On Monday, June 13, 2016 at 4:23:59 AM UTC-7, WJH wrote: > In exploring that link I've identified that Surtees (who effectively tried > to create the same sort of comprehensive list for Durham in the early 19th > century) propagated some errors that are still quoted as gospel today, > including by "definitive" publications such as the online history of > members of parliament. This is a pervasive problem with History of Parliament. It is simply not practicable for a single editor or small group of editors to independently research the thousands of people whose biographies they must compile. As a result, they fall back on the 19th and 20th century compilations, and all too often propagate errors they contain, sometimes at the expense of later publications that would not have been that much harder to access (for example using Vivian for material long since corrected in D&CN&Q and TDA). I can't count the number of times I have found the genealogical blurb at the start of entries in HoP to be wrong or incomplete (or incompletely referenced so you can't tell). In this sense the proposed compilation has a value outside of the genealogy itself. If it only served as a finding aid to the primary documentation and scholarly analysis, it would be useful. taf

On 2016-06-13 21:39:51 +0000, taf said: > This is a pervasive problem with History of Parliament. It is simply > not practicable for a single editor or small group of editors to > independently research the thousands of people whose biographies they > must compile. As a result, they fall back on the 19th and 20th century > compilations, and all too often propagate errors they contain, > sometimes at the expense of later publications that would not have been > that much harder to access (for example using Vivian for material long > since corrected in D&CN&Q and TDA). I can't count the number of times > I have found the genealogical blurb at the start of entries in HoP to > be wrong or incomplete (or incompletely referenced so you can't tell). They also, as a matter of policy, don't correct errors that are pointed out to them. I was told by Dr. Emma Peplow, their outreach officer, that "we currently do not correct or add to the original text on our website in order to keep the online text consistent with the published text." I would myself think that not perpetrating false information is a higher scholarly value than keeping your web text synchronized with your printed text, but what do I know? Dr. Peplow did add (this was in email a couple of years ago) that they're planning a facility that would allow corrections to appear alongside the main text. These remarks were prompted by my emailing to point out that their entry on Sir Thomas Gresley (d. 1445) garbles the account of his daughters, "Joan and Margaret, [who] did equally well for themselves, becoming the wives, respectively, of Sir Thomas Blount (d.1456), treasurer of Normandy, and Thomas Astley of Patshull, who was related to the Beauchamp earls of Warwick." In fact Margaret married Sir Thomas Blount and Joan married Thomas Astley. -- Patrick Nielsen Hayden pnh@panix.com about.me/patricknh http://nielsenhayden.com/genealogy-tng/index.php

On Tuesday, June 14, 2016 at 10:48:53 AM UTC-7, Patrick Nielsen Hayden wrote: > They also, as a matter of policy, don't correct errors that are pointed > out to them. I was told by Dr. Emma Peplow, their outreach officer, > that "we currently do not correct or add to the original text on our > website in order to keep the online text consistent with the published > text." Well, thanks for that. Now I know not to bother sending in corrections. There is certainly a place for the integrity of the original, but not when it comes at the expense of the target audience. In a trivial example, I remember having to use two parallel card indexes at the Portsmouth Record Office. They had two people doing their indexing, and one would go as far as they had time, then put in a marker and the other would progress from that point, back and forth. Rather than interspersing the two batches of entries from the same set of records into a single index, they kept them apart to protect the discrete integrity of the two people's work. It meant the user had to look everything up twice, when they could have just put a distinctive mark on one set of cards and then mixed them if they wanted to distinguish the work of one from the other, and it would have halved the time spent by researchers. taf