England Project Newsletter - December 2022

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December 2022

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WikiTree Projects: England

Hello everyone,

We hope you enjoy our 2022 Newsletter which includes updates from each of our Teams. Here are some of our Project's overall highlights:

• WikiTree Day in November was certainly a big event for us. We put together a 30-minute video presentation for the event and 20 new members joined the Project in the weeks following. You can watch the presentation on our project homepage and we hope it will help future members learn more about the Project. Many thanks to everyone who helped produce this.
• As part of creating the WikiTree Day presentation, we spruced up our project pages with a new Project Banner, Team Logos and QR codes to simplify the sign-up process. You can see all our Project images here: England Project Images. Special mention to Gill Whitehouse for her help in designing and creating these. We also complied a Who is Who in the England Project guide to help members navigate their way around.
• In June, we conducted our annual check-in with all project members. We received some constructive and positive feedback, and only a few members let us know they weren't able to participate in the project going forward. We now have 383 badged members and on average they have been members of the Project for 838 days! That's nearly 2.5 years of membership for each member.
• We have had over 96 new members join us so far this year, with an average of 106 new members joining us each year over the last 3 years. That's a lot of new members -- about 9 each month -- to keep us on our toes and bring new ideas and energy into our Project. To help with the flow of new members we are planning on producing some "how-to" video presentations throughout 2023. Our goal is to provide members with an alternative method of learning, for those who prefer to watch and listen instead of reading written words. These videos will feed into our WikiTree Day 2023 activity too.
• The number of English Profiles on WikiTree continues to grow steadily. Excluding Private/Unlisted Profiles, we have added 465,819 profiles up until the end of November - and we might reach 500,000 by the end of December! We have averaged over 466,000 profiles per year since 2019. Overall, 13% of the profiles on WikiTree belong to people who were born, married or died in England.
• Over the last 3 months, our members have made 454,860 contributions to WikiTree (not just English Profiles). That's an average of 1,200 contributions to WikiTree per member. 128 members made over 1,000 contributions. This not only helps us meet our Project goals, but it also helps WikiTree overall. Thank you to all our members for helping our Project and WikiTree both grow.

We are very pleased to announce the introduction of a new England Project recognition sticker for members who have been with us for over 1,000 days! This is a significant milestone for our members and the Project. If you have been a member for over 1,000 days, watch out for an email in the coming weeks with your personal token of appreciation. We aim to award this recognition sticker periodically each year.

Finally, it will be great to finish 2022 off with a fun Challenge - you can read more about it below. We hope you get involved and enjoy the game!

From the England Project Leaders: Amelia Utting, Joan Whitaker, Lizzie Griffiths, Ian Speed, Elizabeth Viney, Maddy Hardman, Wendy Sullivan and Susie Officer

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The Mighty Oaks continues to be mighty— and big enough to divide ourselves into two teams for every 'Thon this year. While neither team was declared a winner this year, our combined scores showed just how well we did and how much we all improved Wikitree. We added 38,337 Profiles during the 3 Connect-A-Thons and sourced 7,693 Profiles during the Source-A-Thon. The support from all our Team members has been outstanding - thanks everyone!

We get another opportunity to work together as the Mighty Oaks during the next Connect-a-Thon on the weekend of 13-16 January 2023. Details of how to join the fun will be posted here closer to the time: Mighty Oaks Team Page. Hopefully you will be able to join us.

We have also had some members move on to set up their own teams, which is great - we taught them well :)

From the Team Captains: Janet Wild, Joan Whitaker, Maddy Hardman, Frances (McHugh) Weidman & Carol (Winton) Keeling

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Every month we run a challenge which focuses on improving England profiles.

The topics recently covered include missing/misspelt locations, the Armed Forces, Members of Parliament, and profiles from one name studies. We've even had a secret Santa challenge this month which has proven to be great fun with loads of members participating!

We also periodically run fun/sporting challenges which are team based. This year, these have included football and rowing competitions; and a supermarket trolley dash! Keep reading below to see what’s in store for our end-of-year fun challenge :)

Here is a Team page so you can check out more about the fun stuff we have going on: England Project Challenges.

From the Project Coordinators: Carol Keeling & Fran Weidman

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We have improved the method used to identify profiles and allocate them to counties, highlighting more Suggestions, Unsourced, Unconnected and Unknown profiles for county teams to tackle.

We have added new counties for West Midlands and Greater Manchester which will mean that several thousand profiles that were previously overlooked are now being reviewed and improved; and we have agreed on a clearer way of dealing with Bristol, as a separate county in its own right, with responsibility for those profiles picked up by the Gloucestershire team.

A new group of 'England Unknown County' has been created for profiles that can’t be allocated to a county. About 100,000 of these profiles can easily be identified and added to a county’s figures by a small amendment in a location field. Over the next 12 months we will be encouraging our County Teams to boost their profile counts and to reduce the ‘England Unknown County’ figures.

A big thank you to our County Team Leaders and members for their hard work over the last 12 months.

Here is a link to our team page if you'd like to find out more: England Counties Team.

From the Project Coordinators: Dave Welburn & Steve Whitfield

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All the England Profile Improvement Teams have had some changes to their membership with some old stalwarts moving on to other things and we wish them well.

5 months ago a new team, Unknowns, was added to the England Profile Improvement Teams. We now have 7 teams and every member of the 7 teams has been busy working on improving WikiTree and doing a fantastic job.

Year to date, 34,278 English Profiles have been sourced (average 729 per week) and 122,698 active suggestions have been resolved (average 2,611 per week). Over the last 6 months, we have connected 42,308 Profiles (average of 1,627 per week). Wow what a year and it's not over yet! We look forward to everyone continuing this amazing work next year.

Each of our teams has a Team Leader, with two teams having two Team Leaders working to support the teams they lead. Further details about our team can be found here: Profile Improvements Teams.

From the Project Coordinators: Janet Wild & Malc Rowlands

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Hello Muppet watchers - here are our top stats for this year:

• Total profiles managed: 1,113
• Living Notables managed: 82
• Requests to go on the Trusted List of Queen Elizabeth II: 6 (out of a total of 14 requests for Royal profiles)

We have also now got a nifty England Profiles edits feed to alert us to changes being made to our managed profiles, or questions being asked about them. You can see them here in our England Project Discord server: # england-profile-edits.

If you are interested to find out more about what we do, you can find out more about the Team here: England Managed Profiles Team.

From the Project Coordinators: Jo Fitz-Henry & Stephen Trueblood

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We are a small but enthusiastic team, working to maintain a consistent structure for England categories. Roy Walmsley has recently joined as a team leader, to work with county team leaders on identifying and resolving problems with location category names.

The recent exercise of adding Category Information Boxes to all of the "Religious Congregations" (formerly "Religious Institutions") is now complete.

We are gradually rolling out the new format for place category names in Greater London (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Categorisation_in_London). This is taking some time because EditBot can only handle a few at a time. There has been some positive feedback on the new format.

We continue to work with the Managed Profiles Team and with the Ireland, Scotland and Wales Projects on improving the categorisation of the Nobility, and Honours and Awards, of the British Isles and Ireland.

Please contact me if you are interested in joining the team and helping with this work! Our Team page is here if you'd like to know more: England Project Categories Team.

From the Project Coordinator: Stephen Heathcote

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The England Project includes 29 topics, encompassing a total of 2,511 profiles (at the last count). Most of the topics are about individuals involved in a particular event, activity or place, such as the Regicides of King Charles I, while others are more about gathering sources of information, like Black Heritage Records in England. The full list of Topics can be found here: England Project - Topics.

Thirty-five England Project members are involved in one or more of the topic teams - several members are active on two topics and one member works on (at least) four!

The largest topics are English Authors with 649 profiles, English Naturalists with 492 profiles and English Classical Music Composers with 177. The smallest project is probably the English Brass Bands and their known members, but with a lot of information on the topic page it will surely be catching up fast!

From the Project Coordinators: Marjorie Gibbon & Ros Haywood

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This year we changed the way we engaged with people who replied to our G2G sign-up post to join the Project as we found some people who replied to our sign-up post, didn't end up following through to join up.

As each message takes time to send and follow up, in March we introduced a change and we now ask the prospective members to send a Private Message to the Membership Coordinator as a way of reducing the number of people who reply and don't end up actually joining. We were still getting between 2 to 5 a month who respond to the G2G sign-up post who don't go any further. However, since WikiTree Day everyone who sent a private message to the Membership coordinator has joined the project. This new approach has reduced the amount of work involved in the intial sign-up process.

We are currently reviewing our G2G post for 2023 and hope to make the join process clearer for prospective Project members.

From the Project Coordinators: Hilary Gadsby & Heather Brannon

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So far for the year 2022, 88 members set out on the Orphan Trail (49 have already graduated), 42 have gone on to the optional OT2 (1500-1699), and 11 are currently working towards or completed Pre-1500 preparation. These have been all been guided by our wonderful team of 22 Trailblazers.

We usually have 5-10 Trailers waiting to be buddied up with a Trailblazer and it takes about 30-40 days for Trailer to complete the Trail.

A very welcome addition to the team is Maureen Wilkins who joined us as OT1 Team Leader. We also welcomed Julie Laxton as Team Leader for the new role of finding and curating suitable Orphan profiles for the Trail, a very valuable task!

We were sad to lose Susie Officer from the team as she has moved on to become an England Project Leader. Thanks for all your hard work on the Orphan Trail, Susie!

Our Team home page explains more about the Trail and is here: England Orphan Trail Team.

From the Project Coordinators: Gill Whitehouse & Ann Browning

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All England Project members are invited to participate in G2G Coordination without the need to formally join the team.

Any member with access to the England Project Discord server will be able to see the # g2g-feed channel. Here, all G2G questions tagged ENGLAND are posted.

The # g2g-coordination channel is used to discuss some of these questions among Project members. In order to facilitate responses to the questions, the G2G Coordinator tags them with icons to indicate:

🚑 Questions in need of an answer

👍 Questions already answered

⏳ Questions still in need of an answer after two weeks

👀 Questions not requiring a response

👫 Duplicate questions

🐱 Questions about categorisation

🚒 Questions possibly requiring an emergency response from a Leader

All England Project members are encouraged to visit these channels and offer a response on G2G.

From the Project Coordinator: Lois Tilton

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• You don't need to be on the Trusted List to view changes to your direct ancestors profiles from "My WikiTree", click on "Family Activity Feed" (which defaults to Watchlist) and then click "Ancestors" and you can see all changes for those you are connected to on WikiTree!
• There is a new way to view up to 7 generations of your family tree - it's a "fractal view". From your Profile page, go to the "My WikiTree" menu drop down and select "Family Tree and Tools". From there, select "Dynamic tree view". Now click the drop down box where you see "DYNAMIC TREE" and select "FRACTAL VIEW".
• Why not have a "FANDUKO GAME"? It will test how well you know your Ancestors! Follow the same steps above and instead of selecting "FRACTAL VIEW", select "FANDUKO GAME" - it's quite addictive 🤣 ...
• If you are working on a long Biography and have used 4 or more sub-headings which automatically produces a Table of Contents, but don't want to have the Table of Contents showing, you can use the coding __NOTOC__ (that's two underscores at the beginning and end) to hide it. Conversely if you want to show a Table of Contents but don't have enough sub-headings you can use __TOC__ and one will show.
• The new WikiTree Browser Extension has some great features but a few we particularly love are;
  • Clipboard and Notes
  • Draft List
  • When you click on a profile who you are connected to on WikiTree, a message box at the top of the Profile will tell you how you are related!
  • In edit mode, beneath the Edit Text heading where you see B for Bold, I for Italics etc, you get an additional row of options - one being a pick list of stickers and templates! You no longer need to go hunting for the code, you can just select from the list provided. A great timesaver.
• Build a detailed surname list of your ancestors by generation and copy and paste it into your personal profile. It's super easy using this clever app: Surname list builder.

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