Lois is guest subject on WikiTree Challenge this week
So...
I was recently asked to be their guest subject for a week on WikiTree Challenge, to which I said, Sure! What is it? (Prior guests include C.J. Cherryh, so I suspect more than one SF fan among the organizers.)
WikiTree Challenge turns out to be a sort of cross between Roots and Time Team, where the volunteer participants get together for one week to crowdsource genealogy research, and compete to see how much they can learn. They start with a basis of information supplied by their subject, of which I had quite a bit in some quadrants of my family tree, and almost none in others.
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1424626/...
Anyone can play, just sign up and learn. International participants are especially welcome. (I have known roots in France, Germany, and the British Isles; who knows what else.)
Well, and the Neanderthal thing, which of course I had checked when it became available, but that goes back a bit farther than documented sources can reach. I'm not far from European average for those genes, it turns out to little surprise, 2% or less. My maternal haplogroup is H6a1b. I don't know the paternal because I haven't been able to persuade either of my brothers to get tested, drattit. (23 & Me data.)
This invitation had a knock-on effect as I scrounged back through what family documents I had on hand, and was reminded of a project I meant to get to Someday. "Someday" turned out to be the last month or so, and has resulted in an e-chapbook of historical accounts that I will be putting up on Kindle in a week or two. Title will be The Gerould Family of New Hampshire in the Civil War: Two Diaries and a Memoir, which is just what it says on the tin. More on that soon.
Ta, L.
I was recently asked to be their guest subject for a week on WikiTree Challenge, to which I said, Sure! What is it? (Prior guests include C.J. Cherryh, so I suspect more than one SF fan among the organizers.)
WikiTree Challenge turns out to be a sort of cross between Roots and Time Team, where the volunteer participants get together for one week to crowdsource genealogy research, and compete to see how much they can learn. They start with a basis of information supplied by their subject, of which I had quite a bit in some quadrants of my family tree, and almost none in others.
https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1424626/...
Anyone can play, just sign up and learn. International participants are especially welcome. (I have known roots in France, Germany, and the British Isles; who knows what else.)
Well, and the Neanderthal thing, which of course I had checked when it became available, but that goes back a bit farther than documented sources can reach. I'm not far from European average for those genes, it turns out to little surprise, 2% or less. My maternal haplogroup is H6a1b. I don't know the paternal because I haven't been able to persuade either of my brothers to get tested, drattit. (23 & Me data.)
This invitation had a knock-on effect as I scrounged back through what family documents I had on hand, and was reminded of a project I meant to get to Someday. "Someday" turned out to be the last month or so, and has resulted in an e-chapbook of historical accounts that I will be putting up on Kindle in a week or two. Title will be The Gerould Family of New Hampshire in the Civil War: Two Diaries and a Memoir, which is just what it says on the tin. More on that soon.
Ta, L.
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I hadn't heard of WikiTree Challenge before but I LOVE ancestry research, so I will certainly have to check it out. To me it is endlessly interesting to discover the human stories behind the names and dates. From family who hunted cross country for a cousin's killer, an epic court battle that went all the way to the US Supreme Court in the 1890s/1900s, to the mystery of an African American relative who died at 21 in the early 1900s and her death certificate cause of death only says "doctor refused to sign". The stories and circumstances have endless variety that never cease to entice me to research and learn more.
Sandy wrote: "I hadn't heard of WikiTree Challenge before but I LOVE ancestry research, so I will certainly have to check it out. To me it is endlessly interesting to discover the human stories behind the names ..."Yes. All this fine-grained history tends to get erased out of formal histories, which I feel falsifies them to some degree. And yet, limited time and attention, 24/7 is a hard limit, etc. Selection is required, but readers need to realize that selection is happening in the first place. Even a little acquaintance with first-hand contemporary accounts can help with that; one can then at least extrapolate.
I'm now old enough that I can see the simplification process being applied to events in my own lifetime, which feels deeply weird. No, actually, the entire population of US teenagers in the 1960s was not at Woodstock...
Ta, L.
23 & Me. They seemed very comprehensive.
L.