On Mon, 23 May 2011 18:23:07 +0200, Steve Hayes <[email protected]> wrote: >On Mon, 23 May 2011 04:52:05 -0700 (PDT), Tom Wetmore <[email protected]> >wrote: > >>This thread is an offshoot from the Linux thread that is going off on a number of tangentsl. >> >>How should we store evidence in genealogical databases? > >Your message was difficult to read as there is something wrong with your >wordwrap. I was able to read it but it went all the way across the screen on a 15.7" laptop.

singhals wrote: > Yes, PAF too is said to handle audio and video, but since a majority of > my ancestors died before that technology was invented it's even less > useful. (g) And even if it were invented would you really want a recording of a very drunk ggfather singing out of tune? -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

singhals wrote: > Tom Wetmore wrote: > >> Note one very interesting thing about the five answers so far. No one >> says they use their genealogical application to store their evidence. >> Is this a failing of genelaogical software in general, or is handling the >> evidence and handling the persons such two fundamentally different >> things that we need two completely different programs for handling them? > > I won't speak for Steve or Ian, but in MY case I tried putting it all > into the genealogical database. It worked fine for me while I was doing > it EXCEPT for what I see as a personality failure. If I were looking for > the /exact/ date of a death in the Mobil family, I'd invariably notice > that Ol' Skylar was in there 12 times ... and I'd end up opening all 12 > items to find the one with ancestors and descendants. I considered that > a waste of my time and energy, so I went back to paper, which I handle > only when I need to. > I'm not sure exactly what you're describing here but the Gramps approach is that you can add a media file into the Gallery. Just about any category of item except repository can be linked to a Gallery item. The database form has a Gallery tab on it. Click on that and the relevant Gallery items will be shown as thumbnails. So, for example, I can download a household image as a PDF for the Irish 1911 census (*free* - shame on the GB census!), enter it into the Gallery and link to the family record, to each member of the household and to the Place record. If I go into any of the records I can see the thumbnail on the Gallery and click it to launch Acrobat & bring up the full-size image. Supposedly it will also handle audio & video but I haven't tried that. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

On Mon, 23 May 2011 10:12:46 -0400, singhals <[email protected]> wrote: >J. Hugh Sullivan wrote: >> On Mon, 23 May 2011 04:52:05 -0700 (PDT), Tom Wetmore >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> This thread is an offshoot from the Linux thread that is going off on a num= >>> ber of tangentsl. >>> >>> How should we store evidence in genealogical databases? >>> >>> You get a marriage record in the mail; you find an image of a census record= >>> at Ancestry.com; you find the record of an event on a page in a book you f= >>> ound on Google books. What are you going to do with those three records? He= >>> re are some possible answers. >> >> It's easy for me - I establish parameters. If it is online or in a >> book I don't want a hard copy unless it is my direct line. Most people >> who have all that paper can't find anything anyhow. And finding it >> serves no more purpose than listing the source where others can see >> it. After I have proved it to myself I have absolutely no need to >> prove it to others. If they are not satisfied with what I have they >> can do their own research. > >Moreover, the relatives who have even a minor interest in >any of this have about 1/4 as much interest in where I found >something or what it really says. If I share sources with >them, they aren't in footnotes; the narrative text gets >generated with footnotes because that's how software does >it, but I go back and edit the document pulling those >footnotes into the prose; as in , "I finally found this >marriage in the next county over (Tyler) in the >chronological record but just not in the county we thought." >Everyone is happy, particularly after I send the one who >does care a copy of the unedited version. > >If someone doesn't wish to believe me, showing them papers >won't change their mind and not showing them papers won't >change the minds of those who do believe me. > >Cheryl Approaching from the other side, I don't need to see the paper for a fact posted by another - just the source in case I want to endorse it. Unsourced "facts" are often just conclusions - those are pretty scary. Hugh

Ian Goddard wrote: > singhals wrote: >> Tom Wetmore wrote: >> >>> Note one very interesting thing about the five answers so far. No one >>> says they use their genealogical application to store their evidence. >>> Is this a failing of genelaogical software in general, or is handling the >>> evidence and handling the persons such two fundamentally different >>> things that we need two completely different programs for handling them? >> >> I won't speak for Steve or Ian, but in MY case I tried putting it all >> into the genealogical database. It worked fine for me while I was doing >> it EXCEPT for what I see as a personality failure. If I were looking for >> the /exact/ date of a death in the Mobil family, I'd invariably notice >> that Ol' Skylar was in there 12 times ... and I'd end up opening all 12 >> items to find the one with ancestors and descendants. I considered that >> a waste of my time and energy, so I went back to paper, which I handle >> only when I need to. >> > > I'm not sure exactly what you're describing here but the Gramps approach > is that you can add a media file into the Gallery. Just about any > category of item except repository can be linked to a Gallery item. The > database form has a Gallery tab on it. Click on that and the relevant > Gallery items will be shown as thumbnails. > Yeah, even PAF allows that. And, I'm told, you can put the image link into the Source template which does have a repository field. I'm not enchanted with that field, unless the repository is Library of Congress or the Family History Library; no other US library is nearly as disaster-proof -- and even LoC burned once. Having that available though doesn't cure my problem of not instantly recognizing which of 12 men of the same name and birthdate is the one I want and which 11 are data-holders only. > So, for example, I can download a household image as a PDF for the Irish > 1911 census (*free* - shame on the GB census!), enter it into the > Gallery and link to the family record, to each member of the household > and to the Place record. If I go into any of the records I can see the > thumbnail on the Gallery and click it to launch Acrobat& bring up the > full-size image. Supposedly it will also handle audio& video but I > haven't tried that. Yes, PAF too is said to handle audio and video, but since a majority of my ancestors died before that technology was invented it's even less useful. (g) Cheryl

I concur with Cheryl. Basically all genealogical applications allow their records to contain links to external items, either files on the local file system or to URL on the world wide web. That doesn't solve the problem of where to store those links. As Cheryl points out, if you put a link in a person record, you are making the explicit statement that the linked-to evidence refers to that person. The question I am trying to get to in this thread, is how are you going to handle that evidence, a link to an external something or other in this case, when you don't yet know what person should link to it? Tom

> Bob LeChevalier wrote: >> Tom Wetmore <[email protected]> wrote: > As I understand it, what NFS did with IGI records which were > transcriptions, is that it turned each such transcription into an > association of personas, represented in the source record. Thus a > transcribed marriage has two spouses, probably a marriage date and > location, and possibly parents. The personas involved in a given > transcription are not linked to any other data. > > Later, users can then selected various "personas" representing raw > data and "combine" them into a compound or derived persona > representing more completely what they think is the data applicable to > a single person. Someone else could combine different extracted > source personas into a different compound. The original source persona > still exists, as does any combined ones. In theory, one can determine > whether a persona is extracted data or derived, but in practice the > LDS source data is incredibly verbose and redundant, and so > uninformative unless you know what to look for (somewhere deep in the > record, one can find the same sorts of things one could find in the > old IGI records to distinguish an extracted from a submitted record). Bob, I've used nFS and read all the API documentation. They have personas and persons and the user interface allows you to rearrange personas within persons. It's a two-tier system. I think it's a great example of how personas can be made to work. I think their data is pretty stinky, but that has no bearing on the technique in my opinion. >> Eventually every genealogist reaches the point when he or she has delved >> far enougback in time that the solid, firm trail of records has dried up. > I don't ever expect to reach that point. But then my genealogy has > never been confined to direct ancestors. Try to find all the > descendants of some ancestor born around the time of the revolution. > Every single one of those descendants is a cousin, and in many > families that task alone might take a lifetime. What I think you are saying is that you never plan to have to cross the chasm from person-based genealogy to record-based genealogy. The whole genealogical application business, in my opinion, caters to people who believe that. Obviously from all I've written about this, I don't believe that. At my point in genealogical research I have 1000s of records that I haven't been able to assign to real people yet. Here is my overall genealogical project. I descend from Loyalist Wetmores who were exiled to Canada at the end of the American Revolutionary War. By the 1850s many of the children and grandchildren of those families were returning to the United States where the economy was stronger. I descend from one of those returning families. My project is to understand that return migration by finding all the families who were involved, what their patterns of migration were, where they ended up, and where all their descendants are living now. This is a full research project. It is definitely a record-based project. You can probably understand my needs for effective ways to record all my evidence so I can access it in many ways to support the process of making conclusions. You might argue that this project is not a genealogical project, but rather a historical project, so I have no business expecting a genealogical application to be able to support me. I don't see it that way. I believe that genealogy is history, and the farther back in time we go, the more we have to act like historians to make progress. I want a genealogical application that can support what I am doing with this project. Tom

steve <[email protected]> wrote: >Right now I'm sorta trying to do a locality study. I'm completely >clueless as to how I should organize things. I wind up just making >lots of transcriptions and notes and saving them as text files. >Surely there is a better way. For my French work, I use a separate spreadsheet page for each type of record for each parish, so that the most common data items found in extracted records is all in the same column(s), and more or less in the same format. I still can put have some freeform notes off to the right, but I don't commonly need to. I also generate pages that have the same records sorted on various keys. I then in a separate pass, may add the people in these records to a data base and link them together based on parentage or espousal, when I can identify the people. In my case, probably 90% of all people in one kinds of record, show up in some other record (either as parent or spouse, or a death record for someone who was born), and I thus end up with a huge and convoluted tree relating almost everyone to everyone else. But this is totally separate from my spreadsheets of source data. lojbab --- Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist [email protected] Lojban language www.lojban.org

Tom Wetmore wrote: > Note one very interesting thing about the five answers so far. No one > says they use their genealogical application to store their evidence. > Is this a failing of genelaogical software in general, or is handling the > evidence and handling the persons such two fundamentally different > things that we need two completely different programs for handling them? Gramps has a feature which I do sometimes use for handling evidence files but AFAIK it just points to a file it's told about. I don't think it makes a copy in the database. > My answer is that genealogical programs should be able to handle evidence, > but no one has figured out how to do it yet. Figured but not done. If you look back to the thread "Data import from the new Familysearch site" I have an XML example where the "evidence" is copy & pasted from the web-page: <SourceObjects> <SourceObject> <Content><![CDATA[Name: Mary Collier Gender: Female Baptism/Christening Date: 27 Dec 1760 Baptism/Christening Place: ALMONDBURY,YORK,ENGLAND Birth Date: Birthplace: Death Date: Name Note: Race: Father's Name: George Collier Father's Birthplace: Father's Age: Mother's Name: Mother's Birthplace: Mother's Age: Indexing Project (Batch) Number: P01712-1 System Origin: England-ODM Source Film Number: 230649 Reference Number:]]> </Content> <ObjectID>1C42DFF7-299E-44C8-91FB-F5A805A78AAE</ObjectID> <MimeType>text/plain</MimeType> </SourceObject> </SourceObjects> Several points: 1. The object itself is wrapped up with a mime type ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME ). This tells the program how to display it, assuming the program can handle that type itself, or pass it on to whatever utility the OS has associated with that type. 2. As a consequence of the above the system is future-proofed. If some new format is introduced then provided that a mime type is provided then it can be handled. 3. A collection of objects can be wrapped in a binder. This makes provision for multi-page scans, scan and transcription, transcript and translation or whatever. 4. This is intended to be a publication medium. 5. A UUID is provided. This means that if I send a copy of this object to you and someone else who has also received a copy sends a further copy to you your S/W will be able to identify and discard the duplicate. 6. A consequence of 4 & 5 is that once the object is published it should not be amended. If someone wants to make some amendment, such as provide a transcript to a scan, a translation to a transcript, etc. it should be done as a separate object with a pointer to the original. 7. There are a few changes I'd make. Firstly the binder object should have the UUID instead of the inner to discourage braking up the object. Secondly there should be text as a human-readable title/description/handle to the inner object. Thirdly there needs to be a content encoding element as well as the mime type although this could be optional. 8. The whole shebang, binder and all, would best be enclosed in a further wrapper with its own UUID, a UUID pointing further up the source tree and other information such as text to be used as a citation. In the case of an amendment record the source UUID would be that of the amended record. Note that this is an external representation. S/W realisations would be free to store the data in an RDBMS or whatever. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

Tom Wetmore <[email protected]> wrote: >This thread is an offshoot from the Linux thread that is going off on a number of tangentsl. > >How should we store evidence in genealogical databases? You get a marriage record in the mail; you find an image of a census record at Ancestry.com; you find the record of an event on a page in a book you found on Google books. What are you going to do with those three records? Here are some possible answers. > First, if you are careful genealogists, you're going to record the source of the records in your database as source records. Got that out of the way. > Second, as far as the "physical records" are concerned, let's say you carefully file the paper marriage record away in your paper filing system, and you go to your big ancestry folder area on your computer and keep copies of those two images. Dandy. > Now, what are you going to do with the information in those three physical records (let's say we can call those image files "physical" for sake of argument). > Here's the "normal" answer in my opinion. You look at the physical records, you decide who the persons were who are mentioned in those records, you go you your genealogy program and you find the appropriate person records, creating them if need be, and you edit in the new information. In other words you extract information from the physical records and you add that information directly to person records. Note that the information from the physical records only enters into your database as items inside person records. > Here's another possibility advocated by some genealogists. After you create the source records for where the physical records came from, you edit those source records, adding to them the information that you got from those sources that you believe is important. You probably have to do this as "unstructured notes." Then you link persons to those sources and you also "copy up" from the stuff you added to the source records into the person records. > Here's another possibility advocated by programs like Gramps for Family Tree Maker. You first create event records from information in the physical records, say a birth or death or marriage events, and then you add a link from some person in your database, creating that person record if need be, to that event record. The events really don't stand alone; you have to link person records to them. As I understand it, what NFS did with IGI records which were transcriptions, is that it turned each such transcription into an association of personas, represented in the source record. Thus a transcribed marriage has two spouses, probably a marriage date and location, and possibly parents. The personas involved in a given transcription are not linked to any other data. Later, users can then selected various "personas" representing raw data and "combine" them into a compound or derived persona representing more completely what they think is the data applicable to a single person. Someone else could combine different extracted source personas into a different compound. The original source persona still exists, as does any combined ones. In theory, one can determine whether a persona is extracted data or derived, but in practice the LDS source data is incredibly verbose and redundant, and so uninformative unless you know what to look for (somewhere deep in the record, one can find the same sorts of things one could find in the old IGI records to distinguish an extracted from a submitted record). They say that they plan to improve upon their sourcing. >Eventually every genealogist reaches the point when he or she has delved far enough back in time that the solid, firm trail of records has dried up. I don't ever expect to reach that point. But then my genealogy has never been confined to direct ancestors. Try to find all the descendants of some ancestor born around the time of the revolution. Every single one of those descendants is a cousin, and in many families that task alone might take a lifetime. lojbab --- Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist [email protected] Lojban language www.lojban.org

Tom Wetmore wrote: > Note one very interesting thing about the five answers so far. No one > says they use their genealogical application to store their evidence. > Is this a failing of genelaogical software in general, or is handling the > evidence and handling the persons such two fundamentally different > things that we need two completely different programs for handling them? I won't speak for Steve or Ian, but in MY case I tried putting it all into the genealogical database. It worked fine for me while I was doing it EXCEPT for what I see as a personality failure. If I were looking for the /exact/ date of a death in the Mobil family, I'd invariably notice that Ol' Skylar was in there 12 times ... and I'd end up opening all 12 items to find the one with ancestors and descendants. I considered that a waste of my time and energy, so I went back to paper, which I handle only when I need to. > My answer is that genealogical programs should be able to handle evidence, > but no one has figured out how to do it yet. I don't think one ought to mix results with process. In fact, one ought to have two processes -- one double-checks the other for legitimacy; keeping research/evidence on paper and transferring it to the database provides both the separation of tasks AND the cross-check. Cheryl

Tom Wetmore wrote: > On Monday, May 23, 2011 7:47:11 PM UTC-4, Steven Gibbs wrote: >> Basically, I really only have two types of object, persons and documents. I >> input a document and create a new persona for each name in the document. >> Then I check each persona to see if I am comfortable about merging it into >> an existing person %>< >> I didn't cater easily for unmerging persons. If I need to unmerge a person, >> I have to create a new person for every original persona in the documents >> for a person, unlink any parents and children and then remerge each of the >> personas again. If I was starting again, I'd keep a record of each merge so >> I could recreate the last two persons that were merged, as experience shows >> that it's usually the most recent merge that was in error. > Very nice. I'm working on a similar solution. I handle the unmerge problem > by never really merging. Instead of merging I build up a tree of person > records. If I decide two personae refer to the same person I create a new > person record that simply refers to the two personae. I can add a > justification to that new record to explain the rationale for joining. If I > decide later that the personas refer to different people, I just delete the > higher level person. > Take it a step further. Have a separate entity for your "higher level person" and then link entities between that and the personae records. At a minimum the link could simply contain pointers in each direction but you could expand it to contain a note and maybe some value to indicate your confidence - including negative values to say you think the persona does not refer to that person. Gramps, BTW, does have an undo for merges but some operations, such as importing a fresh GEDCOM, wipe the history. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

On Mon, 23 May 2011 15:22:54 -0700 (PDT), Tom Wetmore <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I want a piece of paper, filed where it seemed to me to be a >> good idea to file it. >> >> Paper because I find it easier to shuffle paper than >> electrons -- for one thing, I can spread two dozen pieces of >> paper on the table-top and STILL be able to read them, >> something I find I cannot do with even 4 windows open on the >> monitor. >> >> Cheryl > >Cheryl, > >Far be it for me to question you on this, as that is how historians have done their >jobs for centuries!! But I think in this day and age of computers there are better >ways. > >Glad I'm getting some answers to my questions. Yours is to use paper, Steve's is >to use askSam. Actually I use askSam to generate paper too! But the historian thing reminds me of another program I'd like to see, which has been discussed here occasionally in the past - an event-based program for recording conclusions as well as evidence, which could be used by general historians and not just family historians. It should take into account other relationships than familial ones, and would be ideal for biographers. -- Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

On Mon, 23 May 2011 15:20:30 -0700 (PDT), Tom Wetmore <[email protected]> wrote: > >> askSam can do most of that. >> > >As a Mac guy I didn't know much about askSam. Looking at it now, it seems a >good solution. Personally, I want my evidence in my genealogy program with a >seamless connection between evidence and conclusion data, but if I were forced >to used two programs, one for evidence and one for my persons, this looks like >a good solution. > >I see there are some possible Mac programs to help out, one named CircusPonies. My daughter speaks highly of OneNote, which comes witn MS Office, which I believe has a Mac version. I haven't tried it myself, though, but I use askSam for making notes from documents in archives, interviews with family members and the like. I wouldn't like that to be part of my regular genealogy program, because I use it for making notes of other things as well, and genealogy programs are too bloated as it is - remember the days when programs used to take up less disk space than the data? -- Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

On Mon, 23 May 2011 18:08:26 -0400, singhals <[email protected]> wrote: >Tom Wetmore wrote: >> Cheryl, >> >> I'm not asking what you should store so you can convince others of the accuracy of your work. >> >> I'm asking what do you want to do with the evidence you have gathered about people you MIGHT be interested in, but BEFORE you have figured out who was who. Since the evidence might apply to persons you are interested in, I assume you wouldn't throw it out. Since you don't know who it refers to yet, you can't add it to any person record already in your database. In what form would you want that evidence, and what would you like to be able to do with it? > >I want a piece of paper, filed where it seemed to me to be a >good idea to file it. > >Paper because I find it easier to shuffle paper than >electrons -- for one thing, I can spread two dozen pieces of >paper on the table-top and STILL be able to read them, >something I find I cannot do with even 4 windows open on the >monitor. And that's back to the Research Data Filer (RDF) that came with early versions of PAF. You keep the paper evidence, and the computer indexes them -- something computers are particularly good at. I've said it before and I'll say it again - I'd really like to see an updated version of RDF, preferably one that can import the data from the old version. Perhaps with a bit more pizazz, but nothing too complicated. -- Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

On 2011-05-24 01:49, Tom Wetmore wrote: ..... > > Note one very interesting thing about the five answers so far. No one > says they use their genealogical application to store their evidence. > Is this a failing of genelaogical software in general, or is handling the > evidence and handling the persons such two fundamentally different > things that we need two completely different programs for handling them? > > My answer is that genealogical programs should be able to handle evidence, > but no one has figured out how to do it yet. > > Tom I'm not sure I am responding to the strictly correct post here as your software is posting all your replies as new threads. However... You are perhaps wanting things to be all one way rather than another and are in danger of missing the point which is that evidence can be stored at a number of levels, physical and virtual, according to its perceived usefulness. I retain (almost) all evidence on paper, but selected evidence is then also stored on computer. It is simply too much effort to store all possible evidence in a useful form on computer, so some pre-sifting makes life easier, in fact it makes the job practicable. Now the interesting question is since you have the paper based evidence, how much of a particular item do you store on a computer? In practice, this computer data might be just a reference, or it might be all the relevant data. It could even be all the information in that piece of evidence and including what sort of paper, what colour, what condition and so on, but that would be unusual and remarkably keen. The amount will depend on what you want to do with it on the computer. Do you see the picture? Peter

On 2011-05-23 23:08, singhals wrote: > Tom Wetmore wrote: >> Cheryl, >> >> I'm not asking what you should store so you can convince others of the >> accuracy of your work. >> >> I'm asking what do you want to do with the evidence you have gathered >> about people you MIGHT be interested in, but BEFORE you have figured >> out who was who. Since the evidence might apply to persons you are >> interested in, I assume you wouldn't throw it out. Since you don't >> know who it refers to yet, you can't add it to any person record >> already in your database. In what form would you want that evidence, >> and what would you like to be able to do with it? > > I want a piece of paper, filed where it seemed to me to be a good idea > to file it. > > Paper because I find it easier to shuffle paper than electrons -- for > one thing, I can spread two dozen pieces of paper on the table-top and > STILL be able to read them, something I find I cannot do with even 4 > windows open on the monitor. > > Cheryl > Absolutely. For all my interest in computers, my real underlying interest is in information. Computers are only a tool to help dealing with this. I keep the evidence (and some printouts) in lever arch files roughly organised on a surname basis. Yes, you can take several pieces of paper and spread them out in front of you to study and compare them. That is something you cannot do on a computer. The issue of evidence for people you MIGHT be interested in is a good point. However, my feeling is that throwing it all straight onto a computer is likely to be unhelpful even if the software can cope. Peter

On 2011-05-23, Tom Wetmore <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Your message was difficult to read as there is something wrong with your >> wordwrap. > > If I could fix that I would. I'm using the google interface with safari on a mac. Suggestions? > > Tom Hi Tom, (When you mentioned LifeLines a few postings ago, I recognized your name from many years ago. I never got LifeLines compiled back then. That was probably my loss.) I don't know much about the Google interface. Unless their interface is terribly broken, it _ought_ to be possible to manually break lines at some reasonable limit (72 or so is the old standard). Have you considered using slrn with a non-Google news server? There are a bunch of free and fairly low-cost options. When Verizon dropped newsgroups, I switched to news.individual.net and have been quite happy with them for about US$16/yr. HTH -- Robert Riches [email protected] (Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

On Tuesday, May 24, 2011 4:38:24 AM UTC-4, Ian Goddard wrote: > Tom Wetmore wrote: > > On Monday, May 23, 2011 7:47:11 PM UTC-4, Steven Gibbs wrote: > >> Basically, I really only have two types of object, persons and documents. I > >> input a document and create a new persona for each name in the document. > >> Then I check each persona to see if I am comfortable about merging it into > >> an existing person > %>< > >> I didn't cater easily for unmerging persons. If I need to unmerge a person, > >> I have to create a new person for every original persona in the documents > >> for a person, unlink any parents and children and then remerge each of the > >> personas again. If I was starting again, I'd keep a record of each merge so > >> I could recreate the last two persons that were merged, as experience shows > >> that it's usually the most recent merge that was in error. > > > Very nice. I'm working on a similar solution. I handle the unmerge problem > > by never really merging. Instead of merging I build up a tree of person > > records. If I decide two personae refer to the same person I create a new > > person record that simply refers to the two personae. I can add a > > justification to that new record to explain the rationale for joining. If I > > decide later that the personas refer to different people, I just delete the > > higher level person. > > Take it a step further. Have a separate entity for your "higher level > person" and then link entities between that and the personae records. > At a minimum the link could simply contain pointers in each direction > but you could expand it to contain a note and maybe some value to > indicate your confidence - including negative values to say you think > the persona does not refer to that person. > Ian Ian, Thanks. I have described my current thoughts for "doing genealogical research" as building up "person-trees" with personae (person records codified directly from evidence records) at the leaves and higher level person records as the roots and "interior nodes" of the trees. This is a bit of a simplification since it ignores issues of events codified from evidence, levels of confidence, adding notes, adding conclusions, and so forth. My entire model is a bit more complex that the simple tree of persons idea, but these concepts seem subtle enough that I hesitate to obfuscate the core ideas with that complexity. I guess I'm trying to say that my overall model does include the points you have just mentioned. Thanks. Tom

On Tuesday, May 24, 2011 3:40:55 AM UTC-4, Peter J. Seymour wrote: > On 2011-05-24 01:49, Tom Wetmore wrote: > ..... > > > > Note one very interesting thing about the five answers so far. No one > > says they use their genealogical application to store their evidence. > > Is this a failing of genelaogical software in general, or is handling the > > evidence and handling the persons such two fundamentally different > > things that we need two completely different programs for handling them? > > > > My answer is that genealogical programs should be able to handle evidence, > > but no one has figured out how to do it yet. > > > > Tom > I'm not sure I am responding to the strictly correct post here as your > software is posting all your replies as new threads. However... > > You are perhaps wanting things to be all one way rather than another and > are in danger of missing the point which is that evidence can be stored > at a number of levels, physical and virtual, according to its perceived > usefulness. I retain (almost) all evidence on paper, but selected > evidence is then also stored on computer. It is simply too much effort > to store all possible evidence in a useful form on computer, so some > pre-sifting makes life easier, in fact it makes the job practicable. Now > the interesting question is since you have the paper based evidence, how > much of a particular item do you store on a computer? In practice, this > computer data might be just a reference, or it might be all the relevant > data. It could even be all the information in that piece of evidence and > including what sort of paper, what colour, what condition and so on, but > that would be unusual and remarkably keen. The amount will depend on > what you want to do with it on the computer. > > Do you see the picture? > > Peter Peter, I understand your point. I can assure you I don't want it all one way. I keep evidence in various ways depending on the type. What I am interested in is what is the best way to represent your evidence when you have lots of evidence about as-yet unknown persons, and you are going through the inference process of deciding who those persons are. I would have difficulty handling 100 index cards, or 100 pieces of paper, or having 100 image files open on my computer. I would want a way of putting, say, these five together in a group as a tentative person, and those 15 as another tentative person, and so on. It's hard for me to do this grouping and thinking with paper, cards, open windows. I need some other mechanism to help me. So I'll keep my evidence on paper or in image files, as we all do, but I'm looking for some additional "codified" form of the evidence as more or less similarly-formated records on my computer so I can easily compare and group them. We are getting some good answers about this on this thread now. Tom