Genealogy Wikis

A familiar sight: "World Book Encyclopedia, 1990"
by Nataev - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons 

As a kid I loved looking through almanacs, dictionaries, and encyclopedias.  Now I can indulge my interest in perusing reference, as well as get help in my genealogy, by going to wikis. In particular I regularly use Wikipedia (especially for state and county history background as well as historical background), and the FamilySearch wiki for all things genealogy.

James Tanner has created three videos about using and editing FamilySearch wiki:
The FamilySearch Research Wiki - An Introduction

Understanding Pages in the FamilySearch Research Wiki

Research Wiki Namespaces and Menu Items

I've noticed that the San Diego County page in the FamilySearch wiki is a bit sparse.  I hope to start contributing to that when I have more energy again.

Two wikis I have been neglecting are the Ancestry.com's Wiki and the International Society of Genetic Genealogy Wiki (which I discovered through GEDmatch.com).

It's not clear to me that Ancestry will continue their wiki, as it is hard to find on the Ancestry site itself.  While genealogist Crista Cowan did a video ("Ancestry.com Family History Wiki with Crista Cowan") on the wiki in 2013 it seems they aren't promoting it now and it isn't even on the Site Map.  I had to Google "Ancestry Wiki" to get the main wiki page!

As Crista points out, the wiki is in part from the print classics "The Source: A Guidebook to American Genealogy" and "Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources".  You can access this wiki whether you have an account with Ancestry or not:

I've just been plain avoiding the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG) Wiki because of the intellectual commitment it takes to really get a handle on the details for genetic genealogy.  This year I plan to study this a little bit each week.




As Newcleus sang in "Jam On It":  "Wikki-wikki-wikki-wikki!" (sorry, I couldn't resist)

© 2015 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.