Robert, I am the LifeLines guy. Yeah, the google interface allows infinite sized lines, and doesn't hard wrap them before sending to the new reader. So I'm hard wrapping them myself now. Thanks. Tom

On 05-23-2011 20:49, 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. OK, I'll say it. Not a marvelous wonderful stupendous tool for it, but better than anything else I've tried. -- Wes Groleau There are two types of people in the world … http://Ideas.Lang-Learn.us/barrett?itemid=1157

When I started a one-place study about ten years ago, I decided that standard software didn't do the job I wanted. So I wrote my own. Over the years I've developed the ideas into something fairly coherent, but, since I'd rather be getting on with data input than coding, the execution leaves a lot to be desired, and I'd do a lot different if I was starting from scratch. 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. The only real linkage is that each person has a father and a mother. I treat names as attributes of a person, and estimate other attributes algorithmically, such as estimated date of birth. By clicking on a name I can bring up a complete list of documents referring to that person, and I can open multiple persons at any one time, allowing easy comparisons. An example is given as an appendix. I can search easily on multiple parameters - it's no problem to get a list of everybody with a spouse called Jane, a mother called Mary, and a connection to Cardington, for example. At the moment I have only coded up specific types of documents with fixed formats such as census records, parish registers and civil registration indexes. (Note that this is English research.) I haven't quite worked out a design for freeform text such as wills, but I would expect it to be something along the lines of delineating names, places and occupations with tags. 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. Steven Appendix: Example of screen output. >From this I can easily see that I haven't found a baptism for Joseph (but it looks as though it should be at Cople), and that I haven't seen the marriage record - personally, I'm not bothered about the lack of sourcing for this, since it's a private project, but if I was to give this data to anyone I'd ensure that the IGI batch number I used was included. I can also easily see that there is a problem with the age of his daughter Sarah. I note that he's living with his sister Mary Ann, so that if I can confirm parentage for Joseph, I would hope to be able to confirm parentage for Mary Ann, or vice versa (while being aware that they might only be half-brother and -sister). Joseph's estimated birthdate of 1817 shows in the index, but not in the output. Joseph BRIMLEY _________________________________________________ Father: James BRIMLEY _________________________________________________ 1841 Census: Cardington, Bedfordshire Piece: HO107/9 Folio: 13 Page: 20 Dwelling: Joseph BRIMLY 25 M Bedfordshire Occ: Wheelwright Elizabeth BRIMLY 25 F Bedfordshire _________________________________________________ Joseph BRIMLEY Marriage Registered Q2 1841 at Bedford Registration District _________________________________________________ 24 May 1841: Marriage at St John, Bedford, Bedfordshire. Joseph BRIMLEY to Elizabeth WELLS Joseph BRIMLEY Age: Condition: Occupation: Son of James BRIMLEY, Elizabeth WELLS Age: Condition: Occupation: Daughter of Joseph WELLS, _________________________________________________ 1851 Census: Cardington, Bedfordshire Piece: HO107/1752 Folio: 262 Page: 18 Dwelling: Joseph BRIMLEY M 33 M Cople, Bedfordshire Rel: Head Occ: Wheelwright Elizabeth BRIMLEY M 33 F Harrold, Bedfordshire Rel: Wife Sarah BRIMLEY U 9 F Cardington, Bedfordshire Rel: Daughter Mary Ann BRIMLEY U 37 F Cople, Bedfordshire Rel: Sister _________________________________________________ 1861 Census: Cardington, Bedfordshire Piece: RG9/992 Folio: 53 Page: 22 Dwelling: (partial entry - boarder) Joseph BRIMLEY M 43 M Cople, Bedfordshire Rel: Head Occ: Wheelwright Elizabeth BRIMLEY M 43 F Harrold, Bedfordshire Rel: Wife Occ: Wheelwright's wife Sarah BRIMLEY U 12 F Cardington, Bedfordshire Rel: Daughter Occ: Scholar Mary Ann BRIMLEY U 47 F Cople, Bedfordshire Rel: Sister _________________________________________________ 1871 Census: Cardington, Bedfordshire Piece: RG10/1545 Folio: 33 Page: 10 Dwelling: Bedford Road Joseph BRIMLEY M 53 M Cople, Bedfordshire Rel: Head Occ: Wheelwright Elizabeth BRIMLEY M 53 F Harrold, Bedfordshire Rel: Wife Mary COWLAND U 22 F Wilstead, Bedfordshire Rel: Boarder _________________________________________________ 1881 Census: Cardington, Bedfordshire Piece: RG11/1624 Folio: 43 Page: 7 Dwelling: 1 Church Side Joseph BRIMLEY M 63 M Cople, Bedfordshire Rel: Head Occ: Wheelwright Susannah BRIMLEY M 61 F Willington, Bedfordshire Rel: Wife Mary COWLAND U 32 F Wilstead, Bedfordshire Rel: Boarder Occ: Companion Dom _________________________________________________ 30 September 1886: Burial at Cardington, Bedfordshire Joseph BRIMLEY, aged 69. _________________________________________________ Joseph BRIMLEY Death Registered Q3 1886 at Bedford Registration District Age: 69 _________________________________________________ Known children:- Sarah (1841/1848) _________________________________________________

First of all, I happen to live in the same area where most of my ancestors lived. I have surnames in my family tree in, say the C18th, who were recorded hereabouts in the 1379 subsidy roll. There are transcripts of PRs either in print, formerly in print but now on archive.org or on data CDs which cover most of what I need. This means that filing and retrieval of most physical records isn't a problem. Also I've been able to grab some of the machine readable stuff into an RDBMS which now contains most of the C18th & parts of adjacent centuries of baptisms for 3 parishes (the exact cover varies, plus about a century of marriages for another plus I have almost all for late C16th & half the C17th in a holding table. Naturally transcriptions are only as good as the transcriber so it means occasional trips to the library a couple of miles away to check things on microfiche - assuming they're legible ;) In this respect I'm probably a good deal more fortunate than most although my wife's family are a different matter altogether as she's from Ireland and we have trouble in some cases getting beyond the late C19th. However, one of the penalties of having one's ancestors in the same place for generations is that lots of collaterals are also around and often using the same names. That means that problems start to arise long before records dry up. It means that I have to try to sort out which child of George Boothroyd belongs to which of the several contemporary George Boothroyds etc. My solution to that is to use a spreadsheet (recounted here in previous posts) to shuffle records into coherent family groups based on clues of location and occupation of fathers and likely assumptions about minimum intervals between baptisms of children to the same family. The sort of rule-based approach which Richard mentioned in the previous thread could be really useful here. The spreadsheet approach is made easier where the baptisms come from the period covered by my database. When it gets earlier than that I have sometimes resorted to grabbing IGI PR transcripts as GEDCOMs & loading them into Gramps to sort which is why it hurt when the GEDCOM download broke at the turn of the year. I also use Gramps for recording finished work. I also keep a Gramps database containing location information and merge exports of that with the various family databases to keep the locations consistent. -- Ian The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang at austonley org uk

On Mon, 23 May 2011 11:30:28 -0700 (PDT), Tom Wetmore <[email protected]> wrote: >How do you want to work with that evidence to decide who the real persons >were? Imagine -- you have collected 100 items of evidence. You want to compare >them in many ways to decide who was you. So you need to search through them >looking for a specific name, or a specific year, or a specific place. You >don't know who the people are yet, and you are trying to figure that out. If >all these records were on paper, or in word processing files or in image >files, how are you going to find the data you need quickly. > >I am convinced that once you reach record-based genealogy, you need to get >your evidence records codified into records in a software program. I >would like that software program to be the same program I use for genealogy, >but today's programs don't seem to support this idea very well. If you had >those evidence records codified somehow, you would have an excellent solution >to the searching and thinking problem. Your software could instantly retrieve >all evidence records containing a certain name, or a certain year, or a >certain place. askSam can do most of that. -- 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 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. -- 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

Tom Wetmore wrote: [Snippit] > I am convinced that once you reach record-based genealogy, you need to get > your evidence records codified into records in a software program. I You might check at your local university/college for a professor of history who is doing active research and publishing what he uses.

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

On Monday, May 23, 2011 6:51:44 PM UTC-4, Ian Goddard wrote: > First of all, I happen to live in the same area where most of my > ancestors lived. I have surnames in my family tree in, say the C18th, > who were recorded hereabouts in the 1379 subsidy roll. There are > transcripts of PRs either in print, formerly in print but now on > archive.org or on data CDs which cover most of what I need. This means > that filing and retrieval of most physical records isn't a problem. > Also I've been able to grab some of the machine readable stuff into an > RDBMS which now contains most of the C18th & parts of adjacent centuries > of baptisms for 3 parishes (the exact cover varies, plus about a century > of marriages for another plus I have almost all for late C16th & half > the C17th in a holding table. Naturally transcriptions are only as good > as the transcriber so it means occasional trips to the library a couple > of miles away to check things on microfiche - assuming they're legible > ;) In this respect I'm probably a good deal more fortunate than most > although my wife's family are a different matter altogether as she's > from Ireland and we have trouble in some cases getting beyond the late > C19th. > > However, one of the penalties of having one's ancestors in the same > place for generations is that lots of collaterals are also around and > often using the same names. That means that problems start to arise > long before records dry up. It means that I have to try to sort out > which child of George Boothroyd belongs to which of the several > contemporary George Boothroyds etc. My solution to that is to use a > spreadsheet (recounted here in previous posts) to shuffle records into > coherent family groups based on clues of location and occupation of > fathers and likely assumptions about minimum intervals between baptisms > of children to the same family. The sort of rule-based approach which > Richard mentioned in the previous thread could be really useful here. > > The spreadsheet approach is made easier where the baptisms come from the > period covered by my database. When it gets earlier than that I have > sometimes resorted to grabbing IGI PR transcripts as GEDCOMs & loading > them into Gramps to sort which is why it hurt when the GEDCOM download > broke at the turn of the year. > > I also use Gramps for recording finished work. I also keep a Gramps > database containing location information and merge exports of that with > the various family databases to keep the locations consistent. > Ian, Thanks. You have a very practical approach. Your data is in lots of forms so you manage each form the way that seems to make the most sense. You summarize the important information in a spreadsheet so you can get a high-level overview of your data, and have it in a form where you can rearrange inforamtion quickly and easily to experiment with different ways of joining evidence into persons and persons into families. Of the four ways of handling evidence I summarized in my response to Steven, I think we'd have to add a fifth now: 5. An ad hoc approach in which we keep different types of evidence, taken from different types of sources, in different formats that seem best for that type. 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

On Monday, May 23, 2011 7:47:11 PM UTC-4, Steven Gibbs wrote: > When I started a one-place study about ten years ago, I decided that > standard software didn't do the job I wanted. So I wrote my own. Over the > years I've developed the ideas into something fairly coherent, but, since > I'd rather be getting on with data input than coding, the execution leaves a > lot to be desired, and I'd do a lot different if I was starting from > scratch. > > 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. The only real linkage is that each person has a father > and a mother. I treat names as attributes of a person, and estimate other > attributes algorithmically, such as estimated date of birth. By clicking on > a name I can bring up a complete list of documents referring to that person, > and I can open multiple persons at any one time, allowing easy comparisons. > An example is given as an appendix. > > I can search easily on multiple parameters - it's no problem to get a list > of everybody with a spouse called Jane, a mother called Mary, and a > connection to Cardington, for example. > > At the moment I have only coded up specific types of documents with fixed > formats such as census records, parish registers and civil registration > indexes. (Note that this is English research.) I haven't quite worked out > a design for freeform text such as wills, but I would expect it to be > something along the lines of delineating names, places and occupations with > tags. > > 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. > > Steven > Steven, 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. I let the higher level person inherit facts from the lower level personae. This works fine unless there is some conflict in the facts in the different personae. If there are I let the person know which persona to use for which fact. I don't have different data structures for the persona and person, so there is no reason to restrict these "person trees" to just two levels. I like this approach because at the leaves of the trees we have all the personae, and at all other levels we have persons that were created explicitly because of some conclusion I came to as the result of analyzing all the evidence, and I can document that analysis at that point. The issues I am working through are really those of finding a user interface that makes these idease easy to work with. In summary, there are now four answers to my question that have appeared on this thread: 1. Use paper. 2. Use special associative or full text indexed databases (e.g., askSam). 3. Use spreadsheets. 4. Use roll-your-own software based on a persona concept. This is great; thanks. Tom

> 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. Hoping I'll get a few more answers. Tom

> 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. Tom

On 22/05/2011 18:42, Richard Smith wrote: > On May 22, 12:08 pm, Nick Matthews<[email protected]> wrote: > >> A quick note on reference documents, ideally they would fit on a single >> sheet of paper. Whilst there's no actual limit on size, if the document >> is large the user should consider creating a summary to work from or >> breaking it down into extracts. > > The main example of a longer reference document that I can think of is > a will. When I'm transcribing a will, I try to resist the temptation > to summarise it, as there have been plenty of times when the seemingly- > irrelevant information I would have omitted has turned out to be > useful. On one occasion, I established that the farm left to a son in > a 18th century will was the same farm whose copyhold was held a > century earlier by someone of the same surname according to the > manorial records. On another the particular church where the person > chose to be buried turned out to be the village he had likely grown up > in, and where his parents were from. > > Richard > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message > > I would always put a will in full, even if I also do a summary. I find wills, with their arcane legal language and lack of punctuation, very difficult sometimes so a summary helps to show other people (or my future self) how I've interpreted it. The other extreme in reference document size is a single line from a register or index. Nick

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. Hugh

On Monday, May 23, 2011 12:18:57 PM UTC-4, steve wrote: > On May 23, 6:52 am, Tom Wetmore <[email protected]> wrote: > > How should we store evidence in genealogical databases? > > Tom > Can't you simply catalog every piece of information number such and > such? The copy of the marriage certificate from Aunt Mary is #123456 > and the email from cousin Leroy is #123457 and the transcription of > Hidden Valley marriages is #123458. > > An individual record can then refer to the various item numbers that > support its conclusions. I don't see that the item has to point back > to the people. Presumably the item would speak for itself. > > What a genealogy program can or should do depends on what the user is > doing. A program that is great for presenting a family tree may not > be suitable for doing a one name study. How do you record that the > John SMITH who enlisted in the 1st Regiment of Alabama Infantry just > might be the same John SMITH who married Mary JONES over in the > neighboring county; but you're not sure. > > 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. > > Steve > Steve, Your approach is great for person-based genealogy. You collect your evidence, you catalog it, and you reference each item of evidence from the person records in your database that the evidence refers to. My question has to do with what happens when you have reached the point where you need to do record-based genealogy, and you have collected a great deal of evidence about people you are not sure of yet. You can catalog that evidence as you suggest. But you don't have any person records to refer to that evidence yet, so you can't add any of that data to your database yet. So say you have 100 catalogued records. Some are on paper. Some are image files. Maybe you transcribed some of them into word processing files. How do you want to work with that evidence to decide who the real persons were? Imagine -- you have collected 100 items of evidence. You want to compare them in many ways to decide who was you. So you need to search through them looking for a specific name, or a specific year, or a specific place. You don't know who the people are yet, and you are trying to figure that out. If all these records were on paper, or in word processing files or in image files, how are you going to find the data you need quickly. I am convinced that once you reach record-based genealogy, you need to get your evidence records codified into records in a software program. I would like that software program to be the same program I use for genealogy, but today's programs don't seem to support this idea very well. If you had those evidence records codified somehow, you would have an excellent solution to the searching and thinking problem. Your software could instantly retrieve all evidence records containing a certain name, or a certain year, or a certain place. So again my question. Given you are doing record-based genealogy, and you have lots of evidence records about people you are not sure of yet, how do you want to record that evidence so you can effectively use it to make you decisions about who was who? Tom

> > 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

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

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? Tom

On May 23, 6:52 am, 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. > > All these techniques work fine while you are in the realm of "person-based genealogy" or "conclusion-based genealogy". When in this realm you either already know whom the people are that you are researching, or you have such a solid vital record and other record trail back to them that you can be sure whom you are researching. You know whether any particular record belongs to a person you are researching or not; you ignore the records that don't, and you simply copy information out of the records that do. In my opinion 98% of the genealogical software is devoted to people working in this mode. > > 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. When we reach this point our task changes from one of simply elaborating persons we know or can learn about easily, to one of true historical research. We embark on the chore of trying to find whatever sources we can, from whatever creative recesses of our minds or experience takes us. From the sources we manage to find, we have to keep whatever information that mentions people that might eventually be of interest to us, and we must record that information somehow so we can continually be able to refer to it. We have faith that at some time in the future we will have found enough records that we'll be able to figure out who all those people are and how they are related. At that time, maybe far in the future, maybe after many serendipities in our record searching, we'll be able to finally create new persons in our database and add the hard fought information to them. > > When we reach this point we are in the realm of "record-based genealogy." This has been described as "crossing a chasm." We are now true historians. We must collect lots of records, but we don't know yet whom they belong to. > > What are you going to do with this evidence? If you use some of the approaches above you're kind of stuck. You can add paper copies to your files, or images files to your computer, but what else are you going to do? There are no people records around to stick them to. You can bloat source records with notes, but how can you find any of that unstructured info in the future? > > To do your research effectively, to be able to reason about the data you've collected, you have to have some way of finding the information and arranging it. Are you going to do this by spreading sheets of paper on your desk, keeping lots of windows to image files open on your computer, taking lots of notes on 3x5 cards, sketching out possible family groups with paper and pencil? > > Wouldn't you want all that evidence information codified somehow inside your genealogy program so you can search for names, search for dates, search for places, see the relationships mentioned in the evidence, and so on? How would you want your genealogy application to support you after you have "crossed the chasm?" > > I have my answers to these questions, but I'll stop at this point. I hope you'll think about this. What would your dream software system to do support you?  Say you collected 100 records that mention people with interesting names, that is, names that might be those of persons you are interested in. Because you are so far back and time, in the fog of uncertainty, you don't yet know who the real persons mentioned in those 100 record are, but you have reason to believe that some of them will be the persons you are looking for, and that some of those people are probably mentioned many times in those records. How do you want to record those 100 records so you can work with them to decide who the real persons were? Do you want them somehow in your genealogy program? Do you want that information not to be in your genealogical database until you feel you know who they were? What features or requirements would you want your genealogical software to have or meet to handle this evidence and facilitate your ability to work with it? > > Tom Can't you simply catalog every piece of information number such and such? The copy of the marriage certificate from Aunt Mary is #123456 and the email from cousin Leroy is #123457 and the transcription of Hidden Valley marriages is #123458. An individual record can then refer to the various item numbers that support its conclusions. I don't see that the item has to point back to the people. Presumably the item would speak for itself. What a genealogy program can or should do depends on what the user is doing. A program that is great for presenting a family tree may not be suitable for doing a one name study. How do you record that the John SMITH who enlisted in the 1st Regiment of Alabama Infantry just might be the same John SMITH who married Mary JONES over in the neighboring county; but you're not sure. 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. Steve --

On 2011-05-11 16:52, Richard Smith wrote: I'm having difficulty following this thread. Firstly, it is getting rather long and people are tending to digress into other subjects. Secondly, some posters have software that is causing the thread itself to fragment. May I suggest that participants break off into new threads where a change of subject justifies this. Thanks Peter