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Template:Biography

Welcome!

This wiki is meant to be a genealogy of our family, where "our" means anyone who has been invited to be a member. This is a private site. To see any page but the login, you must have a userid and password. We only intend to invite people who are part of the family tree. All the same, once a fact has been posted on the internet, it may never disappear.

Getting started

Browsing

Please use this wiki to browse and learn about our family! You can find a list of all of the family members with biographies here. You can find contact information for living family members here. We hope that this site will help us stay connected. If you forget the name of the page you want, you might be able to find it by Category, or by entering part of the name in the search box.

If your own biography is in the wiki, you can visit your ancestors by clicking on a parent's name, then click on their parent, and so on up the tree, but this works only for blue links. If you click on a red link, you will be taken to a special page where you can create a new biography for that person. If you don't want to do that, either click on "Cancel" at the bottom, or use your browser's "Go back one page" arrow.

Correcting Errors

If you notice an error on a page, please do either of the following:

1. Let an editor know
   • Click on the "View History" tab in the upper right corner
   • Choose someone from the list of editors
   • Find their email address here and tell them of the error
2. Make the correction yourself
   • Click on the "Edit" tab in the upper right corner and make the correction in the page code

Warning: This may require above average computer skills

Tip: When you are done editing, click "Show preview" so you can see what you've done before you save anything.

Creating A Biography

1. Go to Template:Biography
2. Highlight the text in the blue/gray box and copy it
3. In the search box type:

   If Living: the person's current full name.

   If Deceased: the person's full name at death.

4. Click on: Create the page "Janet Doe Smith" on this wiki!
5. Paste the Template:Biography code into the new text box
6. Begin editing!

We suggest that, in regard to living people, you provide only basic information.

Duplicate Names

• This wiki already has seven different people named John Lowell. To allow each one to have his own page, we called them John Lowell 1 through John Lowell 7. If you search for "John Lowell" with no number, you get a "disambiguation page" that describes each of them briefly and lets you pick the one you want.
• If you want to create a page for Mary Smith, but there's already a page for a totally different Mary Smith, make the title of your article "Mary Smith 2" instead. If that's used, too, make it "Mary Smith 3", and so on.
• You can also create your own disambiguation page, but if that's too much for you to cope with, the administrators will do it later.

Adding photos

• If you have old family photos on your computer, we would love to have them on the wiki—within reason. Photos should preferably show the face of some family member clearly, and should be substantially different; for example, five shots of a picnic with the same four people in each one is overkill.
• To upload a photo, click on "Upload file" in the menu bar at the left of your screen. You will be asked to find the picture file by browsing on your computer, and then to type in a caption. If possible, include names, date, and location in your caption.
• To display the photo in an article, follow the instructions in Template:Biography.

General MediaWiki Information

• Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.
• Configuration settings list
• MediaWiki FAQ
• MediaWiki release mailing list
• Localise MediaWiki for your language

Conventions

Generations

We felt that visitors could orient themselves more readily in the wiki if they could compare generations. We have arbitrarily assigned the babies in our family to generation 50. Their parents are generation 49, and so on up. Fifty generations should give us enough space to go back at least to William the Conqueror, if needed.

This scheme can go awry if someone marries someone from a different generation and they have children together. We hope we don't run into that situation; if we do, we'll just wing it!

Using the generation numbers, you can easily figure your relationship to any of your relatives. If you are in generation 49 and you have an ancestor in generation 44, the number of "greats" is two less than the difference: 49-44-2=3, so the ancestor is your great-great-great grandfather. If you are in generation 48 and you have a distant cousin in generation 47 and your closest ancestor in common is in generation 42, you are fourth cousins once removed. To find the number of times removed, subtract your generation from your cousin's generation and ignore the minus sign. To find the degree of cousinship, take the smaller of 48-42 and 47-42 and subtract 1. You can even calculate your degree of consanguinity, very easily: it's (48-42)+(47-42)=11.

The DeWees/DeWeese Family Association Newsletter has assigned an arbitrary number to each family member, to avoid misidentification. We will give those numbers as DFAN-nnn in each biography where known.

Dates

Some older dates are written with a slash, as in 1649/50. According to Wikipedia, "from the 12th century until 1751 the legal year in England began on 25 March." In modern times, George Washington's birthday would be called February 22, 1732, but Washington's parents would have written 1731 on his birth certificate, because the legal year 1732 didn't begin until March. When we write "1649/50", we mean that the legal year was 1649 but the date was after January 1 so we would think of it as 1650.

"C." is for circa (about).