Hi All, Isabel brought up recently some things to consider in presenting evidence/sources for the data we share. Following is an excerpt from an offlist email exchange between Bonnie and me. I think the considerations she presents are important to consider and so I include some excerpts here....These are reflections on how to do genealogy: letter of the law, spirit of the letter of the law. Both are legitimate. How do you feel about these? Renee ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1) Regarding some of the "philosophical" issues involved in how we [Degruy L] will assemble and present the data we find these words from Bonnie: I guess the simplest way to put it would be that not everyone will agree what the truth is about the lineage. William Faulkner once said that the truth is so blinding that you cannot look at it from one angle. If indeed there was only one truth, there would only be one religion. Anyway, to avoid a train wreck down the line, it would be much better to decide now on a protocol and procedure for assembling the gedcom. In other words, if the lineage was block simple to assemble, someone would have already done it. Therefore, setting ground rules about how you are going to document and deal with discrepancies in the record would be wise. For example, my cousin ... and I fundamentally disagree about procedure for assembling family histories. She is what I would call a strict constructionist. She does not include anyone who is not clearly documented. Her family file is very small. I'm just the opposite. I include anyone I think belongs, hopefully with a justification of why I think so. If you look up her gedcom on rootsweb you will find it confined to one single family line, Baudier, with a few hundred people, whereas mine has thousands. Her research methodology is impeccable. However, you would not see the DeGruy line in her family file, because she has not verified it. Oddly enough, she's the source for a great deal of the information that I have on the DeGruy family. If I followed her protocol, none of you would have had access to the information that I have made available through my family file on the web, unverified and all. That being said, cousin ... has followed the letter of the law, while I have followed the spirit. Both have their value and, I believe, their place. [Her] gedcom is a finely documented and unblemished record on a few chosen individuals which is an end in itself. My gedcom is finely documented where possible but is mostly undocumented and suggest to error. My gedcom is it is intended to be a jumping off place for others to begin their research. I want to do the greatest good for the greatest number, even at the expense of some accuracy. In an electronic age errors are so easily corrected. However, I will tell you that I get some viciously ugly letters about obvious errors in my gedcom. I even had one @%%$#% notify me that he was so appalled by some error that he found on my gedcom about his direct family line that he attached a post it note to my gedcom warning other researchers who he thought might innocently be harmed by the info contained in my gedcom. I was so incensed that I thought about taking the whole gedcom down from the web, but after I cooled down, I instead decided to simply put a disclaimer on the gedcom notifying downloaders to beware ... as if you have to warn any researcher worth their salt of that anyway! An example of the kind of discrepancy in the record that can cause problems is the one in the recent letter that you just got about one of the DeGruy's having two wives, or did he? Would you put the two wives in the gedcom citing who suggested them, or wait until harder evidence came out to discredit or credit them? 2) More items for consideration from Bonnie: I do family research for fun, not to get credit for anything. I get my fair share from my day job. However, that being said, it is best to quote the primary source, not me or anyone else. Again, I recommend the citation standard in the book "Evidence" ... Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian by Elizabeth Shown Mills <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books&field-author=Mills%2C%20Elizabeth%20Shown/002-4987607-0042435> * Hardcover: 124 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 9.25 x 0.50 x 6.25 * Publisher: Regional Publishing Company; 1 edition (January 2000) * ISBN: 0806315431 * $16.95 that I recommended to you [I have a copy at home if you need help]. I try very hard to carefully cite every little piece of data I collect. Unfortunately, rootsweb does not correctly transfer my citations. It is much better for me to send you, or anyone else, a copy of a particular family file from my home genealogy software database for it contains the full correct citation. On the other hand, when I have made some interesting intuitive conjecture about some hapless ancestor that has not a shred of substantiating factual data, which I do quite often, then feel free to quote me or my web file. I'm shameless; I do family research for fun. Although getting it right is important to me, it's not why I do it. As an academic research librarian, I believe knowledge is about sharing. It's important to every researcher that they have a citation that will lead them back to the original document where they can check the facts for themselves. Whenever I can the primary source, or original document, I always do, sometimes many times. Let me give you an example: My cousin ... and I were researching our direct family line. We found our great grandfather on the census alive after we knew for a fact that he was dead [we had a copy of his death certificate]. I cannot tell you how many times we looked at that original census record before one of us realized that the person listed was his wife, going by his name, as in the widow Pascal Henri Baudier [the widow part being understood, or left off by the census taker]. With the above in mind, another instance when you might want to quote me, but only as a secondary source in addition to citing the primary document information, is if you have not checked out the primary source information yourself and wanted to make sure that other researchers know that if they detect any corruption of the primary source material in my data, it was I who made the errors. I hope this is a help. You can always check with me if you're unsure about how to progress. For example, with the information on the degruyere family in Switzerland, it would be better to quote the web site that I got the info from. At the moment, there is no genealogical link to that family in Switzerland, only hearsay. I'm just so excited that you have taken the initiative to enable us researchers to begin a dialogue that will allow us all to work together now to piece the very best information that each of us separately has into something substantive. I'm so exited about this whole project. I just hope I can keep up. I think it's going to be a worldwind! Thanks for including me. I sent along the info to my cousin