It’s been a while since I published a blog post here, and I feel an explanation and an update are needed.
It’s a story of discovery that began with an exploration of possible Jamestown ancestors and blossomed into the discovery of an amazing community of researchers; a commitment to helping grow a single, global, narrated family tree; and untold surprising discoveries—including most recently the discovery that my father’s second wife may have been murdered by a known serial killer.
Let me back it up a bit and give you more of the story. Last June, after a particularly grueling period of work and being a Cub Scout leader, I needed a mental break. I decided to give myself a genealogical challenge—to find an ancestor who is considered a qualifying ancestor for membership in the Jamestowne Society. I have an ancestor who was adopted by an Ancient Planter at Jamestown, but no solid biological connection yet to an early settler at Jamestown. It sounded like a productive way to move my focus back into my happy place (genealogy), and a timely research project, given that we’re planning a trip to Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg this fall to expose Arwen to some early history of the future United States.
As I started digging into ancestors who were reasonable candidates for being early Jamestown settlers, or the descendants of early Jamestown settlers, I kept coming up with references to well-written and well-researched profiles of my ancestors on a site called WikiTree (think Wikipedia, but with the aim of a single, collaboratively-edited page for every person for whom there is historic evidence). WikiTree is a long way from achieving that level of completeness, but there are thousands of active users (over 1.1 million users in all) who are working together to help make that dream into reality, and there are over 39 million people profiled so far on the site.
If you know how frustrating it can be to work with hundreds or thousands of aspirational Ancestry.com trees that have been cobbled together with flimsy or no evidence, many of them making assertions that are plainly incorrect, you’ll understand my joy at discovering WikiTree. WikiTree is a global, collaborative, single genealogical tree where we all work together to get at the genealogical truth about the relatedness of all people who left any historical record of their existence. (Note: if this sounds like an advertisement for WikiTree, know that it is not. I was not asked to write this, I am not being compensated for writing this, I am just a very happy user of this great [and free!] service).
WikiTree has just a single tree that everyone can work on and help improve together. Every assertion on WikiTree must be backed up by cited sources. If you ever find a statement you suspect to be incorrect, you can correct that statement if you’ve done the research to find sources to back up your correction. Everyone who contributes to WikiTree has signed their Honor Code, which ensures a friendly group of like-minded researchers working towards common goals.
A game-changer for me was finding a link to my first gateway ancestor on WikiTree. A gateway ancestor is a person on your family tree who descends from royalty or nobility. Because royalty and nobility have the means and the motivation to document their heritage, and because they are involved in activities and transactions that are traditionally well-documented, the sheer quantity of historical sources for these families is overwhelming, especially to someone more used to finding just crumbs for many of my earlier ancestors. All of a sudden, I was connected to the royal houses of England, France, Spain, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. I found multiple lines extending back to Charlemagne.
Such lavish claims in genealogy are not at all uncommon, so I figured I’d spend an hour or two to disprove some of these claims to prove to myself that the whole lot was unreliable, and then I’d move on with my life. Much to my surprise, however, each assertion I tried to refute ended up being supported by reliable sources and historical documents.
After being unable to easily refute these new ancestral lines, I decided I’d record them in my offline database as pointers to this other research, and *then* I’d move on with my life. I figured it would take a day or two of concerted work. A week later, I figured I had maybe another week of work to go. In the end, it took me over six weeks to capture just a skeletal outline of all of these new ancestral lines in my database. Every once in a while, I’d take a break and try again to challenge some of the assertions, but the research in these early lines in WikiTree held up to scrutiny.
After six weeks of this work, I started to ask myself why I was spending this much effort merging the WikiTree research into my own private database, where it would not benefit from the ongoing research being done by the rest of the WikiTree community. Instead, I could try to merge my own work into the WikiTree framework. So last August, I started entering my tree into WikiTree.
I’ve now entered much of my family tree into WikiTree, and I hope to move most of the research I’ve written on this blog into WikiTree as well over the next couple of years. It can be a bit of a slog with recent generations, as you may be the only descendant or relative with any interest in many of those ancestors. But as you get back in the range of 5–9 generations ago, something magical happens as you find other researchers who are as fascinated by some of your ancestors as you are.
I’ve been working on WikiTree for a little over a year now, and I’ve been deeply impressed with their mission, their community, and the standards of their research.
I spent a lot of time on WikiTree over the 2023/2024 winter holidays, and ended up getting profiled as a Member of the Week, and interviewed live about a detailed profile I had researched and written about a user’s brick-wall ancestor.
I’ve written several detailed profiles of my own ancestors as well, of course. Two of my favorites to date are those of Frank B. Scott (1869–1937) and William Noble Bailey (1860–1923).
My goal for as long as I can remember has been to bring everything I know about an ancestor together into a comprehensive, illustrated, enjoyable biography. For years, I assumed this would be in the form of a series of published books. As I get older, though, I see less value in delaying the sharing of this information so that it can be published in a book that might be seen by a couple of dozen people over the coming decades. I’d much rather share that information now, and have a better chance of it mattering to people right now. One of the things that WikiTree is really good at is making the information entered on WikiTree easy to find for people who may not even know that WikiTree exists.
So that’s what I’ve done and am continuing to do—sharing my family history information by putting as much of that information on WikiTree as possible to share it broadly and to help others find out more about the family we both share. And by doing so, I will hopefully also learn more about my ancestors and family members through collaborations sparked by the research I’ve done and the profiles I’ve written on WikiTree.
And that’s exactly what has happened. The story of my father’s second wife is one such example.
I had often wondered what happened to my father’s second wife, Wynona Nadine (“Wyndi”) Michel. I met her several times in the 1980s when she and my dad were a couple after my parents separated and later divorced. I’ve been trying to piece together my father’s life story, and the period she and my father were together was the period of his life that I knew the least about. At the time, I was mad at him for breaking up our family, and I distanced myself from him for a couple of years, by which time he had moved hundreds of miles away. We reconciled after a while and grew quite close again, but we never spoke much of the details of those years. By the time we did start talking about those years, he was terminally ill. When I was helping clean his house while he was in the hospital, I discovered a wedding certificate for his marriage to Wyndi. Until the, I hadn’t even known they had gotten married. I asked him about it, and he just said that it was probably one of the biggest mistakes of his life, without further elaboration. I never did get to ask him for more details, as he soon afterwards slipped into a delusional state, and died soon afterwards.
I tried to track Wyndi down, and had no luck. All records for her stopped in the late 1980s, soon after she and my dad parted ways. I tried to find her parents, but also to no success. I wrote up everything I knew about her and put it in her profile on WikiTree.
Five weeks ago, I received an email from a woman (I’ll call her “T”) who was trying to learn as much as she could about an aunt she didn’t even know she had until a detective contacted her the day before to tell her that her DNA was a close match for a Jane Doe cold case he was working. From a genetic genealogical analysis, the Jane Doe appeared to be the half-sister of T’s father, who had himself died the previous year. T was trying to come to grips with this new revelation, and was reaching out for any information she could find that could help her make sense of it, and she came across the skeletal profile of Wyndi that I had written on WikiTree.
When T first reached out, she mentioned none of this—she just wanted to know what else I knew about Wyndi. I shared with her everything I knew, and that’s when she told me about Wyndi’s possible murder. We were both very concerned about Wyndi’s daughter, Tasha, after I learned about the murder, and then asked her if she knew that Wyndi had a daughter Tasha who would have only been about 10 years old at the time of her mother’s murder. We’re still waiting final confirmation of Wyndi’s remains through a DNA test with another relative of Wyndi’s that T also didn’t know she had—Wyndi’s half-brother Frank, who is currently serving a life sentence for first degree murder, felony murder, aggravated robbery, and aggravated sexual battery. The more we learn about Wyndi’s background, the more tragic and heartbreaking her story becomes. I will definitely share more of her story here once more of the details are worked out.
Since I started working with WikiTree a little over a year ago, I’ve had many similar experiences of discoveries and connections, although most were nowhere near as dark as Wyndi’s story. I’ve gone from having one known Mayflower ancestor to at least eight, from having a small handful of Puritan Great Migration ancestors to nearly 300, and from having a couple of Revolutionary War ancestors to knowing of at least 22 (and I finally joined the Sons of the American Revolution on the basis of one of these ancestors, Seth Vinton). I’ve discovered my ancestor John Martin was a member of Sir Francis Drake’s crew on his famous 1577–1580 voyage of exploration and circumnavigation. I’ve learned that I am descended from 16 of the 25 Magna Carta Surety Barons, and that I am descended from six Anglo-Norman kings of the House of Plantagenet. And these are just some of the highlights. It’s been a fun and heady voyage!
Yet my original reason for discovering and using WikiTree—to find a solid Jamestown ancestor—has yet to be met. But all the other discoveries I’ve made along the way on this journey have made my decision to lean in to WikiTree so rewarding. If you’d like help getting started, just let me know in the comments below and I’ll be happy to help you out.
Hi, Michael. Wonderful article, and I plan to follow your suggestion and pursue some research on WikiTree. My second great-grandfather was Dr. Perry E. Prettyman, who you wrote about August 25, 2013. My own surname is McCornack, and it wasn’t until I was in my teens (in the 1960s) that I learned that my father’s birth father was George B. Prettyman, one of Perry’s grandsons. George Prettyman died when my father was only 3, so most of my father’s sense of identity was tied to his stepfather, Fred McCornack.
I have had a longstanding interest in learning more about my Prettyman heritage, and I deeply appreciate the fascinating clues that have appeared on your blog. If you have time and interest, I would enjoy corresponding at some point about your research into your Prettyman roots, and to perhaps compare notes.
Great to hear from you, Mike, and also great to hear that some of my blog posts have been helpful to you over the years. I see that WikiTreers have already built out a reasonable profile for Perry Elgin Prettyman (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Prettyman-246), and I see that they’ve made use of my ‘Dandelions’ blog post!
I’d be happy to correspond with you about our Prettyman roots and research. Realistically, I won’t have much more than minimal time on any predictable basis until December, but let’s give it a shot because I often end up have unexpected free time for genealogy.