How long have you been on WikiTree?
I started in 2017 when I was laid up for several weeks after foot surgery. I had been looking for an alternative to Ancestry.com. This is not to bad-mouth Ancestry in any way; I have databases there. However, you might find 200 databases on Ancestry that have some information about a person you are interested in, many times it's different information, and few of them are sourced. For instance, I found 52 databases that contained my father-in-law, some with wrong parents, some with wrong birth and death dates. You could imagine contacting all those database owners to correct them, but who would want to? What I wanted to have was one database that we would collaborate on and not treat as "my" data or "your" data, and I found that in WikiTree. To be fair, many of the early profiles on WT uploaded from GEDs were poorly sourced also, and the information was only as accurate as the original GEDs, but WT has been getting better about insisting on sourcing.
Which projects are you most involved in?
Not an official project, but I spent a lot of time trying to recreate the community where a number of my German ancestors originated. I worked with a 5th cousin in Germany to try to trace all the early people in four small towns north of Trier, Germany (we had a Familienbuch to work from); he then traced many of them who spread out in Europe, while I tried to track as many as I could of these Germans who came to America, mostly in the late 1800s.
I'm very involved now in my first love, Louisiana Families Project WikiTree. I try to take a very global viewpoint, so I don't confine myself to my wife's ancestors, but I try to help recreate the entire community that lived in early Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, and Illinois. I try to connect as many people as possible with each other; I try to merge as many duplicates as I can find - the global viewpoint helps that; and I try to fill in the early blanks, since I have such great access to information from my library.
Do you consider your work here to be part of your legacy?
I do consider it to be part of my legacy. I was trained as a research scientist, so with that background and access to many records, I am as well-equipped to contribute to this effort as anyone. I just love the connections, and I very much enjoy the community of people I communicate with here on WikiTree. We all share the idea that we are trying to get the most accurate tree possible.
What feature would you most like to see added or improved?
The searching for duplicates feature is not robust enough. Partly the problem is the many different ways people spelled names 300 years ago, and partly it's just limitations in the search. I have created profiles several times when WikiTree didn't warn me that "Jean Tallon" (or something like that) existed already when I was creating "Jean Talon" ( a single l). WikiTree does not seem to do well with those variations. But I also created "Therese Huche" because that's what many of the early records say, when "Therese Huchet" already existed because that was also a variant of the name used by some scribes; I don't know how you avoid that.
What could we do to inspire more people to participate in our mission?
I'm not sure how to accomplish this, but convince people that we are all better off if we share all of the data, rather than having "my" data and "your" data. We can resolve differences if they are open, but if our trees are locked up in our individual databases, we don't see the biggest pictures. That's probably okay for some people, but I really like the wide-range outlook of WikiTree.
