April 2024 Connect-a-Thon Highlights

Question

Hello WikiTreers!

Our April Connect-a-Thon has come to an end. Our goal was to bring the world closer together by adding missing relatives. The weekend was a great success, and a lot of fun!

Thank you to all who participated and helped grow our global tree. These epic shows of community effort are just amazing.

We added 88,908 profiles over the weekend ... almost 90,000!

Top 5 Connectors: 

1. (tied for first) Jack Graham - 2,222
2. (tied for first) Jeff Ikeler - 2,222
3. (tied for first) Patty LaPlante - 2,222
4. Danita Zanrè  - 2,041
5. Sandy Patak - 1,703

Top 5 Teams: 

1. Appalachia Roots - 17,576 (!!)
2. Mighty Oaks - 8,292
3. Germany Genies - 3,742
4. Northwest Terriers - 4,322
5. Team Italy - 3,337

Top 5 Teams by Contributions per Member:

1. Appalachia Roots - 475
2. Team Italy - 371
3. Smoking Snakes - 320
4. Splendid Spruces - 294
5. Germany Genies - 293

Forty different teams and 14 individuals added more than 1,000 profiles each! 

Curious about the three-way "photo finish"? Here's the story behind it, as shared by Erin Soltysiak:

"Nobody wanted to beat out Patty, she stayed up so long and cheered us all on. She went to bed in first place so when John (Jack) got to where she was, he stopped for the night, and Jeff was pretty close so just did a last big push as we were all getting tired and delirious in the wee hours. No Appalachian left behind! Plus we all know Greg (Clarke) loves palindromes so why not. Kind of just luck/all our powerhorses working the same-ish speed."

See all the stats here.

---

Tip: You can easily remove yourself from profiles you created but don't want to manage. Just go to https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:WatchedList and click on the "Watchlist Changes" button in the row, then select the link where it says "If you'd like to remove yourself from Trusted Lists that you've been added to just recently...click here" under "Remove yourself from Trusted Lists.

---

Thanks to each and every one of you that joined in and contributed, helping make this a successful and fun marathon! See you later in the year for the July Connect-a-Thon! 

Comments

Congratulations to William Maher, winner of the Guess the total competition, now sporting the Golden Abacus Prize on his profile until the next marathon!

---

A couple of the team numbers are incorrect.

Germany Genies had 5,279 profiles
Northwest Terriers had 3,742 profiles

I'm sure this can be attributed to how tired we all are. I tried to add a child as their father's wife yesterday. Lol.

---

Thanks Azure for the accolade. I am quite chuffed !! 

Answer 1

Thank You everyone  for your time, hard work to add connections in the Connect-A-Thon and having great experiences!  and Thank you Ewoyen for everything that you do for all of us and WikiTree!!

Answer 2

I was able to grow my CC7 by 421 this Thon. I LOVE how the top three were in synch with their final answer of 2,222. I'm sure that was done to please Greg who loves all thing numbers. Great job, everyone!!

Comments

His reaction on the hangout was precious!

---

Yes it was! I was there and he was all giddy!

---

He didn't know until right before we went live. A pleasant surprise

Answer 3

Could you post how the Kiwi Crew did please?

Comments

The Kiwi Crew finished the Thon with 2,683 profiles created. They were 10th place out of all of the teams. And came in 3rd place in their Division (medium sized group).

---

Thank you for that, Shona.

Answer 4

A big thanks to the hang-out team and to tech support! You are appreciated for staying up late, getting up early and for all the behind scene work you do for us to have a fun and productive experience!

Answer 5

I did 8!   I really enjoyed it.  Thanks for letting me.  

Question…What did it mean where it said profiles “normalized”?

Answer 6

A Big Congratulations to all who participated !!! Collectively making genealogy more accurate and accountable to future researchers. Give yourselves a pat on the back for a job well done.

Answer 7

I just have a question. I'm wondering how people manage to connect hundreds and thousands of entries over a weekend. I added 50. I know I could have added 200 if I had changed what I was doing but I couldn't have managed more than that. Since I am in the process of transferring previously done research on Ancestry to WikiTree, I already have multiple sources for each entry. I made the decision to add a significant number of those sources to each entry I made. That took up time. If I had added just one source for each of the 50 entries I did, I could have added about 200. But I couldn't have gotten any more than that. No I didn't sit at the computer round the clock, but I did spend significant time. Please understand that I'm just curious. I'm not challenging anything or anyone.

Comments

I'm equally curious. At one profile every two minutes, 2,222 profiles would take 4,444 minutes. A 72-hour thon equates to only 4320 minutes. Anyone want to share their secrets?

---

If you use Sourcer extension you can transfer your sources on Ancestry in one go when transferring the profile data.

---

Hi Joan, I understand your question/comments very well. For several years now, I have also wondered at the number that some achieve, and I believe that was even before Sourcerer Extension. Please do not underestimate your 50. I did, roughly 74. I could not source 24/7 as I have other responsibilities. Plus, I am more than a little OCD and each of the profiles that I connected now have full biographies with sources. I will go back and add spouses and children. Your 50 helped to achieve the more than 80k connections. Well done, you!

---

Gary, could you give me some instruction in how to do that? I am using the Sourcer extension. It has made a big difference once I discovered it. Because of your comment here, I finally noticed the prompt in the upper left-hand corner that would allow me to transfer information, but it seemed as if things like specific birthdates would become just years. Also, if I transferred all the people listed, it included living people, and I've been avoiding transferring them to WikiTree. Finally, I'm not sure I want to do a mass transfer. Is it hard to make corrections after the transfer? What I've been doing is using a split screen with WikiTree on one side and Ancestry on the other. Before I transfer anything to WikiTree, I analyze whether anything on Ancestry is incorrect and I check out any new hints. In a couple of cases I found that I misspelled a place on Ancestry, so I fixed the mistake on Ancestry. And I found a couple of more serious errors that I put on Ancestry so I fixed them. I don't want to lose the checking process to add entries more quickly but at the same time, I would be nice to add ten profiles or so at a time. Thoughts????

---

Thanks, Carol. I also was adding spouses and children so I have multiple generations of families completed. I was concerned that if I didn't do them systematically, I would lose track of what I had done and what I hadn't. Too many of the names are the same or almost the same. Much of my family's ancestry and my husband's is Irish and they used the same names over and over.

---

Hi
 There's bit of a misunderstanding, Sourcer only transfers one profile at a time, but it can be set to transfer effectively the entire profile including sources (at the January CAT that feature hadn't been introduced for Ancestry, only was available for FamilySearch), the "all citations" feature on Sourcer is a great productivity gain.
 I do the same checks as you do and work split screen with the computer hooked up to two screens, but I do the checks in the weeks leading up to the CAT, that's the big time saver.

---

Gary, can you give me some instruction as to how to do this? I've watched Rob Pavey's video on YouTube and it's frustrating. When his cursor goes to the top of the screen to get the drop down menu he wants, it disappears off my screen so I can't see what he is doing. I've gotten as far as "save person data" but don't know how to proceed from there. My interest isn't so much in the next Connect A Thon as it is in my ongoing project to transfer my previous research. I'd like to get back to doing new research. Thanks.

Answer 8

On behalf of the Globetrotters, I'd like to congratulate each of our competitors for a job well done. It was an amazing weekend. 

I'd also like to give a personal shoutout to the members of the Globetrotters team who manage to connect at least one profile from each of fifty different countries from Afghanistan to Ukraine. If you'd like to see which nations we visited, check out our Connect-A-Thon thread.

Comments

I would like to endorse David's sentiments as the captain of the Splendid Spruce team.

Congratulations to all teams and to all the members who took part

a BIG thank you to the organizers and those who took part in the youtube videos.

---

Hi David, congratulations to your Globetrotters. I also need to acknowledge the great work of the England Team, their Team Leaders and all the England Team participants! The one become the many!