For whatever reason in the last few weeks, I’ve dove straight into everything related to WikiTree. Once I started looking at all of the things that were possible with a huge, helpful, friendly community of users and a system that allows a lot of interconnectedness, I was able to find the power in the site. I’ve always used the site, but I picked up a bunch more responsibility with it recently.
Not only have I started up the Zalewski Name Study project on the site, I also started one up for the next largest surname in my tree, the Thielke Name Study. Those are still in their infancy, with the Zalewski one being a bit further. The Thielke one only has two lines on it so far, but it’s a start.
I also spent a lot of July adding sources to a lot of profiles on the site, mostly my own. This got me the “Sourcerer” and “Club 100 – July 2017” badges for my profile. I also became a member of the US History project, the Categorization project, the Wisconsin project, and the Cemeteries project (aka a Cemeterist.) But, not only did I join those, I am also now the Project Coordinator for the Wisconsin Project itself. This means I get to coordinate all of the sub-projects under Wisconsin and try to recruit volunteers to help build Wisconsin’s information and profiles.
Once I became that coordinator, I noticed Wisconsin has no county sub-projects. So, I went ahead and created the Ozaukee County project since it is the one I feel that I have the most expertise with.
Then once I became a Cemeterist, I decided to pick one local cemetery and work on it. Back in May of 2000, I transcribed a small, local cemetery in the area named St. Finbar’s Cemetery. I posted it up on interment.net as this was probably the leading cemetery transcription site at the time. Surprisingly, it’s still up and listed.
So, I added the St. Finbar’s Cemetery project up onto WikiTree and added my transcription even though it’s slightly outdated. Now, my goal is to either link existing profiles to the listing or create new profiles for every person buried there. I’ve added a few so far and learned a bit of history about the cemetery and its “inhabitants.”
I’m excited and I hope I do well coordinating all of these things. My profile is getting long. The one thing I love to do outside of researching my own family is to help others find information about their family. If you do genealogy, I recommend you join the site or at least visit and look around at all of the amazing things people are doing on their own time to help others.
