What I've been up to

I've been suffering from a bit of writer's block of late. But I'm still here! Just a bit quieter than usual... So I thought I'd give a quick update on what I've been up to lately.

I've been working on my one place study of St. François Xavier. I haven't gotten a whole lot done on that yet, since I only have Saturday mornings to work on it, and one Saturday a little trip to the emergency room took up my whole day and sort of ruined my plans. But other than that I've worked on it every Saturday, and another researcher there gave me the idea of photographing the pages I'm transcribing, so I can work on them at home. I don't have a professional camera, just a little digital one, but it's worth a shot! If I can take pictures that are as easy to read as the paper copies, then that could really speed up my work on this project! So I'll be trying that out this weekend.

I've also started on a website for the one place study. I got some space at Freepages (did you know you can get free web space there for genealogy?!), and so far I've put hardly anything on it, and it's very plain and ugly. But eventually it will be pretty and full of information! You can visit my Freepages here.

Other than that, I've mostly been working on my Acadian ancestors on WikiTree. Not doing a whole lot of research, just merging profiles and starting to add some sources (pretty much just the censuses). Soon I plan to add sources from Stephen A. White, because it turns out that a copy of his Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes (basically the Bible of Acadian genealogy, and rather hard to find) is at the St. Boniface Historical Society! So sometime soon I'll be making time to flip excitedly through that. :-)

Cleaning up WikiTree profiles

Since my posts here have been a bit less frequent in the last few weeks, I thought I'd talk a bit about what I've been doing lately. I guess the reason there have been less posts is that I haven't been focusing a lot on actual research. I've still been busy, though! I've done quite a bit of scanning (the last Scanfest was really productive for me!), and I've been adding more sources to various individuals in my family tree, mostly by searching through lots and lots of census records.

Another thing I've been spending some time on is specific to WikiTree. In case you're not familiar with it, WikiTree is an online, collaborative family tree project. I wrote more about it in a previous post. One difficulty in such a design is that when a bunch of people create their family trees, especially through GEDCOM imports, you end up with a bunch of profiles describing the same person.

I noticed that there's a group of people on WikiTree trying to clean up the duplicate profiles of European aristocracy, and decided to take on a similar effort myself. So lately I've been making lists of profiles of my Acadian ancestors, and planning out where merges should be made.

So far, I haven't really done any actual merging at all. The trouble is, I'm not the one in charge of all these profiles, and the people who are aren't very active on WikiTree, apparently, so it's been tough to coordinate things. I'm planning to request supervisor status, which will allow me to merge open profiles (which most of these profiles are, thankfully) without being on their trusted lists. So here's hoping that works out!

On a related note, I now have over 600 people in my family tree! I can't believe how much it's been growing lately! I've been adding a lot of descendents of my ancestors lately, and every time I do I hope that it will connect me to someone else who's working on their family tree and is my distant cousin. It's so exciting!