WeRelate talk:Support/2011

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European farm names in "place" [2 January 2011]

In parts of France, Germany, and Norway the farm name is often a subdivision of the village. When we are going though the 5. Place tab for a GEDCOM, is it okay to make these farm names part of the place? Or would you prefer we leave that off and stick to the village name only?

In some parts of Germany the husband who marries a wife with a large farm will take the wife's farm name as his surname. Does this affect the answer any? Diltsgd 17:48, 2 January 2011 (EST)

The Place pages are used for indicating a standardized geographic location which can be used in mapping and other applications. In WeRelate, we actually have accomodation for two versions of the place name: the version you used in your gedcom and the name of the Place page you matched it to. Your version is the one that is displayed. Thus your farm name should still display on the Person pages. It is not necessary to create Place pages below the village level. --Judy (jlanoux) 19:39, 2 January 2011 (EST)

Source page titling help page questions [24 January 2011]

I'd like clarification/confirmation/opinion on two things that should be made clear on Help:Source page titles:

In choosing the place to use in a geographically-named place title, use the name as it was either 1) in 1900 if that year is covered by the records (because this will match the place name page) or 2) the most recent year covered by the source. (In the vast majority of cases, this should be the place name as used on the source itself.)
For example:
  • 1850 census for Hampshire County, which was then in Virginia but is now in West Virginia should be titled: Hampshire, Virginia, United States. 1850 U.S. Census Population Schedule.
  • Vital records for Massachusetts towns that start in the 1600s but continue to 1850 should use the place name as it existed in 1850, i.e. Andover, Essex, Massachusetts, United States. Vital records to the End of the Year 1849.
(And if you have an opinion on what to do about pre-1776 US place names for source titles and event places, that's a rule we haven't tackled yet either.)
  • Second, the section on geographically oriented sources as currently written says "Any authoring agency/organization should still be listed in the author field on the source page, but omitting it from the title field will keep the page title from becoming too long." This rule dates to before we had citations created on person/family pages. Do we still want these "authoring agencies" in the "author" field so they show up in citations? In the sources with which I am familiar, this is not a good rule (because the "authoring agency" is more often actually the publisher, inserted by FHL so it can fill the field), and leaving it blank so as to default to the geographic title is easier, cleaner, and more correct, but I don't know what's the best generally applicable advice.

Thanks!--Amelia 20:18, 20 January 2011 (EST)

I think it might be hard to get one answer to the second question. A problem example might help illustrate the difficulty better. However, considering for example, Source:Woburn, Middlesex, Massachusetts, United States. Woburn Records of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, the decision by Edward Johnson to display dates in modern years was flawed in my opinion. Likewise, George Tolman in Source:Concord, Middlesex, Massachusetts, United States. Births, Marriages, and Deaths, 1635-1850 (who is not even listed) printed the records in their original order instead of alphabetizing them, thereby allowing the reader to take clues from the context. Anything that George Bowman of Mayflower Descendant does is generally highly reliable. So even on some sources that classify as government/church records the compiler/editor/publisher affected the work, and that would seem to deserve some notice? --Jrich 22:31, 20 January 2011 (EST)
I agree with you as far as humans go. (And Woburn citation correctly has Johnson listed.) I'm more concerned with the advice to leave something like "Town of Concord" (used in the Concord records you mention) in the title field. FHL (from whence these fields were populated) does that all the time - list "clerk of the town" or X Historical Society in the author field - as far as I can tell entities that held or paid for publication of the records, not ones that made substantive decisions about anything. I'm wondering maybe if the solution is instead to note that tendency and that it's acceptable (recommended) to remove what appears to be artifacts of FHL's system rather than actual authors (something that's often obvious by looking at the FHL catalog or Ancestry entry).--Amelia 23:29, 20 January 2011 (EST)
Well, I am not sure this issue is worth this much discussion. I personally have no problem changing what the FHL says. I frequently find various digital libraries list a different authors and in some cases I have had to read through the introduction to find where the names came from because they weren't on the title page or cover. My point above was to express my opinion against using nothing, because even compiling records that were collected by the government is a lot of work, and the compiler can have a big impact on the usefulness of the final work. There is an example with the Plymouth Colony Records where George Bowman's version corrected the year assigned to the first page of birth records from that had which had been used by Nathaniel Shurtleff, so even though nominally the same records, the expertise of the compiler gave different results. (Fortunately Bowman published his in a magazine so there was never any conflict over the source naming.)
However, in the case of Concord, Google lists the author as "By Concord (Mass.), George Tolman". Worldcat.org does not list any author. The introduction says that the "great burden of investigation and labor has fallen upon Mr. George Tolman", but also that "all the members of the committee appointed by the town have given much interest and a good deal of general supervision to the work". So naming just George Tolman does not seem entirely correct. Of course, you could put all 5 of the members of the committee, but you have to search the innards of the introduction to find their names.
It seems to me that the easiest rule would be to refer to the title page. One would presume that this is more or less how the creators thought they should be named. In this case, the Concord book only says "Printed by the Town". I suppose you could justify an empty author field since strictly speaking nobody is named in an author, compiler, or editor role (I have seen "Anonymous" used in these cases), but I think "The Town" is actually appropriate here (though I might change it to "Concord, Mass", since out of context "the town" is somewhat unclear).
I'd expect mksmith has some good advice. In the end, I don't think it is all that important unless the value is actually misleading or confusing. --Jrich 09:32, 21 January 2011 (EST)
Almost the first rule/principal I remember from my first cataloging course (in 1968) is that in determining a publication's author, title, publisher, and publication date, primacy is given -- wherever possible -- to the title page and the verso. That takes care of 99% of the cases one comes across. You call it whatever the publisher called it and you give credit to whomever was given credit by the book itself. And publishers know that and they nearly always follow the rules they are expected to follow.
"Form" entries are an attempt to regularize the "author" entries for (mostly) government publications, which is of great interest to us here, obviously. Form entries are determined by the catalogers at the Library of Congress, and they follow a fixed and predictable pattern -- a form. And since they considered and solved the great majority of possible problems decades ago, one usually is safe merely looking up a title in the LC catalog online and checking to see how they did it. I think that really leaves only self-published works, which are more common in genealogy than in most other fields. Do-it-yourselfers don't always know what they're doing in this regard, unfortunately, but it's seldom difficult to apply the usual methods and produce an author/title entry: "If the publisher knew what he was doing, this is what it would look like," to quote one of my profs.
I know that on WeRelate I've always tended to push the "library" way of doing bibliographic things, but that's because nearly all these questions were discussed and a method arrived at back when libraries were still considering replacing their gas lights with electricity. Professor-types don't always agree, and the (for instance) British system doesn't always agree with the U.S. system, but bibliographical cataloging -- which is what all this is about -- is one of those areas where I truly believe one is best off relying on the experts, and not reinventing the wheel. --MikeTalk 14:05, 24 January 2011 (EST)

Resizing image and adding caption [24 January 2011]

Is there a way to both resize and image and add a caption? I've tried doing the link as [[image page|frame|caption|350px]] and as [[image page|350px|frame|caption]], but each time the resizing is ignored. On a related note, is there a way to add a caption without having a frame? Thanks! -- Amy (Ajcrow) 11:11, 23 January 2011 (EST)


According to this page, "An image with frame always ignores the size specification". You can use thumb instead to resize and add a caption. [[image title|150px|thumb|left|caption]] (where left specifies the alignment, you can also use right or center).

You could also use the gallery tag, but that resizes the images automatically to the same size. I don't know of a way to add a caption without a frame unless you use tables like this:

{|
|[[image title|50px|left]]
|-
|caption
|}

--Jennifer (JBS66) 11:30, 23 January 2011 (EST)

This has been kind of bugging me, too. I've been putting up Source pages that include the original of the source (a letter or a deed or whatever) in the form of a string of images, taken with my camera at the courthouse. I want to make them large enough to be able to see what the image is without blowing it up -- and the gallery version just isn't large enough for that. And I want them to appear in a few rows down the page, maybe four or five images per row. Is there a reason a framed image has to ignore resizing?
At the same time, I want photos I post to have an obvious caption visible (which implies a frame, right?) without the user having to mouse-over the image -- which isn't always an obvious thing to do. But I can't even figure out how to get them push over flush-left! They want to float to the right of whatever text is at the top of the text box. I've read through everything I can find in the Help system at Wikipedia, but image-handling is still a problem area for me. --MikeTalk 14:14, 24 January 2011 (EST)

Entering Biblical genealogies [29 January 2011]

Has anybody started a Biblical genealogy? How would someone go about entering the genealogies in the Bible since hardly anybody, if anybody, had surnames?

If that is not acceptable at WeRelate, is there a nice wiki plug-in for wikimedia (mediawiki?) to start my own? Since this site already has some traffic, I thought this might be a great place to begin a wiki project for Biblical figures, starting with the genealogies in Genesis and connecting them, wherever possible, throughout the whole Bible. It would be fun, and a whole bunch of people could join into the fun. OR, has this already been done and where would I find it?--Rghollenbeck 08:19, 27 January 2011 (EST)

I think the policy is against creating pages for "people that cannot be linked to modern lines. This includes biblical people (according to Wikipedia:Descent from antiquity there are no known lines right now that extend back to the bible), mythological people, fictional characters, etc." Linkage, meaning based on academically provable documentation. There are rather long discussions on this at WeRelate talk:Watercooler/Archive 2009#What do we do with Adam and Eve? and WeRelate talk:Watercooler/Archive 2009#Non-traditional Genealogy - Adam & Eve Part II, and probably other places too. --Jrich 12:21, 27 January 2011 (EST)

I depart from the "people who can't be linked to modern lines" requirement. In de-duplicating ancient spaces, I've dealt with a lot of people who are definitely historical but definitely not (as yet) linked to modern lines. This process has allowed me to tease out and delete a bunch of hypothetical/fictional/imaginary material. WeRelate also allows for the expression of in-law type linkages which may be more apt to reach into antiquity. So Roman and other ancient genealogy, in its way, can be helpful.
That said, I have done a lot of deleting of people who are purely biblical or mythological - Adam and Eve, etc. I observe a standard of accepted historical existence outside any particular religious or cultural tradition. I also expect that evidence for these folks would appear in well used and well accepted places - commonly wikipedia. --Jrm03063 14:07, 27 January 2011 (EST)

I understand and appreciate the requirement that the genealogies link to modern lines. The standard of documentation needed for this kind of genealogy doesn't quite lend itself to biblical genealogies. However, I find them interesting, and it seems to me there ought to be a wiki venue for such genealogies even if it is not here.

I have MediaWiki at my website and I could start such a wiki if I knew this wasn't something available somewhere else. Last night, I searched Google for over an hour and did find a place called BibleWiki, but it wasn't really a wiki. It was a static website.

1. Does anybody know of an existing wiki that is set up for genealogy which does Biblical people?

2. Are there any genealogy plug-ins available anywhere that are compatible with MediaWiki?

Thanks!

Rghollenbeck 00:35, 28 January 2011 (EST)


I have run across this site before: CreationWiki Biblical genealogy. I'm not sure about it's scope, but it might be worth a look. --Jennifer (JBS66) 05:11, 28 January 2011 (EST)


Once upon a time, I stumbled on a wiki where the creators wanted to track Mohammed and his genealogy. Try searching for that and see what else has developed there, if it is still active. I wish I could remember the name of the website, but I must have found it by searching on wiki and genealogy or something similar. Vague memory says that 'People' might have been in the name. Good luck. --DataAnalyst 10:56, 29 January 2011 (EST)

Navigating [28 January 2011]

I did a search for sources by a certain author, clicked on one of the hits, opened the doc and edited it, and saved it. Now how can I get back to the list of sources by that author? When I click on the Back button, it opens the edit box again. I can't see anywhere else on the page to go back to the list of search results. Bakerbh 11:14, 28 January 2011 (EST)

It is easiest to work in several browser windows. Use the right-click option and open in a separate window or tab. Then your original list remains for you to work through.--Judy (jlanoux) 11:37, 28 January 2011 (EST)
Both Firefox and Internet Explorer have a small downward arrow next to the back button that pops up a small list of recent sites. Besides allowing you to jump back three screens in one step (thus skipping the edit screen, and also the display screen of the source where you hit the edit button, all the way back to your list of sources), it also is useful in orienting yourself since it provides a list of screens you have visited. Also, both browsers offer a history option where you can bring up a searchable history in a separate window, and depending on how your preferences are set, it can possibly help you return to a site you visited even several days prior. These are features built into the browsers and thus apply to any website, not just WeRelate. The above suggestion is also excellent. --Jrich 12:08, 28 January 2011 (EST)

Thank you. Very helpful. Bakerbh 12:12, 28 January 2011 (EST)

obits in personal history text box [28 January 2011]

Especially if I've used an obituary for a source of death information, I like to put the actual obituary in the personal history text box. But should that be done if the surviving heirs could be still living - such as in a 2007 obituary? That obituary has already been published in newspapers and I really would hate to leave it out. Names listed in the text as survivors would not show up in a search so perhaps it is acceptable to include the obit. Is there an established rule about this? --Janiejac 19:42, 28 January 2011 (EST)

I wrngled with this question for a while. But my conclusion is that they have published this info in a newspaper so it really can't be considered private. I include the obits. --Judy (jlanoux) 20:42, 28 January 2011 (EST)

One thing that might come into play, however, is copyright. Some newspapers claim copyright on the obits they publish. Pre-1923 would be in public domain, but modern ones might not. I'm not certain that publishing an obituary in its entirety would be considered "fair use." -- Amy (Ajcrow) 20:53, 28 January 2011 (EST)

I have seen large writeups for the death of well-known persons probably written by the newspaper staff but what I'm currently working with is much more likely info furnished by the immediate family for publishing in the local small town weekly.
I believe I would try to distinguish between the two types. If the staff wrote it, yes it could be copyrighted; if they merely publish what someone else wrote, their claim would be questionable. But my concern was about naming the living survivors in the text window. I thought WeRelate might have a 'rule' about that. --Janiejac 21:21, 28 January 2011 (EST)

Dan Hamrick wrote his professional view of this copyright question in his RootsWeb-Help-L Archives message in 2000: "As a former newspaper editor and publisher with some knowledge of copyright law, I want to address the issue of copyright and obituaries. First, if the obituary is, as one writer suggested, simply a form that recites the facts, it may not reach the unique creation test of copyright law and therefore would not be legally copyrighted. However, most newspapers copyright the entire newspaper. So caution should be advised. If a writer went to some lengths to tell the story of the life of someone who died, I have little doubt it could be copyrighted. A biographical sketch would get similar treatment, even though the person may or may not be dead. However, on the practical side. I think few newspapers would pursue a copyright infringement suit over a standard obituary." You can press on the link above for the full content of his message.

I think the more legitimate concern would be revealing identifying information on a living individual mentioned in the content of the obituary. It might be wise to visible delete that identifiable information, but leave in the source citation of the record for those who may want to do a more thorough independent search of their own.

Just my viewpoint. --BobC 22:56, 28 January 2011 (EST)


What to do when the person's middle name is the name they were known by? [11 February 2011]

My grandfather was named John Ellis McClure, and he always went by his middle name, "Ellis." If I create a page for him as John McClure, how will people ever find him who only knew him as Ellis McClure? Of course this is a dilemma because some researchers, who might not have known him in life, might only know him from some official documents and records as "John McClure," and not know that he went by Ellis; while other researchers might only know him from other official documents and records as "Ellis McClure," and be unaware that his formal first name was John. Ellis wasn't his nickname; it was his lawful middle name and the name he used in life. What is the right way to proceed?--Norajames 11:10, 11 February 2011 (EST)

In the given name field, you should put John Ellis. The page will be named as John McClure but the page name is getting more and more invisible in most uses as the software develops. Any search will match either or both of the given names. Thus if somebody searches for Ellis McClure it will match as long as Ellis is a word in the Given name field, even if not the only or first one. If you really wanted to you could add a Alternate name for Ellis McClure but practically I don't think it will make much of a difference as long as Ellis is somewhere in the Given name field. You can also add a comment in the Personal History section that he went by Ellis. --Jrich 13:29, 11 February 2011 (EST)

Thanks, appreciate the response! Makes sense to me.--Norajames 13:38, 11 February 2011 (EST)


Help needed Salt Lake City Directories [7 March 2011]

I have been building a chart to clarify the dates for the films. I added the book numbers for the Family History Library as well as the Utah State Archives.

I now have a question about how late should I go in entering the books. Since the Archives has a separate catalog entry fro each book year, to link to the catalog it takes one entry per year. Should I go up to 2000 or 2002?

The title is Polk's Salt Lake City Directory. Thanks Hardestypn--Hardestypn 20:18, 25 February 2011 (EST)

I am not sure what you are looking for. I assume you read City Directories above. Also, I am assuming you are referring to Source:Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah, United States. Salt Lake City Directory and not Source:R. L. Polk and Company. Salt Lake City Blue Book or Source:Salt Lake City (Utah) City Directories or the other that seem similar. I am not familiar with that source so the significance of 2000 or 2002 is unknown to me. It seems if you do to 2000, why not two more years to finish? But this is a wiki, contribute what you want, and if somebody else comes along that thinks more should have been done, they will add it. --Jrich 14:35, 28 February 2011 (EST)

Thanks for your response. However, the entry I have been working on is [Salt Lake City directory embracing a complete alphabetical list of business firms and private citizens, a classified list of all trades, professions and pursuits, a miscellaneous directory of city and county officers, churches, public and private schools, banks and incorporated institutions]. My question is how long of table do you want? It is up to 1955. However the Family History Library has directories to 2000 and the Utah State Library has up to 2002.

I'm adding information on the catalog, not on on citing a directory. When I cite sources, I go to Evidence Explained : Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace by Elizabeth Shown Mills. --Hardestypn 18:15, 28 February 2011 (EST)

The entry you are working on is exactly the one I said that I assumed you were working on. I gave the intra-WeRelate short hand and you gave the full URL.
However there are multiple source pages for Polk's Salt Lake Directory, or so it seems. Even more than the two others I cited. So, somebody interested in cleaning up the source page, that has some knowledge of that source, might also consider combining these apparently disparate source pages into one, if it makes sense. Or if they are different, perhaps adding a short discussion on the differences that would help the reader decide which to use, or which they did use.
Personally, I don't care how long the table is. You are working on this, I assume you had a reason for starting this project. What makes sense to you? What will be useful to a reader? As I hinted, if you stop at 1955, and somebody else wants it to go to 2000, they can always do it themselves.
Nothing in my answer was addressing citation of directories. Although the discussion I pointed out started with the phrase "citing City Directories", it was really talking about how to name and organize source pages for directories. I only included it because I wasn't sure I understood your question. Ignore it if it doesn't seem pertinent.
Following my mother's advice, I've got nothing to say about ESM. --Jrich 20:03, 28 February 2011 (EST)

If I understand correctly, you have already added up to 1955 in this table, but you are considering adding approximately 45 more lines (one for each year). I, personally, would rather see a link to a search screen at the Division of Archives and Records Service that you are using, rather than a long table. Furthermore, I can see what the Family History Library contains by clicking on their link in the repositories section. --Jennifer (JBS66) 14:47, 4 March 2011 (EST)


Jennifer, I would prefer one link, however each record is cataloged separately. I couldn't find a good way to communicate the site to go to. Also, before I started, the Family History film numbers were listed in numerical order without dates. I thought dates would be helpful.--Hardestypn 12:01, 5 March 2011 (EST)

This link seems to begin at the city directory for 1890 and displays them in chronological order link to chronological listing. To get to the next set, you can press Next at the bottom or top of that screen. Additionally, this link (another chronological link) from FHLC shows the directories in chronological order as well. I just thought it may save a lot of work adding a link, rather than additional entries to your table. --Jennifer (JBS66) 12:12, 5 March 2011 (EST)

The link isn't working now for me. I'm not sure what you were referring to. Does it work for you?--Hardestypn 14:59, 5 March 2011 (EST)

Oh, it looks like the link timed out... What I did originally is that I clicked on your link for 1890 and then pressed Nearby items on shelf and used that resulting link. --Jennifer (JBS66) 15:10, 5 March 2011 (EST)
Yes those links always times out, that why I went to the catalog and to the permalink. any other suggestions? (Hardestypn)
My only other suggestion is this link: permalink. It's a permalink that searches beginning at call# 979.2 SA 3P (Salt Lake city directory for 1890). --Jennifer (JBS66) 06:33, 7 March 2011 (EST)

Wikipedia text and WeRelate links [26 February 2011]

When text is pulled from Wikipedia using the WP template, how is some of the text then linked to WeRelate pages? Further, why do some links go to Wikipedia when there is a WR page with that title? For example, on Ulysses Grant's page, there is text pulled from WP. The links to Zachary Taylor and Robert E. Lee go to their pages here on WeRelate. However, the link to William Tecumseh Sherman goes to WP, even though he has WeRelate page. Just trying to understand the mechanics of it all. -- Amy (Ajcrow) 08:14, 26 February 2011 (EST)

It's my understanding that the WR agent creates internal links to any other WR pages that have wp- templates for the WP page that is being linked to. In other words, Ulysses Grant's entry is trying to link to Wikipedia:Zachary Taylor, and there's already Person:Zachary Taylor (4), which pulls a wp-Zachary Taylor template from that page. So the agent knows to link straight to the WR page. But it can only do that if the page exists. Sherman's WR page didn't get a WP template until a year after Ulysses Grant's template was populated. The templates are only refreshed once or twice a year, and apparently it hasn't been done since Sherman had a template.--Amelia 09:49, 26 February 2011 (EST)
I see what it's doing now. Thanks for the explanation. -- Amy (Ajcrow) 10:15, 26 February 2011 (EST)

Links in author field [28 February 2011]

Amelia made a comment on a recent edit to this source that I've wondered myself... "can we link to authors?". I recall reading somewhere that we shouldn't put a link to the author's person page in the Source author field. There was another user that wanted to do this recently, so I thought I'd bring it up here. Will the extra code that creates a link get in the way of using the "author" information from that field in other ways, like citations or reports?--Jennifer (JBS66) 05:18, 28 February 2011 (EST)

I checked some citations on pages last night and they seem to still be working, so I've left the link on Savage - if anyone spots a problem with that cite, please make a note. The link can also go elsewhere, that's just a handy place for it on a page where the author isn't necessarily related to the content.--Amelia 08:51, 28 February 2011 (EST)

I recently did this for William Cutter's sources, and have done it in the past for a family genealogy I have used. It is less obvious in Cutter's case, but in family genealogies, I think this is especially desirable as it often helps to understand an author's motivation and relation to various people the author is writing about. From a practical standpoint, the unprocessed link code shows up in result lists returned for source searches. For an experienced WeRelate user, this is not really a problem, but for a newbie, it could be confusing. When done for the second or third author, it messes up the citation because WeRelate tries to reorganize the name from last,first to first-last when building the citation, so if you did something like [[link|last, first]], things gets jumbled. This was easily worked around by putting the second and third author as first name last with no comma, to agree with how they want to end up in the citation. No rearrangement occurs if there is no comma, but of course, this means if the order of authors changes, you may have to adjust the alias of your link. --Jrich 08:57, 28 February 2011 (EST)

I plan to make some changes to how sources are indexed in the next month or so. I'll adjust the indexing so that Person page links in author fields show up without the link code in search results.--Dallan 09:44, 28 February 2011 (EST)

Find/add links on Family Pages [10 March 2011]

A family page has fields for one husband and one wife. However, below each, is a link to "Find/Add another husband" and "Find/Add another wife". I think this is misleading. I have seen on more then one occasion a person misinterpreting this and adding a second spouse on the same family page. I can't think of a reason these links are needed, can they be removed or modified? --Jennifer (JBS66) 07:30, 5 March 2011 (EST)

Out of 18000 pages I have created two or three that use this because there are more than one candidate for a spouse with some evidence for each and no definite proof yet, such as Family:Nathaniel Moore and Sarah Vail (1). If you create a separate Family page for each, you end up with duplicate children. If you don't put both, incoming GEDCOMS won't match and will create a separate page. --Jrich 09:13, 5 March 2011 (EST)
I have asked to have this changed too. It is causing the endless duplicate list and simply creating muddled families for someone else to clean up. If the spouse isn't known, it should be left as unknown. Then in the narrative, one can insert links to the Person pages for the two candidates while information is being gathered. Incoming gedcoms should create a separate family page so that the suspect information can be examined and merged properly or removed as indicated. It is important to keep newcomers with internet gedcoms from overwriting pages that have already been cleaned up. Remember also that we have blocked gedcom of early people to help prevent this problem. Creating family pages with speculative links makes WeRelate part of the problem since someone will export them and spread them further. I was hoping we would be part of the solution in weeding out fantasy families. --Judy (jlanoux) 12:10, 7 March 2011 (EST)
Ok, if there are just two valid occurrences out of 18000, then the confusion is causes isn't worth it. I'll remove the link over the weekend or early next week.--Dallan 14:18, 10 March 2011 (EST)
Just my opinion: I think this is the wrong decision. Take the above case. GEDCOMS are coming in saying either Nathaniel Moore and Sarah Jackson or saying Nathaniel Moore and Sarah Vail because the researcher stops looking as soon as they get an answer. In this case, either answer would have what is normally very good proof, so you can't really blame the researcher. Very few webpages I see list both.
If Sarah Vail and Sarah Jackson are merely links on the Family page titled Nathaniel Moore and Unknown, how will the GEDCOM match saying one or the other match to the existing page? Pretty soon, you'll have 3 pages all representing a single marriage. Of course each will get a copy of the children.
Both Sarah Vail and Sarah Jackson were proven people. A Person page needs to exist for both. My personal belief is that Sarah Vail died young, but I have no proof. Genealogy is a work in progress and at any given time having multiple candidates may be the best we can do. It is not a lack of research or a mistake in this case, it simply isn't completely resolved, yet.
Doing what is proposed above will rule out the possibility of having candidates in a way that the search engine can recognize. What new way would there be to represent them? --Jrich 15:01, 10 March 2011 (EST)
I'm thinking the family page will still have the ability to reference multiple in-question spouses, but it will be an "advanced feature" -- so newcomers won't be confused by the find/add link. Here's how you'll still be able to have multiple husbands/wives on a Family page for the rare cases when it's needed: Create the family page and add one of the in-question spouses as usual; create a Person page for the other in-question spouse; edit that Person page and add the Family page as a spouse-family. Now both in-question spouses show up on the Family page. It's not as convenient as it currently is, but it removes a confusion for newcomers, which I think is worth the cost.--Dallan 18:12, 10 March 2011 (EST)

Very workable. In fact, with that back door, I agree, it's better. Thanks. --Jrich 20:04, 10 March 2011 (EST)


How to handle jp2 files? [14 March 2011]

I have a fellow researcher who is giving me images of old documents and permission to post them here. But the files are type jp2. My default reader is Picasa and it won't open them saying the file is invalid. They will open in IE and in Quicktime, but won't save in a different format. Sender is using a Mac. The files say LizardTech jpeg 2000. Can anyone tell me how to get these converted to jpg so I can upload them? Thanks.--Judy (jlanoux) 12:00, 7 March 2011 (EST)

Do you have Photoshop Elements or other graphic editing program? You might be able to convert them using that. If you don't have a program like that, email one of the files to me and I'll take a crack at converting it. -- Amy (Ajcrow) 16:06, 8 March 2011 (EST)
There is a table of apps that work with it at wikipedia:JPEG 2000#Applications. --Jrich 17:14, 8 March 2011 (EST)
Thank you. FastStone Image viewer works well.--Judy (jlanoux) 00:24, 15 March 2011 (EDT)

Images of personal items like guitar, knitting, dishes? [13 March 2011]

1. Would it be OK to upload images of personal items such as a pocket watch, hand-made quilt or eyeglasses to include in a gallery of images pertaining to one person? 2. What about a decorative drop cap or decorative dividing line to use in an article you are writing. For example, a decorative line you might see to divide text in a 19th century newspaper used here to divide paragraphs in an article about 19th century history? --Cthrnvl 13:09, 7 March 2011 (EST)

One has to remember that we are dealing with web pages and not printed books. Web pages are rendered on the fly by a browser. You have little control and other users will not see things the same as you do.

1. Things like drop caps are not appropriate. It would have to be an image, and it would not necessarily display the way you expect to all users. The best rule is to keep things somewhat generic. Four dashes create a dividing line. Some people wanted something a little bolder and created the template {{blue bar}} which displays a little darker. Trying to use an image of a 19th century printer's device isn't a good idea because you can't control centering. Also the boxes and ads on the right will throw things off. 2. Images that are of importance genealogically would be appropriate for the page, but I wouldn't think all personal items would be appropriate. You have to consider that images slow the loading time. So I would suggest moderation here. Just one opinion. --Judy (jlanoux) 17:51, 7 March 2011 (EST)

I'm fine with images of personal items or a decorative dividing line, though Judy is right that given the way images render here, it might be difficult to implement a drop-cap. If you're going to be uploading a lot of images, the only thing I ask is that you compress them before uploading, to say 100-250K or so. That size should reduce the storage requirements and the bandwidth necessary to display the page without noticeably sacrificing the image quality. You can use Picassa or an image-editing application to do this.--Dallan 14:18, 10 March 2011 (EST)

That suits me fine. My intention is to post a thumbnail on WR with a link to a larger image offsite. I will add these guidelines to Help:Images. Thanks. --cthrnvl 12:15, 13 March 2011 (EDT)


Author's surname in source titles [15 March 2011]

I've come across sources that are titled two different ways when the author has a surname that includes prefixes such as van der. One has the beginning of the title as Source:Veen, Jan Van der. and the other has Source:Van Der Veen, Jan. Which version should we use? --Jennifer (JBS66) 13:44, 14 March 2011 (EDT)

I feel that surnames are names, whatever they may have originally meant. So I vote for Van Der Veen as the surname, alphabetizing under V. --Judy (jlanoux) 16:04, 14 March 2011 (EDT)
This also follows the way person and family pages are titled, so it's nice not to create a different system just for sources. I'll rename the books as I come across them and leave a note at Talk:Source Page Review Guide as well. Thanks, --Jennifer (JBS66) 06:47, 15 March 2011 (EDT)

Data Entry Style [19 March 2011]

Does WeRelate have anything like a data entry "style manual" or list of rules for Person and Family pages? I've seen a few hints linked to various fields (such as entering surnames with initial caps only) and discussion about locations (St. vs St vs Saint in city names) but would like to find a more comprehensive list in a central location.--Kirsten 13:15, 16 March 2011 (EDT)

Good point. There's Help:Date Conventions for dates, but it's not easy to find. And as you say, there are discussions of formats for places (lowest to highest jurisdiction, include country, don't include the word "county"), but there's not a central "Style guide". Is anyone up for starting a Help:Style guide page and linking to it from Help:Contents?--Dallan 22:04, 16 March 2011 (EDT)

Dallan: I could probably rough out a preliminary skeleton based on the rules I use for my own data entry and that could then be edited to reflect WeRelate preferences but it would have to be a Word document and might raise as many issues as it answers. I don't know if that would be useful--or perhaps someone else could do a better job.--Kirsten 19:18, 17 March 2011 (EDT)


Save it as a text (*>txt) file, then cut and paste in a WeRelate edit window. --Jrich 20:45, 17 March 2011 (EDT)
Or you could avoid saving it as a text file by copying the text directly from MS Word (highlight the text you want to copy with your mouse and press Control-C), and pasting it into a WeRelate edit window (press Control-V).--Dallan 21:05, 17 March 2011 (EDT)

Yes, I could do it as a .txt file but that would prohibit much of the formatting and make it a lot less readable.--Kirsten 00:17, 18 March 2011 (EDT)

Wiki formatting is different than word formatting, so the formatting will have to be redone one way or another. How about if you copy it over without the formatting; others can add the formatting in later.--Dallan 18:42, 19 March 2011 (EDT)

matching sources during upload [18 March 2011]

I've just uploaded a very small chart and am struggling to link to known sources so I won't have all the 'MySources'. I entered several sources to WeRelate before the upload so they would be available to match to if it didn't happen automatically. But even though I think I linked to the proper source, the program doesn't show me that - it still shows me 'MySource' and I can't see what I matched to in order to verify that I have it right. I think it should show me what I did link to once I have done that. Am I doing something wrong or this this something in the program that should be changed? --Janiejac 22:11, 18 March 2011 (EDT)

Sources are not matched automatically. On the Source tab you can select a source to match to. Right click on the source line and you can get an option to manually match with the correct source. There are several other options on the right click menu. --Judy (jlanoux) 22:25, 18 March 2011 (EDT)
Thanks, Judy. I had not noticed that option in the drop down window to view the matched source. I thought it should automatically show when I selected it. Perhaps this option should be pointed out in the instructions for people like me who don't look. . . --Janiejac 00:44, 19 March 2011 (EDT)

Map Error [19 March 2011]

There is an error that comes up on a map location. My relative was born in Waverley, New South Wales, Australia - a Sydney suburb. The system insists that Waverley is in Victoria, Australia. I don't know how to correct.

There is a Glen Waverley, a suburb of Melbourne, in Victoria, Australia.--Rchallberg 10:37, 19 March 2011 (EDT)

I added coordinates to the page Waverley, New South Wales, Australia. Make sure you use the correct, fully-qualified place name, there are several Waverley's in Australia. You did not mention which relative you were working with, so I wasn't able to make sure everything was working for that person. --Jrich 11:35, 19 March 2011 (EDT)

Description [16 May 2011]

This page is for answering new user questions.

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OLD questions have been archived at WeRelate talk:Support/2009, WeRelate talk:Support/2010, and WeRelate talk:Support/2011.
NEW questions? Please select "Add topic" from the menu within the top left block of this page.

I have my tree loaded and was exploring things in WeRelate. What does "Related Pages Not in Tree" mean? I looked at some of them are they are linked in my tree. The ones I looked at were the parents and ancestors of women who married into the family. I don't understand what to do with these "Related Pages Not in Tree".--Fmizrany 21:21, 9 May 2011 (EDT)

These are pages for people who are not in your tree, but connect to people who are in your tree. If you want, you can add the connected people to your tree by navigating to the page, clicking on the "Trees" link in the left-hand menu, and checking the tree you want to add them to. Then if you export your tree, the additional people will be included in the GEDCOM.--Dallan 19:32, 16 May 2011 (EDT)

Place pages for castles and other notable locations [9 April 2011]

There has been a recent discussion here about the creation of pages for notable locations such as Windsor Castle or Gloucester Cathedral. I know that our rules state that place pages should only be created for municipalities and cemeteries (which I happen to agree with). As I mentioned in the referenced conversation, I can understand creating pages for Westminster Abbey, because it was also a burial place. Beyond this, I believe we open up a can of worms. There are differing opinions about this, however, so I wanted to bring this up to a wider audience. --Jennifer (JBS66) 15:05, 30 March 2011 (EDT)


I have several plantations in the 1700-1800's that were named but were not around a town. Some of them have not survived although some people were probably buried there. I think that in this case a place page would be appropriate. Some of these plantations that did survive are associated with our famous forefathers. I would like to see coordinates if available or directions to the land where they were.--Suzyq 15:26, 30 March 2011 (EDT)


We need to realize that the time period should be considered. While we don't want to create a place page for modern tourist attractions, Jrm is working with Medieval people where the castle WAS a population center and functioned as a village. In this context, I believe they are appropriate for place pages. The same applies for large plantations in the rural areas. These were the population centers. --Judy (jlanoux) 16:13, 30 March 2011 (EDT)

That seems like a good rule to me: place pages for population centers such as historical castles and plantations are allowed.--Dallan 23:42, 9 April 2011 (EDT)

Collapsible templates [9 April 2011]

Does anyone know the coding that permits collapsible navigation template tables (i.e. the show/hide button here) and whether we can do the same thing here? --Amelia 20:01, 3 April 2011 (EDT)

I've tried working on this in the past but have not yet found a way to do this here. WP's collapsible templates use functions (like #if) that don't work with our version of MediaWiki. --Jennifer (JBS66) 11:07, 4 April 2011 (EDT)
Someone has just offered to possibly help do some javascript programming. I've asked them to look into adding collapsible templates.--Dallan 23:56, 9 April 2011 (EDT)

Surnames - German/Complex/Many spellings [11 April 2011]

Hi, just getting started. Found out about you from Dick Eastman. I've just written an article, soon to be published by the German Genealogy Group on Surnames. Cutting to the bottom line - Most complex surnames have been spelled many ways over the years. In my 20+ years of research, I have made the most progress in the past few years since genealogy sites allowed wildcards, which, when I tried to look up my surname, you do not. My name is Vornlocker. I have proven relatives, alive today, with the names Vornlocher, Farnlacher, Farnlucher. THe original surname in 1600 Austria was Vachenlueger or Fachenlueger, which, in old German, means the place where the wild pigs hide. I can't tell you how many variations took place over the centuries, due to spellings in baptism and marriage records, but my usual wildcard search is V*rnl*er or F*rnl*er.

I doubt I would have found half of my primary source documents without wildcards. May I suggest that, as a starter, you either allow users to search surnames by letter(s) or even better wildcards.

I believe the most difficult issue in joining the world into one tree is the different spellings of the same original surname. If you are interested I can site many examples from my tree - 6 of 8 great-grandparents were German, the seventh a Ryder (German/Dutch) , the eighth a Skidmore (Scidmore, Scudamore, etc.) Need I say more. Also, is your site available in German; several of my relatives don't speak English very well.

Thank you,

Bob Vornlocker--Bob 12:27, 11 April 2011 (EDT)

We're glad you've visited WeRelate. WeRelate search does support the ? wildcard. (One of the names I search for is Daubenmire. I'm sure you can imagine how many variant spellings there are of that German name!) Click on the Search link at the top of the screen and you will get more options. If you go to Search -> People and enter your search with the ? wildcard in the Surname field, you'll get a more meaningful search. Be certain to have either the "Exact & close match" or "Exact, close, & partial" option set on the search (at the bottom of the search screen). I just did such a search for D?benm?r and got results including Daubenmire and Doubenmier. -- Amy (Ajcrow) 12:58, 11 April 2011 (EDT)
The Surname pages allow equivalents to be established so that searching (non-exact) will match the equivalent as well as the specified form. I don't believe that it is intended to deal with translations, like Sontag->Sunday (a conversion done by some German emigrants to the U.S.), but it can link important alternate spellings of the same name for search purposes, like Surname:Sontag and Surname:Sonntag. On a person's page, you can add alternate names, but if the alternate spelling applies to many or most individuals having the same name, i.e., it is applicable to the surname itself, linking Surname pages is probably the better solution. --Jrich 14:01, 11 April 2011 (EDT)

I don't know that we have a policy on language per se. While the site tags and help contents are in english, nothing prevents your relatives from putting in materials in German. I work in a lot of Medieval material and it is not unusual for me to see material in German or Dutch (thankfully - I don't have to read it). If they're using and citing german sources, I would certainly expect the titles and content quotations of that material to be in German. Likewise, it probably would be perfectly sensible that sources written in German would also have "Source:" pages in German.
We would expect the primary name for anyone to be the person's name as they knew it - which, if they were German - would certainly be German! Different language forms of the same name are always acceptable as alternate forms of the name.
When folks of different languages are both working on a page - I suppose english would be preferred - but different language content certainly can coexist.
I would encourage anyone to at least try to participate. I think we would all like to know the strengths and failings of the site with respect to use by those for whom english is not their preferred language. --Jrm03063 13:23, 11 April 2011 (EDT)

I made some big changes to the search engine over the weekend and it looks like I broke wildcards :-(. The work sometimes. I'll fix it ASAP, either later today or early tomorrow. Bottom line is you should be able to use ? to match a single letter or * to match 0 or more letters. The name you search for must contain at least 3 non-wildcard characters. So R?d?r or ?yde* should work; Ry* would not.
Regarding other languages, although the site messages are in English, people who speak any language are welcome. We have a small but growing Dutch community for example, and a couple of German speakers.
Regarding alternate spellings, Jrich is correct that today, you would go to the Surname page for the name and add the alternate spellings there. I'm going to take this opportunity to announce that for the past couple of months I've been working with Ancestry.com to develop a similar-name finder. I'm hoping that this similar-name finder will eventually replace the related names functionality found on the Surname and Givenname pages. When we adopt the new similar-name finder, Surname pages would most likely stick around, but Givenname pages would most likely go away. The new similar-name finder will be similar to the current Surname and Givenname pages in that people will be able to customize which alternate spellings are searched for a specific name, but it should to a much better job of finding additional alternate spellings on its own. We'll be releasing this as "open source" code so that other websites can use it as well.--Dallan 18:01, 11 April 2011 (EDT)

Surname Variations [14 April 2011]

(In relation to the above question.) I would have to say that German > American surnames are my biggest problem. I have Hochwaerter that is all variations of Hovatter in America. No wildcard can help me with that! And also my family's inability to find our ancestors is pretty much centered around the fact that every child spelled their German surname differently in America (Abel, Auvil, Aubel, Able etc.) But my support question is how to make the surname page useful. In the section where you can add variations I have only seen "similar spellings". Where in my case I have categories: mis-spelled, translated to English, completely butchered, and no clue (Halberg>Hatfield). How should I note these variations in the surname page? (Example for Abel: Aubel|WeRelate - similar spelling) What is "WeRelate - similar spelling"? Is that a field that will someday be useful somehow in the search? I'm confused by the "WeRelate" part. For the surname Halberg - how should I add the variation Halfhill? Like this: Halfhill|English translation  ? And for Abel there is a unique problem in that most English speaking Abels from England never changed from Abel but most Abels from Germany changed their spelling. I don't even know where to start with that information on the Abel surname page. But it should be there.

This is why I am so excited about WeRelate - getting all this kind of thing on one page so we all don't have to keep re-inventing the wheel. Thanks everyone who is working on this site : )--cthrnvl 20:00, 12 April 2011 (EDT)

I have my share of well-butchered names. I haven't found a need for wildcards in searches because the search routine seems to take care of that for me. Setting up the surname pages with all of the known variants in use helps a lot for my non-English names. You don't need to include misspellings, only the variants that people used. Use your judgement on what to put behind the pipe. I think I just put "name alternate" or something. You won't see many with anything other than the ones the system stuck there because there hasn't been much need for people to intervene. Once Dallan streamlines the process, I'm hoping we can have a single surname page for the family of variants instead of so many separate pages. They would be more useful that way. --Judy (jlanoux) 21:44, 12 April 2011 (EDT)

I just tried Ho*t*er in the Search (Exact) for People and Hochwaerter was returned along with about 900 others. I don't think Exact and Close matches will ever replace wildcards. There is a big difference between finding the result of someone, the person who entered the record or the person transcribing the record, making a mistake and the actual variations of a Surname over the centuries. Since most people couldn't read or write in the 1500's to the 1700's, improving in the 1700's onward, what the priest/minister wrote in the record often became the person's name- that's how we got from Vachenlueger (a real name, being the name of a place, meaning "the place where the wild pigs hide" followed by -er which is customary for someone coming from a place) to Vornlocker/Vornlocher/Farnlacher (real names today). I suggest that, unless a real person used the spelling in an official document that they signed or, maybe, put their X to it (when they couldn't read/write), it's not a legitimate variation of the Surname.--Bob 10:33, 13 April 2011 (EDT)


Oh, maybe I don't understand wildcards so much. I thought they were only good for 1 letter. Thanks for everyone's input on surnames. --cthrnvl 18:40, 13 April 2011 (EDT)

The ? wildcard stands in for a single character. The * stands in for a multiple letters. So, in searching for the Hovatter name above, you can enter Ho*ter in the surname field and all names beginning with Ho- and ending with -ter will be returned. --Jennifer (JBS66) 18:46, 13 April 2011 (EDT)

I agree that the exact+close name matching option can't replace wildcards. But I think there's room for improvement in most websites' (including this website's) close name matching, so that they match similar spellings better. I'll post a couple of proposals for an improved close name match next week. I'd love to get people's feedback.--Dallan 19:14, 14 April 2011 (EDT)


Author format in source titles [18 April 2011]

I'm looking for clarification on the format for author's names in page titles. The format is Last name, Given name - but we omit information such as Dr., Rev. in the title, right? Should this info then go in the author field? --Jennifer (JBS66) 14:53, 13 April 2011 (EDT)

That's what I'd say.--Dallan 19:15, 14 April 2011 (EDT)
Our help says "Enter the first author in Surname, Given Name(s) order in the "Author" field (use the name as printed on the book, if you know)". I see a user renamed a few pages to a format like: Source:Goodhue, Rev. Jonathan E. History and Genealogy of the Goodhue Family in England and America to the year 1890, and the title page of the book does say "Rev. Jonathan E. Goodhue". If we don't want items such as Rev. and Dr. in the page title, then I think we'll need to indicate that on the Add>Source page and help. --Jennifer (JBS66) 07:47, 15 April 2011 (EDT)
What would you recommend? It seems like either way would work. As you say, we just need to document it.--Dallan 02:34, 17 April 2011 (EDT)
I just did a search for sources with the word "Rev" in the author field. I got back 30 matches. Most of them included Rev in the page title. However, about half had it before the author's surname and half had it after the author's surname. Maybe the confusion in knowing where to put it means that we're better off telling people to omit it from the page title. Or else we need to be clear that it goes after the author surname. What do you think?--Dallan 02:39, 17 April 2011 (EDT)
For the sake of simplicity, I'd say omit titles like Rev., Dr., etc. -- Amy (Ajcrow) 14:13, 18 April 2011 (EDT)
I agree that titles should be omitted. I can change the help to say "Enter the first author in Surname, Given Name(s) order in the "Author" field (use the name as printed on the book, if you know, omitting titles such as Dr. or Rev.)". --Jennifer (JBS66) 14:18, 18 April 2011 (EDT)
Thank-you!--Dallan 14:27, 18 April 2011 (EDT)

Just pointing one possibly relevant example just to ensure all complications are considered: Source:Moore, John Trotwood. Record of Commissions of Officers in the Tennessee Militia, 1796-1815. I believe (my notes say) the title page of this source gives the author as Mrs. John Trotwood Moore. There are other sources by John Trotwood Moore, but I haven't investigated them to see if done by Mr. or Mrs. Two comments: 1) it only takes a small amount of work (visit to worldcat) to discover that her name is Mary Brown Daniel Trotwood but it violates the rule of not changing the name from what is on the title page. 2) In this particular case, I think the source should have a geographic name, but I have not surveyed the other works by John Trotwood Moore to see if they are likewise compilations of official records or original work. --Jrich 15:04, 18 April 2011 (EDT)

Another example of a complication - we have a few dozen Dutch and German sources where the author is listed only as Dr. somebody Source:Kappert, Dr. Geschichte der Bramscher Tuchmachergilde. --Jennifer (JBS66) 15:17, 18 April 2011 (EDT)
I don't know if this alleviates the problem at all, but I'm planning for the next version of source auto-complete (sometime in the next couple of months) to list sources using both their page title as well as their source title field. (Auto-complete for sources will finally be case-insensitive as well.) So for those sources where there is significant ambiguity in the author's name, they'll at least be findable in the auto-complete drop-down by entering just the title. Thank-you for offering to update the help on this issue.--Dallan 16:19, 18 April 2011 (EDT)

Ireland placenames [18 April 2011]

I read all the place name requirements and that's why I opened Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, Republic of Ireland. For the most part, names of civil parishes have not been included in the Irish placenames in WeRelate. I believe that it is incorrect to include them.

For example Magheross is a civil parish for records but it is not a placename per se. No one would say that they live in Magheross. There are also RC parishes but again, they are not named in the placename.

In Ireland, the smallest place name is a townland, town, county, country. It would be for example, Rathcahill, Newcastle West, County Limerick, Ireland. Since the townland consists of approximately 20 families, it's really too small for our purposes. I have taken off all my townland names for WeRelate but it is not going to be helpful in the future to occasionally add a civil parish name. The only place that these civil parish names are used is by record keepers and then only occasionally.

Could an authority on Irish Place names chime in so that we can be consistent?

Thank you.--Genearchivist 15:12, 13 April 2011 (EDT)


Furthermore, I wouldn't use any parish name, RC or civil. According to Titling Conventions for Place Pages "List each part of the place from lowest to highest jurisdiction: town/city, county/district, state/province, country."

It actually makes more sense to me to use the townland, the Town/City, County, Province, Country. In the case of my Grandfather it would be Glassleck, Shercock, County Cavan, Ulster, Ireland. This is pre-1922. But I would be just as content with Shercock, County Cavan, Ulster, Ireland. This would be what the Titling conventions page is asking for.

Since, there are only 4 provinces in the Republic of Ireland and they are mostly not used as in an address, I would suggest a 3 level hierarchy only. (example: Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, Republic of Ireland.

Civil and church are types of records but not really placenames as you wouldn't find them on a roadmap.--Genearchivist 19:19, 13 April 2011 (EDT)

I agree about omitting the province. I think we've done that -- counties are listed directly under Place:Republic of Ireland. And if the townlands generally have just a handful of families, then it seems to make sense to omit them as well. Do we currently havde pages for civil parishes? I looked at County Monaghan and didn't find any. If you say they're rarely used, and we don't already have pages for them, then maybe we don't need pages for them.
There are actually a large number of countries where the place title includes just 3 levels. I've updated Portal:Place to reflect this.--Dallan 19:47, 14 April 2011 (EDT)

We had a user last year who felt places in Ireland should take the form Townland, Parish, County, Republic of Ireland. There are a number of parish pages under County Clare alone. Dallan, can we take more time to research this and get additional input before we make a policy that pages in Ireland are at 3-levels? --Jennifer (JBS66) 15:31, 15 April 2011 (EDT)


Hi again. After spending some time with this subject and watching a webinar from FamilySearch on Irish records, I now believe that Irish place names should be written as Town/Townland, Civil Parish name, County, Country. In the case of large towns, the Civil Parish name is unnecessary but it is vital to Townland placenames. Townlands can be named the same in different counties and in different Civil Parishes, so it's important to use the Civil Parish name along with the county name. I know that I'm back-peddling over what I wrote before, but I'm nothing if not flexible. I was so unfamiliar with seeing Town names with their coinciding civil parish name. I agree with whomever spoke up last year that there should be four levels. Town/Townland, Civil Parish, County, Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland as the case may be. I understand that this is the best way to enable research, and I'm all for that.--Genearchivist 20:50, 15 April 2011 (EDT)

That's fine with me. As Jennifer says, it's good to research these things :-). Looking at the list of place pages in the Republic of Ireland, it appears that most counties in the Republic of Ireland generally have just three levels at present, though County Clare has 4 levels: civil parish and townland. Perhaps you could mention on Place:Republic of Ireland page in the How places are organized section that places should ideally have four levels? And maybe you wouldn't mind adding the civil parishes and the townlands in a few other counties as you come across them in your research? That would be much appreciated.
By the way, the list of place pages in the Republic of Ireland is updated nightly with the previous day's changes.--Dallan 02:31, 17 April 2011 (EDT)

Hello Dillan, I'd be happy to. Great Project regardless.--Genearchivist 14:54, 18 April 2011 (EDT)

Thank you!--Dallan 16:22, 18 April 2011 (EDT)

My living brother was downloaded with my gedcom [14 April 2011]

I don't know how it happened but WeRelate has my brother uploaded but he's alive! We've got to get him off of here! How do I do it?--Genearchivist 20:00, 13 April 2011 (EDT)

You can go to his page and click More>Delete. Just a note for problem-solving purposes on our end, it appears the gedcom had Y in the death field, marking him as not-living. --Jennifer (JBS66) 20:11, 13 April 2011 (EDT)

Thank you Jennifer, you appear to be my new guardian angel! I figured it out after I asked the question, you were right, there was a Y in the death field. Strange. Thank you so much.--Genearchivist 20:13, 13 April 2011 (EDT)


Amelia (Amy) Otis [15 April 2011]

I'm puzzled. I can see Amelia Mary Earhart's mother, from Amelia Earhart's and Edwin Earhart's (listed as spouse) pages. But clicking on Amy Otis' name doesn't do anything.

If I go directly to Amy Otis' page I see her parents but not Edwin Earhart nor her children.--Rick 19:26, 15 April 2011 (EDT)


Amelia Otis is named in the family page's title, but her page is not included if you look at the Edit screen under Wife.

  1. Family:Unknown and Amelia Otis (1) needs to be renamed to Family:Edwin Earhart and Amelia Otis by clicking on Rename from the left menu
  2. Edit that newly named family page to add Person:Amelia Otis (2) as Wife. --Jennifer (JBS66) 19:45, 15 April 2011 (EDT)

Help needed to source obit Civil War Vet [16 April 2011]

I found an obit for Confederate Veteran named Jackson who died in Texas. I thought to put the obit in a transcription just to keep the info available. He is not connected to any current person/family pages. When I went to create the transcrip page, the system asked me for the source.
I copied it from a MyFamily site that is due to expire.
The one who posted it at MyFamily had copied it from a Bell Co TX usgenweb page.
The poster at the genweb site had copied it apparently from a book called Nannies Scrapbook. No publishing info about the book is given except "Book One. page 100".
This appears to have been originally published the the Belton Journal in 1918. The author's name is given in the article.
The web page is not easily found by going to the usgenweb site as there appears to be no link to this page. I had to google a phrase to find the page and copy the URL which is http://www.txbell.net/nannie12.htm

So how in the world do I source this thing?? Maybe I should just put it in an article that doesn't require a source to create the page and I could give the URL to the website as text in the article?? --Janiejac 07:27, 16 April 2011 (EDT)

Just put what you know. For example, I would consider leaving Source/MySource set to "Select" so you don't need to create a page if you don't want, then enter "Nannie's Scrapbooks" as the title, enter Vol. 1, p. 100 and the URL in the page field, and I would add "[Apparently taken from the Belton (TX) Journal in 1918]" along with the text of the obit. That is enough to get anybody to the website where they can easily read, as I did, that this was a scrapbook of articles made by a lady who lived in Belton, TX, and eventually someone descended from this person will come along who will call one of the libraries that keeps old issues of the Belton Journal on microfilm, or the Texas Newspaper Project in Austin, and have them look up the issue so they can get their own copy of the original, and hopefully at that time, make the citation more formal. --Jrich 17:29, 16 April 2011 (EDT)

GetSatisfaction [25 April 2011]

Well, guess there's no point watching this page any longer. :-) --Jrich 11:20, 25 April 2011 (EDT)

We're trying out GetSatisfaction to see if it works better for answering questions. After thinking about your post, I realize that a big problem with GetSatisfaction is that you can't get notified when a new topic is created unless you're an employee. They have this capability listed as a feature request, but it's not available right now. Another problem is that people need to sign into GetSatisfaction separately to post a question.
I really like the two things that GetSatisfaction provides: being able to track the most-frequently asked questions (which helps me see which things are most confusing for people), and for people to see answers to similar questions that have been asked (and answered) previously. But maybe the two problems listed above mean that we should continue to use this support page instead. Sigh.--Dallan 11:51, 25 April 2011 (EDT)

Newbie needs Admin help with first Source post US Census [30 April 2011]

I have just attempted to create my first Census source addition (to the page Person: Rawleigh Hallmon) and I'm about 100% certain that I didn't get it right. Could a kind knowledgeable person help me with this? The complete census page information is on the associated Talk page. (You'll understand why when you see it.) I think what I ended up with is a combination of a mangled existing Source: page within WeRelate plus some additions that may not be necessary. The discussions that I have read ABOUT census citations are totally confusing to me right now. Since I will no doubt have many other census citations going forward, I would like to do it the "right" or "preferred" way for We Relate. All help appreciated.--LulaBelle 15:44, 25 April 2011 (EDT)

Hi LulaBelle,
The census sources in the database are in kind of a state of flux, so your confusion is understandable. You didn't mangle anything that I can tell, but there's a more standard way to accomplish what you want.
  1. Census citations should point to the county-level source for that year. Those are formatted County, State, United States. YEAR U.S. Census Population Schedule (for Rawleigh: Source:Jefferson, Alabama, United States. 1920 U.S. Census Population Schedule). If you used a particular transcription and you want to cite that directly, it might also be in the source database, but because most people these days are going to look at images online, the general format is the most commonly used. The fastest way to have the source come up is to start typing the county ("Jefferson, Alabama...") in the source title box and the drop-down box will show the options already in the system.
  2. If there is no entry for the census you need, create one by typing what should be the appropriate name into the Source title box.
  3. In the volume/pages field, put any information that will help a user find the page. This varies by census, but is usually at a minimum the town/district and page (Prec. 41, sheet 5A). Repository-specific information, like FHL film number, is unnecessary.
  4. In the source citation detail field, put the relevant portion of the transcription, including the head of household name, since most people are going to find the entry through searching.
  5. If you created a new census source, when you save the page, the link will be red. After you are otherwise done editing the person page, click on that red link and edit the page to have type Government/Church records, the appropriate place, title and year, and subject Census records. In the text field, put (using the appropriate year and state):
{{YEARCensus}}
[[Category:Year State census]]
This puts basic user tips on the page and puts it in the right category.
For this specific record, since the explanation of the census record is lengthy, the talk page is a perfect place for it, although I've also done this as a section on the person page. I'd suggest putting the actual transcription or just the head of household in the detail field, with a note "This entry contains numerous errors, see (where ever you put the explanation)."
I hope that helps. If you remember what page you were reading that you found confusing, could you point us to it? We'll try to make it better!--Amelia 16:15, 25 April 2011 (EDT)

Thank you so much. I think my confusion came from trying to access an existing Source page that I thought I had seen in crawling around the site, from the actual find/add page -- figuring out what to enter where to call it up. You answered that quite succinctly. Your step-by-step is MOST helpful. I've only been at this for about 3 days -- I'll eventually catch on!--LulaBelle 16:53, 25 April 2011 (EDT)


Welcome to the monkey house, LuluBelle! I've developed a slightly different method for census management, which also works. Because I don't want to have to have a WeRelate page open for editing while I'm sifting through a county history or reading census listings on Ancestry, I do most of my preliminary work offline -- in my case, with TMG. Then I import GEDCOMs of moderate size every so often, and run a minute or two of clean-up on each new (or newly expanded) page. That being the case, I create new census source pages on WR sort of in batch mode. I do a Find/Add, create the page if it doesn't already exist (they usually don't, for whatever reason), and add the template and category notes all in one step. To keep track of what I've already done, I keep a plain text file handy listing alphabetically the census pages I've created, which I can keep open and refer to in the background. Since I tend to do most of my research in a handful of geographical areas, I'm using many of the same censuses over and over again. (I have another text file of all the MySources I've created; otherwise, I have found myself unintentionally re-creating the same MySource with a slightly different title, which is embarrassing.) Then, when I'm matching up sources in the import process, or when I'm just adding a census listing to one or two people by editing their pages directly, I can copy-and-paste the source page title from my text file. I'm a great believer in copy/pasting. Anything to avoid having to re-do a source-page search every time I want to add it to a page! --MikeTalk 09:01, 29 April 2011 (EDT)

Thanks for the good info, Mike. I'm copy/pasting it to my very own personal WeRelate help file! I don't feel comfortable yet uploading a gedcom -- I've been in the process of changing my own files from PAF to Legacy so they just ain't right yet. Actually, the WeRelate setup has helped me to organize my own research even better. Especially the sources. I'm even liking the monkey house. --LulaBelle 13:47, 29 April 2011 (EDT)
I'm glad to hear you're taking your time. One of the biggest problems at WR has been "drive-by GEDCOM-ers" who register, immediately upload a file of 5,000 people -- usually comglomerated from other people's GEDCOMs -- and then disappear again, leaving behind a mess for others to clean up. It's much better to hand-craft pages for awhile as you learn the ropes and figure out the ways to do things that work best for you. When you understand how to accomplish your goals, then doing GEDCOMS is likely to be simply one tool or method among many. The goal here is quality, not mere quantity! --MikeTalk 08:32, 30 April 2011 (EDT)

No longer considering GetSatisfaction [26 Apr 2011]

I just wanted to announce that we're no longer considering GetSatisfaction for tracking questions and answers, due to several issues:

  • People need to sign in separately to GetSatisafction
  • There's no way for people to "watch" the list of questions on GetSatisfaction and be notified of new questions.
  • It's more difficult to add links to the wiki pages here.

Instead, we'll continue to use this Support page for support.

Thank you to everyone for their feedback and helping us to decide whether or not to use a different approach.--Dallan 17:23, 26 April 2011 (EDT)


Category pages not showing all subcategories [28 April 2011]

The Category:Ohio, United States page is not showing all of the subcategories. There are categories for all 88 counties, but the Ohio category page stops at 77 (last county shown is Shelby). The categories for counties Stark through Wyandot don't appear, though they do exist and are linked to Category:Ohio, United States. Some I created this morning (like the category for Vinton County), but some were already in existence, such as the one for Trumbull County. I've tried scrolling through the pages, but the remaining pages are links to article/person/source pages, not subcategories. Any ideas why not all subcategories are showing? -- Amy (Ajcrow) 09:20, 28 April 2011 (EDT)

Amy, they are there, but on the first page you are not seeing them all because of the overabundance of Source pages listed below. You need to press Next on that page a number of times to get past all of the sources. This is the main reason I have asked for Sources to be placed into categories separate from the main place categories. You can edit the URL like this to jump ahead. --Jennifer (JBS66) 10:46, 28 April 2011 (EDT)
Thanks, Jennifer. I just didn't scroll far enough. But this definitely shows a weakness in the current category structure. What's the point of having subcategories if you can't see all of them from the category page? I wonder if there is a way to force it to display *all* subcategories before even starting to display the Pages. -- Amy (Ajcrow) 10:54, 28 April 2011 (EDT)
WP says "A maximum of 200 category entries are displayed per screen. To make navigating large categories easier, a table of contents can be used on the category page...Subcategories are split alphabetically along with the articles, which means that the initial screen of a split category may not include all its subcategories. To make all subcategories display on each screen, add a category tree to the text of the category page, as described at the help page under Displaying category trees and page counts." Category tree works like this, unfortunately, it doesn't appear to work with our version of MediaWiki. --Jennifer (JBS66) 15:40, 28 April 2011 (EDT)

Gedcom import question [2 May 2011]


I loaded a gedcom and apparently it went straight to being accepted as an import. I'm not sure, but I think so. I tried to do an import and nothing happened. I was able to do the matches and update the matches. Does this mean my tree was imported? Do I skip that step? I'm sorry I'm so confused. I know this is the second email I've sent to you for help. But the last answer did not say if the import was completed or not, just that there must have been a computer bug (Dallan Quass). Thank you for your assistance once again.--Fmizrany 20:15, 30 April 2011 (EDT)

left response on user's talk page. --Jennifer (JBS66) 20:18, 30 April 2011 (EDT)

Thank you for responding Jennifer. I found the Import Gedcom and it says" You have a GEDCOM already in process. Before importing a new GEDCOM you need to wait for your earlier GEDCOM to finish importing

Click here to review (or delete) your earlier GEDCOM"

Does this mean it is being reviewed by administration now? I did not import it! I couldn't get the import tab on the page with my corrections and matches to work. At least I didn't get any response to indicate that it was working.--Fmizrany 20:29, 30 April 2011 (EDT)

This is odd, because according to our Gedcom review page, you only have one gedcom in the queue. I will leave a message on Dallan's talk page so he can help determine what is going on. --Jennifer (JBS66) 20:39, 30 April 2011 (EDT)
Fmizrany, it appears that you've selected "Import GEDCOM" from the Add menu, as if you were trying to import a brand new GEDCOM. Instead, you need to review the gedcom that you've already imported. You can do that by clicking here. There's a similar link on your talk page. Once you've clicked on this link and reviewed your gedcom, click on the "Import" tab while reviewing your GEDCOM, then click on the "Ready to import" button. That will send your GEDCOM to the administrators for final review before it is imported. I hope this clarifies things.--Dallan 22:45, 2 May 2011 (EDT)

Edit freeze? [1 May 2011]

Why can't I edit (add) a Spouse or parents to any of my pages? It is possible to remove spouse or parents.--burgjoh 01:26, 1 May 2011 (EDT)

On the Person page (the regular page, not the Edit page), you should see a link on the righthand side to "Add Parents and Siblings." There should also be a link to "Add Spouse and Children" or "Add Another Spouse." -- Amy (Ajcrow) 08:51, 1 May 2011 (EDT)

Boyerton [2 May 2011]

I attempted to add Boyerton, Berks, PA, USA as a Populated Place but the edit page keeps defaulting to Boyerton the Borough. These as distinct places per GNIS and while the populated place may fall entirely within the bounds of the borough the reverse is not true.--Rick 13:28, 2 May 2011 (EDT)

What exactly are you trying to do? Are you trying to make a new Place page for Boyerton, Berks, Pennsylvania, United States? The best way to do that is to click on "Add" (at the top of the page) > Place. Enter Boyerton in the place name and start to type Berks, Pennsylvania, United States in the "Located in" field. (If you stop typing after a comma, you'll get a list of places to choose from, so you don't need to type the whole thing.) -- Amy (Ajcrow) 13:36, 2 May 2011 (EDT)

Thanks I noticed the solution in the FAQ pages. I added Boyertown (town). Without the (town) adding kept defaulting to editing the borough.--Rick 20:42, 2 May 2011 (EDT)


Duplicate details on Source [27 June 2011]

Please look at the person page for August Summach (1888-1973.) I can't see why the details for several of the sources are repeated twice. When I edit the source, the details are only there once.--RGMoffat 08:28, 17 May 2011 (EDT)

They are appearing twice because you have entered the text in both the source text box and an attached note (ie S7 and N4). --Jennifer (JBS66) 08:36, 17 May 2011 (EDT)

Thanks, I think I have been bitten by Google Chrome again. I could see the problem in Internet Explorer, which I seem to need to work with We Relate.--RGMoffat 10:04, 17 May 2011 (EDT)

Can you provide more information about the problem you're having in Chrome?--Dallan 14:50, 17 May 2011 (EDT)

I use Chrome frequently and have had no problems on WeRelate. For what it's worth.--Rick 13:27, 27 June 2011 (EDT)


Annoying advertisement banner [17 May 2011]

I now have an annoying advertisement for Lowe's/Chevy/... using up the top of my screen and making it hard to work. I understand the ads on the sidebar but this is much more annoying including it has sound, it flickers, etc.

Does it have something to do with the following lines in the page source code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.min.js"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.12/jquery-ui.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/w/jquery.inputHintOverlay.min.1.js"></script>

Is there anyway to remove this?--Sparrell 08:50, 17 May 2011 (EDT)

It sounds like something in your browser configuration (like an add-on/plug-in). WeRelate doesn't have banners at the top of the screen, only google ads on the right-hand side.--Dallan 14:50, 17 May 2011 (EDT)

Pike, Clearfield, Pennsylvania - Place Name [10 June 2011]

There are place names identified with some of my family members as Pike, Clearfield, Penssylvania.

There is no community named Pike in Clearfield county. The correct place name is Pike Township, Clearfield, Pennsylvania.

I tried to make the change but a message indicating only administrators can do it appeared. How can this correction be accomplished?--RickLGleason 13:40, 10 June 2011 (EDT)

We don't include words such as county or township in place page titles. The fact that Pike is a township is indicated on the place page as its Type. --Jennifer (JBS66) 14:10, 10 June 2011 (EDT)

Delete an Article [22 June 2011]

How do you delete an article? I should have created a User page instead. When I go to the "more" menu there is no option to delete.--Rick 20:52, 22 June 2011 (EDT)

If there is no option to delete under More, then you can mark the article for Speedy Delete by putting {{Speedy Delete|Place your explanation here.}} in the text box on the page. --Jennifer (JBS66) 21:03, 22 June 2011 (EDT)

Wide table means I can't see family info on the right (without scrolling) [27 June 2011]

Hi. I added some wide tables to a page Person:Samuel_Depue_(1) to display some census data, but now the family info (wife, children) appears as if it has vanished. In fact, it is still there, but to see it, you have to scroll over and hence it is easily missed.

Is there a way to move this family data back closer to the person's basic facts?--Wolfmanmi 21:40, 26 June 2011 (EDT)

I moved the wide tables inside scrolling div's. That's the only thing I could think of.--Dallan 11:15, 27 June 2011 (EDT)

DFree - offline for now [28 June 2011]

Hi All,

I am using my Dad's computer access. I am unable to do the Welcomes for a while. The buildings electricity is strange. Probably a major fix. My computer is off line for now. When things are fixed I will send a mesage to you. Sorry, Debbie Freeman --DFree 13:40, 27 June 2011 (EDT)

Hi Debbie, It's no problem -- Solveig or I can handle the welcomes until your electricity returns.--Dallan 19:27, 27 June 2011 (EDT)

Hi All,

I am back on line. Electricity is wonderful!! Thanks for the help. Debbie Freeman --DFree 23:35, 27 June 2011 (EDT)


"Category" page won't delete [28 June 2011]

An ancestor of mine, Chauncey T. Gunn, for some reason is the sole person in a category: Gunn in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Chauncey was never there, he is the only person in the category and no one is on the watch list. The page should be deleted, but that function is not working for this page. What can be done?--Gunnj 08:15, 28 June 2011 (EDT)

That category is red-linked, so the category page has not actually been created yet. The categories that appear at the bottom of person and family pages are created by the software automatically based upon names and places on the page. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines appears because your Burial location of Charlotte is linking to the wrong place. If you edit the burial location to add the state and country, the category will be corrected for you. --Jennifer (JBS66) 08:21, 28 June 2011 (EDT)
Now that the topic has come up... I think the system is sometimes a little too smart for its own good. How can it logically conclude that "Charlotte" should be auto-linked to "Charlotte, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines"? Especially since it isn't even the first Charlotte in the list of potential Charlottes? I would like to know how that feature chooses... Moverton 11:03, 28 June 2011 (EDT)
When faced with ambiguity, the system chooses the place at the highest level (the fewest commas). (Later this Summer, I'll order the auto-complete places the same way.)--Dallan 23:09, 28 June 2011 (EDT)

Divorce [30 June 2011]

How does one add a divorce to either a family page or person page? I have no problem entering marriages but cannot figure out how to enter a divorce. It does not come up in the event list. Searching "divorce" in the support search has not come up with the answer.--Parrotluvr 17:05, 30 June 2011 (EDT)

Divorces are entered on the Family page. Click on edit and then in the section "Events and Facts," click "Add event/fact." Divorce is the 4th item in the dropdown. -- Amy (Ajcrow) 17:12, 30 June 2011 (EDT)

Removing gedcom [11 July 2011]

Now that we have finished submitting and analyzing my gedcom, I have just heard from a family member who has some privacy concerns about some of the information. It is not clear to me what I have to do at this point to remove that gedcom while I mark the private facts in preparation for resubmitting.--Mfseeker 10:26, 11 July 2011 (EDT)

To remove a gedcom, you can go to the Overview tab and press the Remove this Gedcom button. --Jennifer (JBS66) 10:28, 11 July 2011 (EDT)
If it's only a few pages, there might be other solutions. If other people are already watching the page, you won't be able to remove them by removing the gedcom. You can also edit the problem pages and remove the information. This will not remove the history. If you want to totally wipe out some individual pages, you can use Speedy Delete and an admin will come along and remove them for you. Then you can create new pages for these people. --Judy (jlanoux) 10:54, 11 July 2011 (EDT)

Well, that is my problem. I remember having seen an "Overview" tab somewhere on the site, but I cannot find it>--Mfseeker 11:43, 11 July 2011 (EDT)

If you are still in gedcom review and have not sent your file to be imported, the Overview is the first tab in gedcom review.
If your file has already been imported, look at the MyRelate menu for Trees. You have a delete button for each tree. However, the cautions I noted above apply. WeRelate is a shared environment and it is disruptive to remove a tree. Other people may be using these pages. Also, you may have imported multiple gedcoms in a tree which will all be gone.

Another issue is that once you have deleted a tree, you should wait a few hours to make sure they are gone from the index before uploading a new file. Otherwise, you will get Family Matches to deleted pages. Thus I believe it is better to remove only the problem pages. The steps would be,

  1. add the Speedy Delete template to the problem page {{Speedy Delete|your reason}}
  2. unlink the page from the family
  3. create a new page for the person and link to family
Hope that helps.--Judy (jlanoux) 13:01, 11 July 2011 (EDT)

Need to add a living person as a bridge [12 August 2011]

My parents are desceased and all 4 of their children are living; however one grandchild (my brother's son) is desceased. How can I connect the grandchild to my parents if I can't create a page for my living brother?--Becky 15:43, 15 July 2011 (EDT)

I suggest it is best not to create a page for this grandchild. I tend to wait until a generation has passed before adding people in deference to their immediate families. If you feel the need for a memorial, then simply add a line to his page with links to the grandparent's pages. The nice things about a wiki is that one can add these cross-links. --Judy (jlanoux) 17:06, 15 July 2011 (EDT)

I have run into this problem with an uncle and aunt's family. I would like to have a bridge to allow us to link. I am in my 70's now. I am trying to get as much genealogy done as I can. There are a couple of people in the family who may do some work on genealogy after I am gone but I cannot think of one grandchild who would take it up. After that, who knows how long it will be before someone in my family group will start working on the tree again. Why not allow a way for those of us who have a family tree but no link to put it there. Thanks.--Suzyq 18:10, 15 July 2011 (EDT)


"Living links" can be created when needed. The only times I have done so were for my grandmothers who are outliving my grandfathers by many years. They do make it easier for navigation, and I do not add any identifying information for them. See Person:Living Jacobson (42). Moverton 19:01, 15 July 2011 (EDT)


I'll throw in my two cents. I even have trouble adding anybody with a date in the 1900s because I am afraid, even if they are dead, somebody that is alive may not like facts that are inferred, such as ages, or that their grandparents married twice, or somebody broke the law, etc. It just avoids problems to stop when you run into a living person, or even sooner. After all, the government holds the census for 70 years, and most death records are held for 50 or more except for direct descendants, so it seems to be a well-accepted practice. You are free to leave a paper copy with your children, grandchildren, etc. Tell them they don't need to do anything if they don't want to, just make sure it gets passed on. It's not like WeRelate is the only way such information can be preserved for posterity. --Jrich 19:13, 15 July 2011 (EDT)


I didn't realize Judy's comment didn't end the discussion. For the reasons Jrich describes and others, living people are not permitted on WeRelate. We have permitted varying degrees of living people in the past (why you will see Living X in gedcom uploads from a while ago), but we have changed the policy for simplicity sake to just prohibit them, with the exception of famous individuals whose ancestry is of general public interest (and whose family information is already public).--Amelia 21:10, 12 August 2011 (EDT)


GEDCOM export [18 August 2011]

Is there a way to select a group of records (eg a tree) and export to GEDCOM format?

Or is GEDCOM a one-way street for WeRelate?--Jhamstra 20:59, 12 August 2011 (EDT)

Yes, you may export a tree via gedcom. Go to user page>MyRelate>Trees>Export. --Beth 21:19, 12 August 2011 (EDT)

Thanks - I didn't know what would be the exports format(s).

A related question - is there a way to export a Tree (or otherwise) with all the WeRelate data or only what can be exported via GEDCOM?--Jhamstra 21:31, 14 August 2011 (EDT)

The best answer is to create a tiny tree of a few people with a lot of data and see what your desktop program does with it. I believe everything is exported, but in my testing I found that some programs ignored certain items. --Judy (jlanoux) 21:50, 14 August 2011 (EDT)
The contents of talk pages aren't exported, and images aren't exported. The only tricky part is if notes are attached to source citations. The GEDCOM standard allows source citations to have both a text field and a notes field. We put the text/transcription associated with the citation in the GEDCOM text field, and any notes that are attached directly to the citation in the notes field. As I recall, some desktop genealogy programs (I can't recall which ones unfortunately) import only one field - either text or notes, but not both, or they make finding the other field kind of difficult. If you take Judy's advice and create a small tree containing someone with a citation that has add both text/transcription and an attached note, and export that tree, you'll find out whether your desktop genealogy program can handle both. For what it's worth, it's far more common here for people to put information in the "text/transcription" field of a citation than to attach a note to the citation. Notes are generally attached to events, which is handled by every desktop genealogy program that I tested.--Dallan 15:17, 18 August 2011 (EDT)

Source citations are being changed [9 September 2011]

I have noticed that some of my source citations are being changed for Ontario Canada Births. I primarily use Ancestry.com and use a source page indicating the data was found there. This source shows two repositories, ancestry.com and Family Search.

These citations are being changed to a similar source that includes only references to the Family Search web site and includes something like "(family search index)" in the citation. My concern is that I did not use this web site, and cannot verify that the information I include is identical to what would be found on the familysearch.org site.

I understand that the sources are similar since they both use data from the Ontario archives. Should a more generic source be used that would include both repositories without implying a specific one was used? If not, how do I ensure my references are not changed by an administrator?

Thanks for your awesome work in administering this Wiki.

Rick--RGMoffat 17:11, 8 September 2011 (EDT)

We want to have one Source page for each record set, even if it appears in multiple repositories. If you want to identify the particular repository where you saw the information, you would do that in the citation field on the Person page.
I looked at Source:Ontario, Canada. Ontario Births, 1869-1912 and Source:Ontario, Canada. Ontario Canada Births 1869-1912, and they do appear to be the same record set - hosted at Ancestry and at FamilySearch. So I've merged them.
You're already doing what you need to, to ensure that citations aren't changed without your knowledge: watch the Source page so that if it is ever changed, you'll know about it. In this case, it appears that you're the only person who's edited either of the Source pages recently, so I'm not sure how the citation changed. I did make a minor change in how citations are generated in general a couple of months ago that might have impacted you, but that's been awhile now.--Dallan 18:55, 9 September 2011 (EDT)

Print family Tree [16 September 2011]

Is there any way that the family tree can be printed?--Logue3134 11:52, 14 September 2011 (EDT)

The long-standing opinion is WeRelate wasn't a good place to offer such tools - instead - we expect people to export a GEDCOM and use whatever tools they prefer.--jrm03063 13:10, 14 September 2011 (EDT)
Jrm is correct. I could add an option to print the family tree that opens up on the person and family pages pretty easily, but it would be simply a screen-print of what's currently displayed on the page.--Dallan 18:02, 16 September 2011 (EDT)

List subpages [21 September 2011]

I've looked all over for the tag to list subpages and can't find it; also, none of the extensions listed at mediawiki appear to work (unless I haven't found the right one yet); what is the appropriate tag for WeRelate? Thanks.--Obstinatesnooper 21:45, 18 September 2011 (EDT)

One thing you could try are the "addsubpage" and "listsubpages" tags, as exhibited in WeRelate:Suggestions. They may not do quite what you want though because addsubpage adds the page title to a list of subpages on the main page, so that people watching the main page get notified when a new subpage is added. In the future I plan to extend these tags so that if you rename a subpage to make it a subpage of a different page, it adds/removes it from the lists on the main pages. The idea is that with these two tags, you could add a basic forum to any page.
If that doesn't work for your case, add a suggestion to WeRelate:Suggestions and I'll import one of the mediawiki extensions.--Dallan 16:27, 21 September 2011 (EDT)

[28 September 2011]

I am new to this site and I have made a mess that someone might want to fix. I know that Reverend Thomas Maxwell had a son named James that married Cynthia (Cristy)Carr and she died in 1820 after having Vingina born Jan 15th 1820. His 2nd wife was Martha Patsy Jinkins. All children born after 1820 was by Martha. James Wilbur Maxwell may 1837-14 jan 1922.was Joel P Maxwell's son.--Chaindropz 00:42, 28 September 2011 (EDT)

So, the first nine children were by his first wife? I see that they're duplicated under Martha, the 2nd wife. If I'm understanding your problem, then what you will want to do is to open "Edit" on the Family page for James & Martha and click "Remove" next to each of the children's names whom you want to remove from that page. A person can have more than one spouse, and therefore can appear on more than one Family page -- there's one Family page for each couple -- but a person can't have more than one set of parents.
And don't worry if you "mess up" something, or even if you just change your mind. Nothing on a wiki ever goes away. You can always go to the "History" link in the lefthand column and return to a previous version. --MikeTalk 05:06, 28 September 2011 (EDT)
I have reverted the edits as the family pages already existed with the 2 wives and children. Still working on the page for James Maxwell as the page has some other problems, possibly from an old merge that I did. Haven't had time to address James Wilbur Maxwell. Please read the help files on family and person pages. Welcome to Werelate. --Beth 07:50, 28 September 2011 (EDT)

I am related to Thomas Adams and Mary McGill [1 October 2011]

I am related to Thomas Adams(Adamson) and Mary McGill who were both born in Wigtown Scotland but went to the USA . Thomas who would be my3x Great Uncle. His parents were James Adamson and Henrietta Mason. I have a story written by Ella Rhodes Phumphrey who tells the story and mentions photos I would be very interested if any one know of any living relatives that may have more informtion and photos etc.--Sylvia adamson 06:21, 28 September 2011 (EDT)


Hi Sylvia! The best place to do this would be to go to his page - is he this person? Person:Thomas Adams (60) Check his information and if he is the person you want look on the left side menu - you will see links for Person Talk and Edit (those are the first three choices). You want to click "Talk" - that is where everyone will meet to talk about this person. Every person has a "Talk" page. Post your questions or information you want to share there. Then, in the same left side menu, click "watch". Every time this page is changed you will be notified in two possible ways. One is by email - you may have to set that up in your preferences, but another ways is to go to the top drop down menus. Go to My Relate. In the drop down menu choose "Watchlist" - this will show you if any pages you said you wanted to watch (by clicking that page's "Watch" link - it will show any pages that were changed. Hope that helps : ) --cthrnvl 15:04, 1 October 2011 (EDT)


Sharing Family Tree links [11 October 2011]

I want to post a link on my blog. I want the visitor to be able to find my family tree, some sort of overview view page.

I am so far unable to determine what page or link that would be!--Dixonge 11:14, 10 October 2011 (EDT)


Some people use user pages to display pedigree charts or surname lists or descendant outlines. Check my user pages for some things I've experimented with. Also this page for an idea for handling many generations of ancestors. The new "family tree" on each person page can be used to see all ancestors of the individual by expanding all of the arrows. But a reader would have to know to do that.--Judy (jlanoux) 11:45, 10 October 2011 (EDT)


Judy - thanks! I think I will need to set up a user page like your main page, also a big page listing all my direct line, with links to each patriarch family unit. Something like that.

BTW, my Quaker Dixons came from Ireland to Delaware to North Carolina, then Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa. I'm in Ross County, Ohio right now doing some research.--Dixonge 20:20, 10 October 2011 (EDT)


Northern Neck of Virgnia Families [27 October 2011]

I have long since given up trying to fix the continuous, multitudinous screw ups to these families. It is beyond repair and no amount amount of trying to fix it does a whit of good, it just gets undone by some dolt. There is a better place to work on them, at ancestry.com under "Northern Neck of Virginia Families." This is by invitation, which you will see when you access it. This group takes its responsiblities seriously an there are few if any "fantasy" genealogies posted there. If you have a genuine interest in real genealogy, use this. If not, continue to mess up what is already a mess right here.--Persisto 18:07, 27 October 2011 (EDT)

I am glad that you have found a place for your work that better suites you, but I find your tone in this message completely offensive. From your contributions, it appears that you have made 2 edits to Person pages thus far in 2011. One of your edits was to the page for Person:Hannah Ball (5), where you placed a note in the edit summary stating that her birthplace of Barkham Manor was "thoroughly debunked". Where is this stated on her page? Where are the sources for this assertion? WeRelate is an interactive, collaborative site. Users need to add substantive, well-sourced data to their pages and be ready to respond to page edits that challenge those assertions. --Jennifer (JBS66) 18:46, 27 October 2011 (EDT)

Source questions - vital records, book reprints, MySource [2 November 2011]

I am new to the site, and like what I see! However, I am struggling a bit with source formatting, and want to check in with the collective wisdom on some issues before I muck around too much.

  1. Vital records: I have some vital records that I transcribed at various county courthouses. In the cases I've looked at, the existing vital record sources on WeRelate are for FHL microfilm collections. E.g., for Sauk County, Wisconsin, there is Source:Sauk, Wisconsin, United States. Sauk County Registration of Births, Ca. 1853-1907 and Source:Sauk, Wisconsin, United States. Sauk County Registration of Marriages (1842-1907) and Marriage Index (1852-1907) --, 1842-1907, both "published" by the Genealogical Society of Utah. If I'm reading Help:Source_page_titles right, I should create a source named, say, "Source:Sauk, Wisconsin, United States. Births", and list the Sauk County Courthouse in Baraboo as a repository. But should I then merge the information on the FHL microfilms (which presumably are copies of the same documents) into this new source, and add FHC as a repository?
  2. Book reprints: I have biographies from a book published in 1901. My copies are from the original volume, which I obtained from the NEHGS library. There is a source record on WeRelate for a 1974 reprint of this book, at Source:Memorial and Biographical Record and Illustrated Compendium of Biography of Citizens of Columbia, Sauk and Adams Counties, Wi (the title is somewhat of an abbreviation of the original, but must be the same volume). A search on Google Books reveals that there is another reprint from the last decade. Somewhere when I was browsing around the help, I found a suggestion that the source should contain the details from the original, with information about reprints added; but there is no place in the source form to enter reprint information. Should I just edit the source to reflect the original publication and mention the reprints as freeform text in the Text field?
  3. MySource seems like the place to put the details about a particular biography entry or vital record, since it allows me to enter a transcription (it seems a bit narrow to create a Transcript for them), and more easily cite them from multiple pages. It would seem that the MySource page should in turn link to the Source page for the larger collection. But I don't see any place to do this in the input form.

Any advice on how to address these issues is appreciated! Bruce Kendall 22:01, 29 October 2011 (EDT)

Hi Bruce,
Excellent questions.
  1. You're correct on the source format for a record you tracked to the courthouse. You're also correct that if we were totally consistent, then we would list the FHC films as repositories, since they are technically the same source. However, for a number of reasons including ease of identifying the source most likely used, we treat materials like those FHC films as their own sources and only merge them with others when they overlap exactly (like if Ancestry has digitized the same range of the same records). It's not an exact science, admittedly.
  2. You're right on the approach to reprints - they do not get their own page. The publication information should be that of the original, and reprint information can be added free form to the text field.
  3. Vital record transcriptions should probably go in the source detail field for the person named (although they can also be a MySource). For biographical entries that are short, same thing (using the overall volume as the source). Otherwise, it's best to abstract them and either weave them into the narrative or put the highlights in the detail field.
--Amelia 00:22, 1 November 2011 (EDT)
Another thing to look at for transcriptions is the new transcript namespace. It's not well-integrated with the rest of the site yet, but it's intended to be the long-term solution for transcriptions like wills or biographies that are too large to put inline in the source citation.--Dallan 20:37, 1 November 2011 (EDT)
Thanks for the advice! I'll follow Amelia's guidance on 1 and 2. I was torn about the transcriptions, as the biographies contain information about multiple generations and so don't naturally have a "home" on one person's page; even full transcriptions of 19th and 20th century vital records often contain information about multiple individuals. Dallan's link showed me how to set up transcriptions in a hierarchical system (e.g., for transcribing multiple biographies from a given volume), and some of the links there showed how to link to the transcriptions of individual records in the citation (I'm still figuring out which form fields accept wikitext and which do not...). Thanks again! --Bruce Kendall 12:10, 2 November 2011 (EDT)

template for DNA? [12 November 2011]

Do we have a template to paste on person pages when a descendant of this person has been tested? Would be neat if we could add the haplogroup in the template if we do. Is there any reason that we should NOT do this? --Janiejac 23:06, 7 November 2011 (EST)

I've put together a couple of templates: Template:DNA and Template:FamilyTreeDNA-YDNA-12, but I don't really know much about DNA research, so you could probably create something much better. Please feel free to either edit one of these templates or add a new one, and tell people about it in the help pages. Thanks--Dallan 14:40, 10 November 2011 (EST)
I edited Template:DNA to update to the 111 markers per FamilyTreeDNA. Please check to see if I entered the markers correctly. The formatting could be changed but will leave that to someone that knows more about that than I do. One could have different templates for the test levels or I surmise one can just adjust to the level tested. --Beth 22:47, 10 November 2011 (EST)
I placed this template on Person:Thomas Coker (13). Didn't fill in the values. I have not cleaned up this page since my gedcom upload but at the bottom of page who would notice the DNA values. Maybe we should have a special logo to link to the person's YDNA results. Results could link to the actual page and a page on We Relate if necessary.--Beth 00:20, 11 November 2011 (EST)
My assumption was that Dallan's templates were only for people who have had their DNA analysed and would probably only appear on individual User pages. Moverton 14:10, 11 November 2011 (EST)

This table isn't exactly what I had in mind. I should have been more specific. I'm thinking of a relatively small rectangle with the curly-que red logo (I hope it is not copyrighted) and beneath the logo just enough room to add in the name of the Haplogroup. Just something to catch attention different from the text letting folks know this line has been tested. Then if someone wants to put in more info about the unique signature or even the actual numbers they can do so in the text or in a table such as Dallan created.

If you could provide a URL with the logo you're talking about, I could create a template pretty quickly.--Dallan 21:08, 12 November 2011 (EST)

Copyright Status of Recently Issued US State Documents [12 November 2011]

I have, for example, some birth certificates for births before 1900 which were typed up in 1995 by the County Clerk of Kent County, Michigan. Is there an interpretation of their copyright status which would allow them to be posted to this site? Is the best alternative then to set up MySource pages for these documents where I quote the facts from them and possibly post a thumbnail? --Pkeegstra 16:27, 11 November 2011 (EST)

The safest route is to do what you suggested: quote the facts and post a thumbnail. Alternatively, if you had access to the original pre-1900 document you could probably post a larger image of that.--Dallan 21:11, 12 November 2011 (EST)

Reprints [20 November 2011]

I was trying to clean up some source pages that were titled incorrectly and ran into a problem. Bottom line, I am not sure how to title reprints. In this case, an article was published in Essex Institute Historical Collections, and the same year, 50 reprints were published, and the reprint was later republished by various publishers. Presumably they have all the same content: the description of the reprint identifies it as a reprint of the article, and the republications came out roughly 50 years after the author died. I only have access to the original article. The original article has page numbers from 317-332 in Volume 47. The reprint is said to have 16 pages but I don't know if they are the same page numbers, or 1-16. One source page, type book or article? Or two source pages, one type book and the other type article? If two, it appears both should use "author. title", so how to differentiate? Since they came out the same year, I can't differentiate by putting (1911) like is done with different editions, so do I add (Reprint)? By the way, five source pages currently exist for this/these source/sources, which is part of why I was investigating this to start with.

  1. Source:Robert Clements of Haverhill and Some of His Descendants
  2. Source:Robert Clements of Haverhill and Some of His Descendants (The Essex Institute Historical Collection, 1911, Peabody, Massachusetts)
  3. Source:Robert Clements of Haverhill and Some of His Descendants (Peabody, Essex, Massachusetts, United States)
  4. Source:Greely, A. W. Robert Clements of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and Some of His Descendants
  5. Source:Greely, A W. Robert Clements of Haverhill and Some of His Descendants

--Jrich 11:19, 19 November 2011 (EST)


I am one who recently used this source. Mine was taken from the Essex Institute Historical Collection publication and I can not confirm the contents of the other sources.

A.W. Greely, "Robert Clements of Haverhill and Some of His Descendants". Essex Institute Historical Collection. 47 (1911); online archives, Google Books (http://books.google.com) p. 317-332.--Kpb2011 13:23, 19 November 2011 (EST)


I think the least confusing thing is to have one source titled Author.Title and explain what's what on that page. First, any discussion about the article and its merits or lack thereof needs to be combined, and that's (at least in my opinion) the best reason to have a source page in the first place. Second, the content is the same in each, so someone looking for a copy doesn't want to look at four source pages to figure out where to find a copy. The citation may not be academically perfect, but I think that's the least of the evils.--Amelia 17:11, 19 November 2011 (EST)


These appear to be in two distinct formats. The first (original?) is in the Essex Institute Historical Collections vol 47 (1911) p 317-332 and the other appears to be a separate reprint of the original article. I have over 200 citations that I will be making and they are based on the pagination of Vol 47, not the reprint(s).--Kpb2011 13:19, 20 November 2011 (EST)


Help citing Journal Articles [10 December 2011]

Am having a heck of a time trying to source journal articles. 3 examples: Sidney Perley, Editor, "Ayer Genealogy". The Essex Antiquarian. IV (1900); online archives, Google Books (http://books.google.com), p. 145.

Henry Cole Quinby, A.B., LL.B., editor, "Alsbee-Ayer Families". New England Family History. II (1908); online archives, Internet Archive (www.archive.org), p 153, 154.

John B. Threlfall, "The English Ancestry of Elizabeth Strutt, Wife of Thomas Scott of Ipswich, Massachusetts". New England Historical and Genealogical Register. 141 (1987); online archives, New England Historic Genealogical Society (www.americanancestors.org), p. 34-37.

What fields are used for what? What goes where? What happens if the article spans several volumes?

As you can see, I do not list the full URL because they are subject to change and sometimes inaccessible without a logon. What is the protocol?--Kpb2011 13:11, 19 November 2011 (EST)

See Help:Source page titles for information on how the title of the source page describing a source should be constructed. In the case of articles, the basic form should be "Lastname, Firstname. Title". In the case of Journals, it is "Journal Title (Publisher)".
It is my impression that creating source pages for articles is not done all that often (not sure how to search for this to get actual numbers). To get a citation looking roughly correct without an article source page, specify the journal title in the title field and put Lastname, Firstname. "Title of Article" in the record field.
I believe the idea of the Article type of source page is so there could be commentary about the article added, which is very reasonable idea, but what seems to happen is that the same article will be cited using the record field with the journal title on one page, and on another page by citing an article-type source page, depending on whether the contributor was aware of the article source page. (Since, there seem to be so few articles, I don't even tend to look.) Fortunately, since Dallan started displaying citations on the resulting pages, both forms give nearly the same result.
The source page for an article is useful for articles that span several volumes because the page number field on the source page can list the multiple installments. For example, Source:Bolton, Ethel Stanwood. Some Descendants of John Moore of Sudbury, Mass, which lists the three installments in NEHGR in the page number field: "57:300-9, 57:362-70, 58:176-8" . But when this source is cited on a particular Person page, the source citation would give the specific page or pages that discuss that individual in question so that citation that appears on the Person page is focused on that individual(e.g., Person:Prudence Moore (4)). --Jrich 16:54, 19 November 2011 (EST)
Agree with Jrich. Unless these are extraordinarily important and likely to be cited dozens of times; or you have a transcript; or there are images or other elements that need discussion; there's no need to create a source page for the article itself. Use the journal as the source (all those you cited are here, I think); the particular locations you found them should already be listed as repositories on the relevant source pages. Putting the article title/author in the record name field and citing the page adequately allows others to find what they need.--Amelia 17:15, 19 November 2011 (EST)

I have decided to use MySource for articles. In my research, I consult many articles and journals and therefore are cited frequently. It will also prevent dupe sources and bypass this reprint of journal articles into book form issue for the moment. Citing reprints messes up the page numbers I use from the actual journal.--Kpb2011 17:33, 9 December 2011 (EST)

You are likely to see me updating such citations to one of the normal conventions when I find myself editing such pages. I actually think using mysources will create more dupes, as it would result in one entry for an article under each user name that cites it, plus results in citations that only contain what each user thinks is necessary instead having one universal citation. Any useful information you happen to put there would be unknowable to any person who wasn't looking at one of your pages. Certainly I think many of the ways sources are handled are not ideal, and my ideal is not somebody else's, but part of the point is to work together. --Jrich 10:06, 10 December 2011 (EST)

half brothers named john [20 November 2011]

Dear all, I am finding these entries to be difficult, the page did not have a delete button when I swapped pages and did not know if one had been saved or not. Also you have merged the entries but deleted the second name. In these marriages the mother had a son named john richard, the father died and she married again and named her next child john william. John richard was adopted by the new husband so there are two john"s growing up together If the second name is deleted how can I tell the difference on the "tree" Thanking you. emde--Emde 17:56, 19 November 2011 (EST)

It is hard to tell which people you are talking about. I am guessing you are talking about Person:John Noake (2) (John Richard) and Person:John Noake (4) (John William)? I know nothing about this family, but taking your comments at face value, perhaps it would be preferred that the first page be named John Wilkins, i.e., using his birth name. The adopted name could be added as an alternate name. This can be fixed by renaming the page and editing the page to change the surname and add the alternate page. --Jrich 22:35, 19 November 2011 (EST)


Hello Emde, I believe a merge that I did may have caused some confusion. The page for Family:John Noake and Florence Strongman (1) originally looked like this, with two entries for the husband, John William Noake. I merged both versions of John William together. The middle names were not deleted. Middle names do not appear in page titles, but they do appear in the blue box on their person page. If you look at the page for Person:Ann Richards (13), it shows both spouses, with a John Richard from the first marriage, and a John William from the second marriage. --Jennifer (JBS66) 06:52, 20 November 2011 (EST)


Why doesnt Mother appear with spouse and children? [23 November 2011]

I am very confused. Mary Clement (1637 - ) married John Osgood. This is the Mary http://www.werelate.org/wiki/Person:Mary_Clements_(16) why does John Osgood have spouse/children listed and Mary does not?

How did I mess this up? Should I revert the page back?

AArrgghh--Kpb2011 19:04, 19 November 2011 (EST)

I am not sure what happened, but saw the problem you described. I added the marriage to Mary's page and I think everything is now the way it would be expected to be. --Jrich 22:07, 19 November 2011 (EST)
This looks like a bug. I'll check into this. In the meantime, if you come across this situation again, Jrich's solution is the right thing to do: add the family to the person page that's missing it.--Dallan 00:20, 24 November 2011 (EST)

How do you add name to "watch list" of everyone in a tree? [23 November 2011]

Am trying to find a way to add my name to the "watch list" of everyone in a tree all at once. Is a pain to add to each individual. When I added the gedcom information - my name was automatically added to the watch list for those individuals.--Kathiemir 20:04, 19 November 2011 (EST)

There are two things you can try:
  • Click the "Trees" link on the left-hand side of a page that you want to watch, then include ancestors and descendants of that person. Adding pages to your tree also adds them to your watchlist. This doesn't add everyone in a tree to your watchlist, but can be used to add multiple generations at a time.
  • If you know the name of the user whose tree you want to watch, select "Launch FTE" in the "MyRelate" menu. If you're asked whether you want to create a new tree or open an existing tree, open an existing tree. Alternatively, select "Open tree" in the "File" menu. Enter the name of the user whose tree you want to watch, click "Go", and select their tree. Finally, select "Copy tree" from the "File" menu, and enter the name of a tree. Copying a tree doesn't copy the pages; it simply adds the existing pages to your tree, and adds them to your watchlist.
--Dallan 00:20, 24 November 2011 (EST)

Thank you for your support, creating family tree for Stewart family. [30 November 2011]

--val 13:53, 30 November 2011 (EST)


Adding sources/citations to Articles [11 December 2011]

Have been looking for 30 minutes for instructions on how insert sources and citations into an article. In short, I want to create inline bibliographic citations (i.e., text1) and then a source list on the page.
1. Smith, Bob, WeRelate for Dummies, Publisher, Place, Date, pages.
2. Doe, Jane, Secrets to citing sources in WeRelate, Publisher, Place, Date, pages.
Is there a better (more preferred) way to do this?--Kpb2011 11:20, 10 December 2011 (EST)


Many examples of what you're trying to do here within WeRelate. Within the Formatting Help Page you may want to go to the paragraph entitled "How Do I create References and Footnotes?" section to read the instructional specifics. I used many source citations within this project article I initiated a couple years ago, so you may want to refer to that also for some source citation examples and techniques. --BobC 09:53, 11 December 2011 (EST)


So, if I read this correctly, since I want to add citations to an article (which does not have inherent source fields), I would need to use <ref name="SrcName"></ref> using unique "SrcName". That is one SrcName for each reference cited, but can re-use the "SrcName" if I reference the same source again in the article.
Did I understand this correctly?--Kpb2011 11:55, 11 December 2011 (EST)

The "SrcName" would be how you want the citation to look. If you find an example that looks like what you want (there being several types of references in BobC's article, edit the section and see how he did it. (Canceling of course when done.) --Jrich 16:15, 11 December 2011 (EST)

How do I change the status of a living person if they have passed away and I want to update their information? [12 December 2011]

(Question moved from Category talk:Review needed.)

If you notice during gedcom review that someone has been marked as living, and you want to mark them deceased, you need to do two things: First, edit the page by clicking on the "Edit" link just below the page title in the lower half of the screen and add a death date. Second, uncheck the "Exclude" box at the left of the line in the upper half of the screen.

If somehow a wiki page has already been created for the person, and you realize that they are deceased, simply edit the page and add the death date along with any other information you have about the person.--Dallan 16:29, 12 December 2011 (EST)


Surname spelled incorrectly. [21 December 2011]

The surname Hasslekus is spelled incorrectly. It is actually spelled Hasselkus. The names listed are part of my family tree and I am a Hasselkus. Since I am new here, how do I go about correcting the spelling? Thanks for your help. Ken Hasselkus--Hasselkus 19:39, 20 December 2011 (EST)

You didn't list any pages so I can only respond in general. In all families, many branches evolve different spelling. When combining all such branches into a single tree, as WeRelate does, inevitably there will be differences of opinion about the right spelling. Perhaps one could provide a facsimile of a signature of the individual and justify one spelling for one individual in that manner. But that stretches no further than the individual who signed his name that way. So the best approach is to be flexible, which is undoubtedly something you have to do anyway, when you go searching for records in the census, or other sources. If the spelling is misleading, perhaps it should change. Personally, I would say Hasslekus versus Hasselkus is not misleading, so I would suggest ignoring the difference. For searching purposes, it is useful to make sure different spellings are treated as equivalent by ensuring each spelling is listed on the corresponding Surname pages. I edited the Surname:Hasslekus and Surname:Hasselkus pages, so this should be so about 15 minutes from now (it takes a short while to get indexed). --Jrich 22:24, 20 December 2011 (EST)
Ken, you didn't say which page(s) you're interested in changing -- but please keep in mind that a great many surnames (maybe most of them) have at least a few variant spellings. There is seldom a single "official" spelling, especially if it's a non-English name that English-speaking county clerks and census enumerators have struggled with in the U.S. in the past. I doubt very much that all the different branches of the Hasselkus/Hasslekus family have always spelled it the same way. Having said that, you can easily edit the person page in question and add another spelling of a name by clicking on the "add alternate name" link just below the "Name" field near the top. In fact, you can list several alternate spellings, as well as known nicknames and so on. If someone has created a page for a person with a surname spelling based on a particular document, it's usually better to leave the name spelled that way in the title. The document shows that there's a reason the name was spelled that way (that it wasn't just a typing error, for instance). In fact, renaming a page for relatively minor reasons like this is generally a bad idea. And the alternate names you add will come up as search-results in any case, so in that regard it doesn't much matter what the page title is. Oh, and welcome to WeRelate! [Hiya, Jrich -- I went to save my reply to Ken and got editorially conflicted. But I guess having two replies won't hurt him....] --MikeTalk 22:57, 20 December 2011 (EST)

Thanks so much for your assistance and wise counsel!--Hasselkus 08:23, 21 December 2011 (EST)


Programmatic access to Place Coordinate data [27 December 2011]

Is it possible to call the coordinate data which is associated with a Place page using a piece of wiki syntax? I am interested in calling this information to pass into a template to create a URL to call the GeoHack resource. --ceyockey 15:19, 26 December 2011 (EST)

It's not, but it would be pretty easy to add. I'm out of town this week; I'll add it when I get back. I'm thinking I'll create a tag, like <coordinates>place-name</coordinates>.--Dallan 20:33, 27 December 2011 (EST)