’t pick it up for another ten years, but that’s when it started.
Are you are interested in certain surnames or locations?
Surname wise, my own surname is fairly rare, so I have always taken an interest in that, and a yDNA confirmed variation of it. Beyond that Durney, also Galgey, which is a very rare surname.
Location wise, Western Australia. It’s a large geographic area, but it had a pretty small population prior to a gold rush in the mid 1890s, so it’s not actually a crazy size for a location interest.
Do you have a favorite ancestor or brickwall breakthrough story?
You can’t know the long deceased, but you can sometimes get a vibe from your research, and I quite warmed to my ancestor Leopold Burmeister. I have a nice photo of him from 1888, which helps. My youngest son’s middle name is Leopold after him.
For a brick wall breakthrough, I was pretty pleased with myself for solving a brick wall that had defeated my cousin for decades by tracing the witnesses on a marriage record. But the most fortuitous, was a result of collaboration (a WikiTree theme). To cut a long story short, I had built a relationship with another Dorney researcher over the years. When I contacted her with some interesting but unresolvable information, it turned out she had a friend at that very moment researching in the Irish Archives in Dublin, who was able to look up old maps for me and confirm that two completely different addresses were in fact the same place, which was the key to knocking the first hole in the brick wall.
What is your toughest brick wall currently?
All of them. I’ve done the easy ones, I’ve done the very hard ones. All that are left are they very, very hard and impossible ones.
How long have you been on WikiTree?
Since January 2017. I’d been involved with other crowdsourcing projects before, and I’d heard of the one tree concept before, but hadn’t liked any other implementations of it.
I have never seen the point of just building a tree on my own computer at home, nor throwing my tree up on a commercial website where there is nothing to distinguish it from the hundreds of low effort trees on the same site.
It was also a way to publicly and accessibly share my research so near and distant family members can find it. I’ve been contacted by way more relatives via WikiTree than any other avenue.
Do you have a story about how someone was helped through your participation on WikiTree?
Because WikiTree is freely and readily accessible to the world, any information shown here can help others.
Despite it being the third decade of the 21st Century, and Germany being a highly developed nation I fairly recently paid an actual person to go to an actual church and take photos of actual physical registers as the only way to solve a brick wall.
I put the results on WikiTree and a relative was kind of enough to get in touch and thank me, for the work also solved his brick wall.
(interview continues in comments)
