The Ravensbrück List (Ancestry) Is Done — A Purple Triangles Update

 Companion post to Episode 4 of A Country Girl Rambles, "Update on the Purple Triangles Project (Sep 2026)" and what's changed this month.

Profiles for all of the Bibelforscher in the Ancestry.com dataset for Ravensbrück have been created! That's 192 profiles on the Purple Triangles - Ravensbrück free-space page, with 185 of them coming from the IBV category in Ancestry's Germany, Incarceration Documents, 1933-1945 collection (from the Arolsen Archives, 1.1.35, Ravensbrück Concentration Camp). Each profile represents not just a name and a prisoner number, but a person who was imprisoned for refusing to renounce their faith.

A little background

WikiTree is a free genealogy website, where genealogists collaborate on a single family tree, with one profile per ancestor. Back in 2015, the Holocaust Project was created. When I joined WikiTree in 2018, my first focus was getting my own family added, and then in 2019 I started the Jehovah's Witnesses sub-project of the Religion Project. Projects on WikiTree are ways for members to work together on a location or a topic, like religion. I wrote about how that one got started on my old blog, if you'd like to read more!

Purple Triangles is a part of both of these projects, as Jehovah's Witnesses who were persecuted during the Nazi regime were identified in the camps with a purple triangle badge. In the camp records, they appear under the category "IBV," short for Internationale Bibelforscher-Vereinigung, the International Bible Students Association. The focus of the project is to document and memorialize these victims of religious persecution, and connect them to the global tree.

Last August, I finished the profiles for all 442 Bibelforscher in the Ancestry.com Dachau records (G2G post). Ravensbrück, the women's camp, was next.

What went into these profiles

To build the list, I searched Ancestry's Germany, Incarceration Documents collection for the keyword "IBV." That brought up 185 records, which I copied into a Google Sheet to work from while creating the profiles.

The records were compiled mostly from arrival, transfer, and register lists. Because the Lichtenburg records passed into the Ravensbrück series, some of the entries actually come from lists that predate the camp's opening. As with Dachau, there were some transcription differences between Ancestry and the actual documents on Arolsen, so each entry was checked against the original. Names were sometimes spelled differently from one list to the next, and married and maiden names got swapped around, so it took some going back and forth!

Along with Ancestry.com and the Arolsen Archives, the repositories used for source documentation include FamilySearch, FindAGrave, the Watchtower Online Library, Stolpersteine, Villa Merländer, and Lila Winkel, which specifically documents Jehovah's Witnesses persecuted under the Nazi regime.

Each profile gets the Jehovah's Witnesses and Jehovah's Witnesses, Purple Triangles categories, along with the Holocaust Project sticker marking their documented fate: victim, survivor, or unknown. If the records don't tell us, it stays unknown. Maintenance categories are added too, showing whether there is evidence of family members on the source documents, or whether more records, like a birth, marriage, or death, are still needed.

This list is not complete, and it does not represent the full number of Bibelforscher women held at Ravensbrück. There were some men held there as well. These are the women who are most easily identified in this one record set, and more will be added as more profiles are created.

Updating the camp pages

While working on Ravensbrück, I also went back through the free-space pages for each of the camps and updated them against the current category list. The main Purple Triangles page lists each of the camps, how many profiles are currently in each camp's category, and whether there is a free-space page for it. That catches profiles missing a category, entries on a camp page that don't have a profile yet, and profiles that were never linked back to their camp page. It's not the most exciting work, but it means that anyone landing on one of these pages can trust that the list is current.

What's next

These profiles need to have their family members added and to be connected to the main tree. Can you help us get them connected? Here are a couple of places to start:

• Jehovah's Witnesses, Family Tree Size One, with 571 profiles waiting for family members
• The Purple Triangles free-space page, if there's a particular camp you'd like to work on

If you're watching the video, you'll notice I switch between two browser windows. One shows WikiTree as it looks on its own, and the other has the WikiTree Browser Extension installed, which changes how WikiTree displays. WikiTree Sourcer is another extension that's really helpful for adding sources.

If you have Jehovah's Witness ancestors who were imprisoned, deported, or lost during this time, I'd love to hear from you. I'm also writing more about this project over on my Purple Triangles blog, which is linked at the top of this blog too.

What I've been working on

Admin work for the WikiTree Challenge and the Source-a-Thon has been heating up, so there hasn't been a lot of time for my own genealogy this week. Our WikiTree Challenge guest for October is Blaine Bettinger! My mother is also visiting, after we went up to Olympia last Saturday to see my brother and my cousin.

News from around WikiTree

The surname changes I mentioned a couple of weeks ago are live! Chris has a pinned G2G post, "Have You Seen the New Surname Hubs?", and he used my Peasley Genealogy Hub as the example. The Peasley Surname Collaboration Score is 95.27%! Have you checked out the hub for your surname yet?

Upcoming events & challenges

Today: US Black Heritage is sponsoring the week, and they're having a Disco(rd) Party at 7pm ET!

Saturday: Eowyn and I are doing a livecast on how to register and participate in the Source-a-Thon. If you've never done one before, this is the perfect place to start!

Also on Saturday, the Genealogy Collaboration Hour has a new host, Denise Jarrett! You may recognize her as a host from the Member Q&A sessions and the Saturday Roundup. I've stepped back from hosting, but I'll still be joining in as time permits.

Sunday: Member Q&A at 11am ET.

Monday: Tech Talk at 6pm ET (link coming soon).

The Source-a-Thon is coming up soon, and there are some really great prizes this year, including a Y-37 DNA test, subscriptions to Ancestry, MyHeritage, FindMyPast, and Family Tree Webinars, books, handmade scarves, and more! See the full prize list on the help page.

For all upcoming events and challenges, see Help:Calendar.

Hope to see you around the branches!