Do you have any of your tree on WikiTree? Although I had heard “Dear Myrtle,” “Cousin Russ” and others talk about “cousin bait” and the use of WikiTree, I don’t have a lot of my data on WikiTree.

That all may change thanks to the recent meeting of Topeka Genealogical Society‘s Computer Special Interest Group (via zoom) last Thursday. During the meeting, Rich shared a lot of information about WikiTree including a GenealogyTV video.

After participating in the group, I decided to give WikiTree another try.

Since I have been updating my 3rd great-grandparents, I decided to see whether I could use a RootsMagic narrative report to create a profile for one of those great grandparents. I started with Henry Burke, whom I had to add. Since I had his daughter, Angelina Burke in my tree, I clicked on her father to add him. Then I

• entered his birth and death dates
• verified he wasn’t already in the tree
• added his place of death
• added the Find a Grave record as the source

This created a ‘basic profile.’ Then I clicked to EDIT the profile. I copied the RootsMagic narrative report that I had created for Henry Burke into the biography section. This replaced the “generic” birth/death information with the narrative for his life. This process changes the superscript endnotes numbers to regular numbers at the end of each fact sentence.

I had previously tried this with Nelson G. Crawford‘s profile and decided to put parenthesis around the numbers so that readers might realize they were embedded endnote numbers.

When working with Henry Burke’s profile, I explored the help resources and discovered that I could “embed” the sources by using the <ref> tag.

Further down on the help page was information on how to reuse a citation.

Since I’ve used the Find a Grave citation for multiple facts, I wanted to use this technique for that source. So, I assigned the name “find grave”

Then I just referred to that name when I wanted to reuse the citation.

When finished embedding the sources, I saved the profile. This published my narrative report with superscript endnote numbers.

At the bottom of the biography is the numbered list of sources with links back to the biography.

To summarize, I

• Used RootsMagic to generate a narrative report for my ancestor and open that report in Word.
• Copied the biographical portion of the narrative report into the WikiTree profile for my ancestor
• Used the <ref> </ref> tags to create an embedded citation
• Copied the source information from the word copy of the narrative report (or from RootsMagic) and pasted it after the <ref> tag and before the </ref> tag
• Used the name= function to assign a name to a citation so that I could reuse it
• Saved the updated profile when finished embedding the sources (See Henry Burke)

Now that I’ve not only figured out how I can use the narrative report to create the WikiTree biography but also how it fairly quickly and easily embed the citations, I will likely build out more of my tree.