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So, on my account at werelate.org I’ve uploaded my family history information, namely the GEDCOM data that my dad gave me a few years ago. WeRelate is a cool site. It’s basically Wikipedia for genealogy. In fact, it’s built on the same underlying MediaWiki software that Wikipedia uses. The idea of WeRelate, as with any wiki, is to harness the benefits of collaboration and reduced duplication of effort through an easy, change-what-needs-changing interface. Go find an ancestor and add additional details by clicking ‘Edit’ at the top of a page. Or make an account and upload any GEDCOM family history data you have. Odds are there will be some overlap between your tree and what’s already on there, so you and other volunteers can work towards integrating that new data into the existing tree structure. It’s fairly easy to do that because a list of possible duplicates is automatically generated for your account. The list for my account is here.

Some of the information in our records is either given without any source citation, or cites sources like Ancestral File that are often questionable and inaccurate. So I think I’m going to start a project of source review and retracing of steps to ensure the accuracy of our information. I want to get primary sources, hopefully including images of the documents, for all life events. It’s possible that at some point I’ll start finding discrepancies between what I’m able to reproduce and what is claimed in our tree. That’s where this exercise could get interesting. Anyway, I know that primary sources aren’t available in a lot of cases. But when they are obviously available, I’m going to try to cite and provide images or transcriptions of the primary sources.

By the way, isn’t this photo of my great grandma cool? I think she looks really pretty. I wonder when and for what occasion this photo was taken. For her wedding, perhaps? Katinka was born in Avnslev, Svendborg, Denmark in 1884. At the age of 24 Katinka sailed to the United States on the Lusitania (yes, that Lusitania), arriving in New York on September 5, 1908. After arriving, she traveled to Denver, which only a few months earlier had hosted the Democratic National Convention where William Jennings Bryan was nominated for his third(!) defeat in the presidential race. We’re not sure how long she lingered in Denver, but by July 6, 1911, she was in San Francisco marrying my great grandpa, Niels Henning Hansen. She outlived Niels by over a decade, dieing just weeks short of her 91st birthday in Los Angeles. (Interestingly enough, her son, my grandpa, Siegfried Hansen, also died at the age of 90 years old. Hence my goal is to live until I’m 90 🙂 )