Spotlight: WikiTree Sourcer 2.7.1

WikiTree Sourcer 2.7.1 has been released, and for a x.x.1 release of the browser extension, it has quite a few changes/additions and I’d like to make it the Spotlight app of the week. I’ve talked about browser extensions before in the spotlight series, because I think they are huge additions to any genealogist’s toolkit.

In this instance, and for a detailed description of changes, see the bottom of this article, BillionGraves, FamilySearch, The Genealogist (.com and .co.uk), Ancestry, Scotlands People, NZBDM, and WieWase Wie/Open Arch, all had improved functionality for WikiTree users. The Genealogist was improved a great deal (you can switch between .com and co.uk), BillioGraves functionality has been updated to work with the new search paramters, and FamilySearch’s Image Viewer is better supported in terms of image citations.

So what is it? WikiTree Sourcer is a browser extension for WikiTree users who are using Safari, Firefox, or Chrome web browsers, and it does three main things (to paraphrase it’s description):

• When you are on a WikiTree profile page, it adds additional source-related capabilities, namely making it easy to search other genealogy services and websites for additional records (from that profile page).
• When you find a relevant record on another site, it can extract that record’s data along with a proper citation (Which is HUGE for WikiTree users, if you want to have a standard/properly formatted citation).
• From another genealogy services’s website, it can then search additional services/websites for the same or similar records (you can even have it flag free versions of records).

For me, it’s useful for a few things: Finding more records and helping with proper citations (a must for WikiTree and genealogy research in general, because I’m not always good about proper citations) and for FamilySearch sources. I’ve been doing an extensive amount of research concentrated on a few large families in one specific area, and it has helped me find information I might not have otherwise found, because those families loved to re-use names.

In terms of citations, you have three options – build an inline citation, build a citation with a narrative, and build a Source Citation (listed in the “Sources” section). On some sites (Ancestry and FamilySEarch) you can build citations for all sources at once. An example of the narrative text it can generate from records (from the user guide):

Census: “On 31 Mar 1901, Charles D Pavey, age 17, was with his parents and brother at Book Assembly House, 318, Kentish Tower Road, St Pancras, London & Middlesex, England. He was a Waiter.”

Baptism: “Harry Alfred was born on 18 Jul 1852; baptized on 23 Mar 1855 in Plymouth, St Andrew, Devon, England. He was the son of William Henry & Elizabeth.”

That makes things a lot more readable for people.

This is what it looks like in action:

There’s another feature that a lot of users really like, that I haven’t used as much, but it has the ability to create a table of everybody within a household (even if it’s multiple families, which it can split up) using census records and lets you paste the table into a WikiTree profile page (screenshots from the user guide):

And you can display additional information from the census:

Just look at all of the styles/types of tables and lists you can generate for WikiTree::

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:WikiTree_Sourcer%2C_Household_Table_Styles

You can look through the WikiTree Sourcer User Guide showing you options, how to build citations and household census tables, searching other sites, etc.:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:WikiTree_Sourcer_User_Guide

If you are a WikiTree user (even if you are not actively editing or adding to it), it’s amazingly useful, and it’s not just about saving you time when searching records, but it makes you much more efficient – you are searching from the actual WikiTree profile page, and it can point you to records you might not otherwise have thought of or seen and gives you proper (and automatic) citations making it extremely easy to work with WikiTree pages (and not having to worry about how a citation should be formatted).

It also supports a large number of genealogical sites/services from around the world:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:WikiTree_Sourcer_supported_sites

Apple Safari users:

It is free for Chrome and Firefox users but does cost a small fee ($4.99 USD) for Apple (macOS, iOS, iPadOS) users as Apple charges a yearly fee to publish through the App Store.

Official Site: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:WikiTree_Sourcer

Downloads:

• macOS (Safari) (Apple App Store)
• iPhone (Safari) (Apple App Store)
• iPad (Safari) (Apple App Store)
• Firefox (Mozilla.org)
• Google Chrome (Chrome Web Store)