England Project Newsletters

Profile managers: I. Speed [send private message], Steven Whitfield [send private message], Maddy Hardman [send private message], Amelia Utting [send private message], Elizabeth Viney [send private message], England Project WikiTree [send private message], Lizzie Griffiths [send private message], and Wendy Sullivan [send private message]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for supporting the England Project in 2023 and for your contributions to our goal to improve the ever-expanding number of English profiles on WikiTree!

Here is our latest newsletter with an update on this year's achievements and highlights.

If you missed it, you can watch the WikiTree Day 2023' presentation, "Breaking Down Brick Walls in England", on Youtube here. Many thanks to Jo Fitz-Henry, Stephen Trueblood and Nic Donnelly of our Managed Profiles Team for sharing your knowledge and your professionalism in putting this video together!

Please join our end-of-year 2023 Christmas Challenge. Watch out for the announcement when it begins on Sunday 17 December 2023.

We look forward to continuing to work with you all in 2024!

Best wishes, England Project Leadership Team

Membership and Orphan Trail

We continue to have a steady stream of new members joining the England Project and starting the Orphan Trail, especially when the project is mentioned in WikiTree's weekly WT News email. Our membership list currently stands at 376 members (as at 1 December 2023).

Kathy Nava has joined the leadership team and W Robertson is now helping with the team maintenance. Kathy adds new members to the project, Hilary and Malc keep the Orphan Trail running smoothly, and W ensures that members get added to their new team(s) once they graduate from the Orphan Trail.

A big thank you to all our amazing Trailblazers for the support you provide to members on the Orphan Trail!

Project Coordinators for Membership: Kathy Nava and W Robertson
Project Coordinators for Orphan Trail: Hilary Gadsby and Malc Rowlands

Project Challenges

2023 was the year for improving England profiles! We started out early in the year with our most successful challenge to date: Unknown Regions (in March). During the course of the month, 31,663 profiles were corrected.

In July, we solved 1,310 Unknowns, in October, we corrected over 13,000 suggestions, and in November, we added 3,165 missing locations.

In between, we had a Coronation Tea Party, went on a Summer Holiday, brought dozens of emigrants back to England, connected 25 Members of Parliament to the global tree, and many more.

Special thanks to all the wonderful members who have taken part in these challenges!

Our goal for 2024 is to keep the momentum going, and try to make profile improving fun.

We are always looking for suggestions for future challenges. Our only criteria is that we stay within 19th-20th century England, so that our newer and/or less experienced members can easily take part :)

Project Coordinators Carol Keeling and Fran Weidman

Topics Team

The England Project's Topics cover English artists, actresses, pirates, people involved in the execution of King Charles I, suffragettes, Queen Victoria's Rifles, the Time Team - to mention just a few of the 32 Topics.

Since our July newsletter a new Topic has been launched, Pedigrees for Tamworth of Lincolnshire, bringing together the people in, and closely related to, the Tamworth family as named in "Visitation of the County of Lincoln In 1562-4".

At the latest count, there were 3,291 profiles under the wings of the England Project's Topics, not including the English Quakers, the English Mining Disasters or a couple of the Topics that don't have categories (so are hard to count individual profiles).

The English Companies and Their Founders Topic had a boost in September when it featured in the England Project's monthly Challenge, 'A Nation of Shopkeepers'. Starting with a list of the names of 49 people who started shops and services that are familiar names on the English High Street, all but 3 now have well sourced profiles with families, and almost all have been connected to the main WikiTree. Who were the three that the tenacious EP members couldn't find? William Hamley who founded Hamleys toyshop in 1760 proved very elusive; Scottish-born David Taylor of Waitrose Supermarkets (which he founded in 1904 with his colleagues Wallace Waite and Arthur Rose); and Mr Pennington of Ladbrokes Bookmakers who has managed to maintain his air of mystery, as seemed to be his ambition - but one tenacious member did suggest who they think he probably was. Brilliant sleuthing, many thanks and well done to everyone who took part! I for one look at the High Street quite differently now.

There are many fabulous project members who work on the Topics, and two coordinators. Ros Haywood has been busy recently adding profiles of Space:English Authors (now 765 of them!) and working on connections for the Space:Harry Potter on WikiTree actors, growing their CC7s. She is now turning her attention to the Space:Peasants Revolt 1381. Marjorie (Humphrey) Gibbon is thinking about more Topics that can feature in the EP monthly challenges (watch that space) and tinkering with categories behind the scenes.

Please get in touch with any of the Topic leaders, or one of the coordinators, if you would like to join in with any of the Topics or have an idea to start one of your own.

Project coordinators Marjorie Gibbon and Ros Haywood

Profile Improvements Team

As reported in our July newsletter we have amalgamated our Arborists, Gedcom and Unknowns Teams into the new successful Tangled Families Team with Frances (McHugh) Weidman as Team Leader and we welcome Liz (McIntosh) Macdonald as the new Team Leader of the Biography Builders Team.

During 2023 we have seen 44 new members joining the team’s with 15 leave for pastures new and as such now have a total dedicated team membership of 186 actively improving all aspects of our WikiTree English profiles to a high standard.

The total English profile numbers sourced, in the year to date, is 41,343 (last years increase 34,278), active resolved suggestions were 149,060 (122,698), connected profiles were 66,939 (42,308) and unknown LNAB successfully identified this year to date 5,038, all showing an impressive increase/improvement thanks in a significant way to our superb members.

Our goal for 2024 is to continue to improve the English WikiTree profiles and to actively take part in as many of our team challenges as possible concentrating on English profiles within each of the challenges:

• England Monthly Challenge
• Connectors Challenge
• Sourcerers Challenge
• Data Doctors Challenge
• Biography Builders Challenge

Further details of our teams can be found on the Profile Improvements Teams pages and we always welcome new members from the England Project membership.

Project Coordinator Malc Rowlands

County Teams

Some members focus on specific areas of the tree as members of our Profile Improvement Teams; others join one of more of our County Teams from where they try to improve 'their' county. Each county is separately reported in the England and County Statistics Reports.

As well as reporting profile counts in the different categories, the tables express each county's figures as a percentage of its total profiles. The chart below shows the impressive performance levels that are being delivered in our top performing counties and gives a realistic indication of what we can aspire to.

Our overall top performers are:

(Note that the 'new' post-1974 counties, where the profile counts are still very low, are excluded from this analysis.)

The counties in which we have seen the greatest improvements this calendar year (calculated as a percentage of total current profiles) are:

Thanks to all members who have worked over the last 12 months to grow and improve the England branch of the tree. Your efforts are very much appreciated.

Categories Team

The major event of the year for the Categories Team has been welcoming Roy Walmsley as project coordinator. Roy has made a fantastic contribution to keeping on top of requests for new categories, and identifying and resolving errors and ambiguities in existing category names.

There have been no major changes to the England Project category structure this year, but a major exercise on correcting the names of occupation categories from "English Occupation" to "England, Occupation" has been completed.

No report on categories would be complete without mention of Madelaine Kirke's work on transferring thousands of profiles from the top level "England, Infant Mortality" category to the correct county sub-category (or other country!), often having to research the profile to find the correct place. Thank you Madelaine!

In the grand scheme of WikiTree we in the Categories Team hope that all the major restructuring, etc., has been completed, with only minor corrections required, gaps filled, and extensions made, as requested by you, our fellow Wikitreers. So please don't hesitate to ask us if there's anything we can do to help with categories.

Our achievements in numbers

Continuing the positive story from our June update, the charts below illustrate the weekly growth in England profiles; and highlight the improvements we have collectively been making to our branch of the tree.

New Profiles

Averaging just under 10,200 profiles per week, more than 500,000 new England profiles will be added to Wikitree this year. On 2 December, the cumulative total of profiles with a birth, marriage or death in England stood at 3,904,090 which represents over 10.7% of all Wikitree's profiles, up from 10.4% at the start of the year.

The chart below shows three significant spikes which illustrate the impact of the Connect-A-Thons held this year over the extended weekends of January 13-16, April 21-24 and July 14-17. Many of our members joined our Mighty Oaks Team and helped to boost our profile numbers.

"Unknown County" Profiles

Not all England births, marriages and deaths can be allocated to one of our recognised counties. Often, the only information available about an individual is that he or she was born, married or died in England. Alternatively, a village, town or county may have been input into a location field in a way that is recognised by Wikitree's system as an England profile but which can't be allocated to a county. Both these types of profile are placed in a 'county' we have named 'England Unknown County'.

Our 'March Challenge' was to reduce the number of 'Unknown County' Profiles. We collectively improved the location fields of over 31,000 profiles, with a considerable impact on the percentage of England profiles that are identifiable at county level.

Some members continue to focus on an ongoing basis on improving location fields, re-entering the place name in a recognisable format or adding more specific detail to the profile. We started the year with almost 9.25% of our profiles in 'Unknown County'; the figure has been impressively reduced to 7.54%.

"Unsourced" Profiles

The current system for identifying and counting Unsourced profiles has its limitations; there is a considerable number of profiles not sourced to Wikitree standards but not picked up in the current Unsourced count. (For more detail see Understanding England and County Statistics.) That said, our Unsourced statistics are collated on a like-for-like basis and serve to give us a useful indication of an increasingly healthy tree.

Initiatives such as the March 'Locations' Challenge, or preparations for the Source-A-Thon can result in a number of poorly sourced profiles being identified and labelled for further attention. This can generate short-term increases in our Unsourced number as the chart below illustrates, but the overall trend is one of improvement as members continually source and improve profiles.

When England project members focus collectively on an aspect of Wikitree, we can have a considerable impact, as shown by the dramatic drop of Unsourced profiles during the Wikitree Source-A-Thon over the weekend of September 29 - October 2. 7,332 England profiles were sourced by our two teams.

Since the start of the year, at least one source has been added to over 41,000 England profiles that had been flagged as 'Unsourced'. Over and above this, many other profiles that don't appear in the statistics have also been sourced in the process of us tidying up old Gedcoms, identifying Unknowns, researching Tangled Families etc.

Unknowns

Our 'Unknowns' count currently stands at 38,633. Almost 90% of these profiles are wives whose maiden name hasn't been identified.

The Unknowns Report is a fantastic tool to help those of us who enjoy the stimulation of working on Unknowns to find profiles by county for different time periods.

Our July Challenge was to reduce the number of Unknowns; our team effort resulted in a significant improvement in our numbers as shown on the graph.

We have reduced Unknowns by 1,400 from at the start of the year. This figure represents 0.99% of total England profiles, having started the year at 1.17%.

Suggestions

The headline chart for Suggestions shows a significant increase in flagged profiles over the summer, as explained in more detail below; but despite the fact that new routines and algorithms boosted the way some issues are identified, we will finish the year with a lower precentage of Suggestions than we had at year-end 2022.

The weekly Suggestions Report contains a long list of possible issues with profiles ranging from impossible scenarios (e.g. a mother who died years before her supposed child's birth) to relatively minor formatting issues such as a missing "=" sign in a biography heading. Some suggestions are much more genealogically important than others. Albeit a subjective assessment, we have broken down the different types of suggestion into three clusters shown in the chart below.

In the first, highest priority, cluster (Gender, Dates, Relationships, Names and Locations), we have seen a significant reduction of issues over recent months. Location suggestions in particular have been dramatically improved.

The second group (Biography, References and Templates) affects how individual profiles look. At the start of April, changes were made to the way messy Gedcom files were identified adding over 12,500 profiles to the 'Gedcom junk' suggestion code. Over recent months, we have seen marked progress in this second group.

The third cluster (Categories, Privacy, Links, DNA) grew considerably over the summer months as profiles were searched for 'broken' links (typically to external websites), adding about 24,000 new suggestions to the total. This category has also seen considerable reductions over the last 5 months.

Thanks to the efforts of our members working on suggestions, the England branch of the tree is undoubtedly healthier. We will finish the year having fixed over 150,000 Suggestions - a remarkable achievement.

To help us in this important area and for more insight into the different types of suggestions, refer to the England Data Doctors Team Page.

Unconnected Profiles

At the start of 2023, 89.8% of England profiles were connected to Wikitree's main tree. That figure has steadily improved and now stands at almost 90.7% as illustrated in the chart below.

So far this year, almost 67,000 previously unconnected profiles (single people and 'loose branches') have been linked to the main tree, an impressive average of nearly 1,400 per week.

If you enjoy the challenge of connecting, why not join our Connectors Team for advice and encouragement as we strive to reduce the number of unconnected profiles in our tree.

Do you have feedback?

We would love to hear if you have any feedback on our newsletters or the project more generally. Please put your feedback or suggestions in the comments section below. Thank you!