Friday, June 22, 2018

An Interview with Chris Whitten: The Originator of WikiTree

If you haven’t yet done so, I recommend you use WikiTree as your free public family tree to share with others. WikiTree’s unique concept of having a single-entry per ancestor allows you to meet cousins you may never meet any other way. (I have found a bunch and many of us have even gotten to meet in person.) Some genealogists who are members of WikiTree do a DNA test and others don’t. WikiTree provides a way for you to connect with both. 

Here is a screenshot of only a part of WikiTree's "Get Started" page. They keep score of their membership statistics which is growing by leaps and bounds making WikiTree one of the fastest growing free online genealogical tools today. You can do searches on this page and there are links to all sorts of other interesting information.


You can find more facts and information about WikiTree HERE.

The best way to find out about how to use it is to give it a spin. You can signup HERE.

A curious person, I like to get to know more about the creative geniuses who are behind the tools that are driving the engine of a new resurgence of people interested in finding their families' roots. I am honored and thrilled Chris Whitten agreed to do this interview with me.


Chris, please share with us a little about your life outside of WikiTree. What do you like to do to relax and take a break?

I have a wonderful nine-year-old daughter. She is the light of my life.  In my free time I do a lot of gardening and landscaping. I
build stone walls. I really like to be outside and work with my hands.

(Chris may build stone walls. WikiTree members collaborate to help you knock down your genealogical brick walls. Stuck? Ask for help at the G2G forum--that stands for genealogist to genealogist. You find it under the "Help" pull-down menu at the upper right of the Wikitree page once you are logged in.)


 What is a typical workday like for you?

Some of my day is filled with mundane administrative tasks and problem-solving, of course. But I try to discipline myself to spend some time each day on a project that moves WikiTree forward. That's what keeps WikiTree improving, and what makes working on it personally rewarding.

At what age did you first get interested in genealogy?

I think I always had an interest in family history. The objects and heirlooms, especially ... the medals and mementos of my great uncle who died in World War II ... the model ships my great-great-grandfather carved to look like the ones he sailed in when he was young ... the pewter plate passed down through the hands of a dozen generations.

When you're young I think it helps to have something that you can hold in your hands. That makes history and your ancestor's stories come alive.

When I was 17 my great-aunt, Rebecca (Bartlett) Nally, helped with my first family tree. She was a great genealogist and a wonderful family leader, by which I mean she was one of those people who help keep a family together. She helped with my whole tree, including the parts that weren't her own.

 Have you had any big surprises when you studying your family history?

One amusing surprise when I took a Y-chromosome DNA test a decade ago: I didn't have any matches with my own surname (Whitten) but a half dozen with my wife's surname (McClellan). We joked that I should have taken her name when we got married.

I assumed that there might be one of those euphemistically-named "non-paternal events" in my recent history. On the other hand, it was only a 12-marker test. And many Whittens and McClellans came from the same Scottish-English borderlands region, so the matches could go back before surnames. Still, I didn't have any Whitten YDNA matches for almost ten years.

That actually leads me to my most pleasant recent surprise. My Whitten brick wall was broken through last year and there was a Revolutionary War veteran on the other side!

I was contacted by a man named Keith Whitten who found the profile of my ancestor Samuel Whitten on WikiTree. He said that Samuel was the brother of his ancestor and that their father was Richard Whitten, a private who served for three years in the American Revolution.

I asked Keith to take a YDNA test, and sure enough, we're a perfect match at 37 of 37 markers. Very cool. I was super excited about this.

Where were you and what were you doing when you had the first “A-ha” moment for creating WikiTree?

It wasn't a single moment. I organized my own and my wife's family history onto web pages in 2005, in time for our wedding. In part, this was just to get all the cousins and aunts and uncles straight in my mind before sending out invitations. :-) But also because weddings are important family events, and they're an opportunity to share and grow the family history. I wanted to get everything organized. I wanted to know what was known, and what was not known.

Although I didn't have the time to do it then, I wanted to make the web pages wiki. I wanted to enable family members to browse the pages, see what was missing, and be able to add it right then and there.

Thinking about it being wiki led to thinking about it being global. A family doesn't have clear borders around it. Families overlap. Infinitely. If I invite my cousin to add to the tree, she would add relatives and ancestors who aren't directly related to me. Our families are like overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. Every family circle is unique, but overlaps with others. We all connect.



What talents did you already have that enabled you to believe you could create WikiTree?


I've been creating community websites since 1995. My first business was a networking site for libertarians and free-market conservatives. At the time that I had the idea for WikiTree, described above, I was working on a site called WikiAnswers, a collaborative Q&A site.

 How long did you mull the idea over before you took action?

I registered the domain name WikiTree.com in 2005, but I didn't have time to work on it until I left WikiAnswers in late 2007.


What were some of the obstacles you had to overcome to make WikiTree a reality?

The biggest challenge was privacy. I didn't know how to handle that for a long time.

It's one thing to say that we're one big family. That my cousins should be able to add her cousins, and her cousins can add their cousins, etc. But all these cousins shouldn't be able to see everything about each other. The idea for Trusted Lists was a real breakthrough for WikiTree.

Another obstacle was the high level of expectations that genealogists have for family tree software. Genealogy software has been around since the 1980s, growing and improving. WikiTree had to develop a lot of features and functions before genealogists would take it seriously.

Where do you imagine genetic genealogy will be in the next ten years?


The combination of DNA testing and a single family tree means that most people won't have to research their family history. They can take a DNA test and almost immediately see a rich, deep genealogy that has been created by their cousins. Some already can.

I know many genealogists don't like this idea. Saying that a simple DNA test will give you your family history raises their hackles. But together we're making this possible, and it's a good thing.

Not everyone is a genealogist. Not everyone wants to do research. By sharing what we learn, by putting it together on a single family tree, genealogists are giving a wonderful gift to everyone else.

We do the genealogy. They spit in tubes.


What are your wildest imaginings for genetic genealogy in the future?


I think we will reconstruct the genomes of our ancestors.

We'll be able to see them. Know them in ways that they didn't even
know themselves.


What new tools do you hope to develop in the future?


We were actually working on collaborative chromosome maps for ancestor profiles, to move in this direction of reconstructing our ancestors' DNA.

We pulled the plug on this for privacy reasons. I'm disappointed, but it will happen without WikiTree. WikiTree needs to focus on our core mission of collaborative growing the tree. Our ancestors' genomes will be hosted elsewhere.

For our core mission, collaboration is key. It's relatively easy to get genealogists to share their research. Many will share their GEDCOM. But integrating their research and collaborating – really working together to fix mistakes and solve mysteries -- is not easy.

So, we are always working to make collaborating with other genealogists easier, and more fun. We're improving search and matching. We're looking for better ways to introduce cousins. We hope to do some of this with X-chromosome matches soon. There are always a hundred things on the to-do list, most of which have been suggested by community members.

I want to thank Chris for this incredible interview. 

Update: I decided just linking didn't show up enough in the interview and decided to add Chris' Samuel's full URL. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Whitten-56 Once you click on it click the descendant's icon so you can get a better idea of one of the innovative features of WikiTree.

I also want to thank him for a wonderful tool within WikiTree which can help everyone as they brag about and search for family. Each WikiTree profile has its own unique URL link which you can share with others on social media. If you click on Samuel Whitten's blue underlined link above you will see it takes you right to his WikiTree profile. WikiTreers call this sharing of profiles "Cousin Bait." Go ahead, search WikiTree for an ancestor (or add one) then post the URL to your favorite social media site and ask family to add their branches. (To copy a URL Left click and drag your mouse across the entire http address to highlight, then Right Click, select Copy. Go to Facebook or where ever and Left click your cursor where you want to add the URL and Right click and select Paste. Give it a second to load then click Post or Tweet.)

The URL link is like the one I share when I am looking for new members to join the Facebook Brady DNA Project. The project is open to anyone with the Brady surname anywhere in the world who has done autosomal DNA test and has uploaded to GEDmatch. Many at the project have added our branches to Hugh Brady whose WikiTree profile is Brady-242. (You really didn't expect me to pass up this opportunity did you?)

Thanks again, Chris!

Happy Finding!

I'm still having a blast.




Saturday, June 16, 2018

Creating a Basic GEDmatch DNA Workbook

You can copy and paste your results from GEDmatch into any spreadsheet program such as Excel or OpenSource.

I created a DNA spreadsheet workbook which contains the following: One-to-many page, Graphic Tree, Bar Chart, CSV file, Matching Segments, Triangulated Segments, and Gedcom + DNA. The One-to-many and Gedcom + DNA are on the free part of GEDmatch. You will need to join Tier 1 to access and run the rest of these fabulous tools. You will need to make a $10 donation. Joining Tier 1 for a one-month donation can save years of time figuring out who the common ancestors are you share with your matches. 

Some people view it only as a verification of their research. Discovering what's behind the walls, family secrets, adventures, and meeting often unknown living family members for me is what genetic genealogy is all about.  

Explanations of your results from Tier 1 tools can be found on several of my previous posts.

When I am done with running the tools this is what the sheets at the bottom of my workbook look like.




To copy different tool results into a workbook simply select all (Ctrl+A) right click “Copy,” open a blank spreadsheet page, right click your mouse and Paste. Or click Paste on the spreadsheet toolbar.

Sheet 1 One-to-Many

Use Ctrl-A to highlight everything, Right-click Copy. Open a spreadsheet and click Paste. A little circle spins for a while and a pop-up might tell you what you are pasting might look a little different than what you saw on the GEDmatch page. Don’t worry, you didn’t do anything wrong. Simply click “OK.” The circle will start spinning again and then you will see what you copied appear. The “One-to-Many” page might take a minute or two for the page to fully load. If you look at the scroll bar on the far right of your screen when it is all the way to the top it has finished loading the page.

Double click on the sheet at the bottom of the workbook to add a title to the page. (Untitled spreadsheet pages are labeled Sheet 1, Sheet 2, Sheet 3 and so on.)

Click to open a blank sheet for the next set of results.

I adjust the column widths on the “One-to-many” workbook page by sliding the lines between the alphabet letters at the top of the spreadsheet page right or left. The alphabet letters denote the columns in the spreadsheet. If you don't know how or are afraid of spreadsheets read my post, Easy Peasy Spreadsheets

I am so thankful I listened when Jim Bartlett told me I really needed to start using them. The learning (and for me fun) is in the doing.

After you paste your One-to-many page you will see that column “N” is an empty column. I make it wider and give it the heading MRCA (most recent common ancestor) and add notes under it. When the name of the person or grandparent couple is known I add that information.  

Be sure to click on the save icon frequently. Or you can do Ctrl+S.

On the One-to many page I study the Gen and Total cM shared information to help me determine relationships with my matches.

If I don’t know the relationship to a match I add notes of my best guess using the genetic distance and/or the results of “One-to-one comparison” totals which are found by clicking on the blue letter “A.” The One-to-one comparison gives more detailed results and the total amount shared can vary from what you see on the One-to-many page. 

Gen 1= Parent, Gen 2= grandparent, Gen 3= great-grandparent, Gen 4= 2nd great-grandparent. If I don't know the exact answer I might just note "4th great-grandparents" until I figure out exactly who it is.

One of the things I had trouble with is the fact that an MRCA (most recent common ancestor) can be a grandparent couple instead of just one person. 

Word to learn: Nibling. This is an aunt/uncle, niece/nephew relationship.

I check the total cMs shared using the free online DNA Painter cM Relationship chart that also provides odds for possible relationships you could share with your match.

Below is the DNA Painter tool I use to help me figure out the relationship with my match.
https://dnapainter.com/tools




I run Tier 1 Tools and select Triangulation Groups Beta Tools for three of pages I include in my DNA Workbook. Each one goes on a separate sheet. The Beta Tools gives you Graphic Tree, Bar Chart, and the CSV file.



Sheet 2 Graphic Tree (See Triangulation Graphic Tree What the Heck Am I looking At?)

Sheet 3 Bar chart (See my previous post on Bar Charts)


Sheet 4 Matching Segments

I love studying this page. It shows which chromosome and position you match with a person BUT it can be confusing because it is two dimensional and doesn’t show triangulation so there is no way to know if the match is on your maternal or paternal line. This is another good sheet to make notes on. I insert a column just before the colored graphic by right clicking my mouse on the cell that contains the letter “J” at the top of the page and choosing “insert.” A good note to make is what their name or alias is on their testing site.

Sheet 5 Segment Triangulation

I prefer to use the middle selection when I run this tool. It shows results by Kit number, chromosome, segment start position. This is the sheet I use to sort matches on maternal and paternal sides.  (How-to in my book and a future post.)




Optional additional sheets

Sheet 7- CSV or Comma Separated Value  

Download these results if you are used to working with spreadsheets and understand sorting. You don’t need this sheet to find your genetic family. I prefer to work with Sheet-5.

Sheet 6 - Gedcom + DNA matches



Though I can’t view the trees from the downloaded spreadsheet, this is a handy reference page for getting around the new GDPR EU (General Data Protection Rules for the European Union) that has resulted in everyone who is living shown as HIDDEN HIDDEN. You can edit this sheet and use it as a reference. Replace the hidden/ hidden with the name of your match by using Ctrl-F, enter the kit number and search your One-to-many page.  Or you can enter the Gedcom file number in “User look-up” which is found on the landing page. When you use “User look-up” you may find your match handles multiple kits of others who share the same most recent common ancestor (MRCA) with you.

I insert an additional column on the Gedcom + DNA spreadsheet and add the name of our MRCA and note if this person is a maternal or paternal match or A or B match when I am working with an adopted person.  

I also like to clean up my downloaded pages by deleting the stuff at the top of the downloaded pages. You can do that by going to the numbered rows at the far left of the page. Click on the row number that contains the lines of copy you want to delete. This highlights the row. Right-click and choose Delete.

If your results are scrunched up so you can't read the page, or you see a bunch of ### where numbers should be, slide the lines between the alphabet letters that indicate column to the right. Play with your sheets to get them the way you want them. 

If you make a mistake when working with your spreadsheets use the swishy back arrow button. 



You can rearrange the position of your DNA workbook pages by clicking on any sheet heading and dragging it right or left.

Happy Finding!

Still having a blast!