By now, you may have noticed that I love using WikiTree. I do my original research primarily using my Ancestry membership (which is expensive and not an option for everyone), and then take what I learn about each family/relative and craft it into a biographical profile on WikiTree so that it is easier for me to share my research with others.
If you see me mention a relative in a Substack post, odds are that I’ve linked their name to their WikiTree profile - for example, Thomas Henderson Murray (about 1779 - about 1837), who I am hoping to trace back to Scotland.
Another practice I enjoy is creating “Free Space” pages for the unique local histories and published family histories that I run across in my research. Here are three WikiTree pages that explain what these are and how to make them:
And if you visit my profile, Callin-50, I have a “Local Histories” section linking to the various Free Space pages I’ve made or contributed to. Like this one:
So What?
When America’s first Centennial approached (1876, for those who need a number) it became a trend for towns and counties, especially across the more recently settled MidWest, to publish large histories of their town or county, and they often included biographical sketches of the most prominent citizens. Despite hiring historians and scholars to edit these massive projects, they rarely met any kind of academic standard - they cited no sources or primary records and often relied on close relatives or (in some cases) the subjects of the biographies to submit the sketches to the editors.
At best, these biographies give us a sense of what these “prominent citizens” thought about themselves, or how their families saw themselves in local society. They are often useful for tracking down primary sources, and they often provide a detailed list of ancestors and siblings for the person featured in the sketch.
At their worst… these biographies can be full of errors, bias, and a near-constant elevation of white men with property over the rest of the residents of a given area. The erasure of the contributions of women and ethnic minorities to these towns and counties, combined with the almost universal reinforcement of the myth of “rugged individualism” that “built our country from nothing,” puts the racism and casual superiority of the men of that time on full display.
But…
Even the worst inaccuracies contained in the pages of these books can give a researcher vital clues to learning about their family history. And that is what makes them important tools in our toolbox.
Why WikiTree?
There are a lot of places where you can find local histories - Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, Google Books, FamilySearch.org, and Ancestry collect a lot of them. The benefit of a Space on WikiTree is that researchers can create links to all of those repositories and include information about the reliability of the information, as well as provide source citation text that can easily be pasted into any WikiTree profiles you might be making. Example:
The Wiki platform also has a few neat features that make it easier to see, at a glance, how many individual profiles cite or link to a source. If the source citation text includes a link to the Free Space page for that source, any profile that cites that source using that text will appear at the “What Links Here” link for that Free Space page. Users can also use Categories that can build an index of related pages, so you can see profiles based on their family groups or local areas, or even Categories for “People named in this source,” if that is useful.
The Down Side
You might be leery of “trusting” what is on WikiTree - or you may be one of the people I see complaining online that you had an unpleasant interaction with another contributor or a profile manager. These are valid concerns - and your experience may vary wildly from the experiences of others. But there are a lot of us out here who want to help - never be afraid to ask for help.
Using any collaborative platform - any user-editable web page - will inevitably lead you to cross paths with people who don’t behave the way you expect or desire. You mustn’t let common human behaviors (including, perhaps, your own) discourage you from learning how to use a potentially helpful tool. But the behavior of other people is often a mask for the real problem, which can be boiled down to a fear of the loss of control over your work.
The real downside for many people is that posting on a collaborative platform means putting work into something that you don’t have absolute control over. That’s the trade-off you have to make if you want other people to benefit from your work - they have to be able to access it. In my experience, though, whether I’m editing Wikipedia, WikiTree, or any of the other work- and hobby-related wikis I’ve used over the years, it is far more common for the work I do to be ignored than it is for it to be vandalized or altered by another user.
This is why I’m so grateful to see you reading my work here - sometimes it can get lonely doing this kind of work, and seeing you regular subscribers enjoying my efforts is more rewarding than you might think!
Wow, Tad, thank you! I too have been frightened away from adding to Wikitree with that sense than I’m doing it wrong. I think you’re spot on about the control issues. Tweaks, edits, and commentaries are as old as the gilt marginalia of illuminated bible pages.