On Thu, 09 Jun 2011 12:58:54 +0200, Steve Hayes <[email protected]> wrote: >I am thinking of creating a database for people to record strays on these >sites, and thought I would ask for advice on what to include in such a >database, especially from those who may have had some experience of strays >indexes. Thanks to those who have responded, though none actually answered the question -- about which fields would be most useful for collecting information on strays, and whether there is any agreed standard format for strays databases. I've written more about it here: http://hayesgreene.blogspot.com/2011/06/strays-databases-and-indexes.html and would be grateful if anyone could pass it on to strays coordinators they know. The aim of the exercise is not to engage in headscratching about whether people were or were not "strays", but rather to collect information about obvious strays and, if possible, pass them on to the strays coordinator of the family history society concerned. -- 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

Steve Hayes <[email protected]> wrote: >On Thu, 09 Jun 2011 12:58:54 +0200, Steve Hayes <[email protected]> wrote: > >>I am thinking of creating a database for people to record strays on these >>sites, and thought I would ask for advice on what to include in such a >>database, especially from those who may have had some experience of strays >>indexes. > >Thanks to those who have responded, though none actually answered the question >-- about which fields would be most useful for collecting information on >strays, and whether there is any agreed standard format for strays databases. > >I've written more about it here: > >http://hayesgreene.blogspot.com/2011/06/strays-databases-and-indexes.html > >and would be grateful if anyone could pass it on to strays coordinators they >know. > >The aim of the exercise is not to engage in headscratching about whether >people were or were not "strays", but rather to collect information about >obvious strays and, if possible, pass them on to the strays coordinator of the >family history society concerned. In passing, I think a clearer definition of what identifies someone as a "stray" is needed. I don't know how to express it in terms of your database, but one area of "strays" I have been trying to deal with are people living in a household on a census who are not obviously members of the family of the head of household. These include roomers and boarders, and prior to 1880 may include family members with different surnames whose relationship isn't apparent (like inlaws and nieces/nephews). In rural areas there are people working as laborers who may be local, or may be from some other county or state. Farther back, there are teachers and merchants who show up in households where they lived for only a short while but then moved on. Less often, there are people living alone who have surnames not otherwise found in the district being enumerated. Sometimes these are just elderly people whose spouse died or whose kids have moved away, and other times they are people who are in the census district this year but who won't be found on the preceding or succeeding census. I've been working on one enumeration district of a rural Georgia county in 1860 as part of a place study. Some 540 people in the district, and I've connected most of them to other people in the district. I have one or two families not connected to any other in the district that lived elsewhere in both 1850 and 1870, and maybe a dozen of the 540 are individual people who are of the type described above that I can find no clear trace of in other censuses. (I am being very thorough in seeking connections, and suspect that others looking at the district, might label as many as 10-15% of the population as "strays", instead of the 3% that I have.) Urban areas, especially big cities that are immigration magnets, may have districts where a high percentage of the inhabitants are "strays" of this sort. My father was born in a mining town in northern Michigan where a high percentage were recent immigrants from a variety of countries, and many were living in group boarding houses. Maybe half of them settled in the area, but others returned to the home country or migrated to other locales. The enumerators were horrible at spelling all the foreign names, so tracing families in that county is often difficult even if people remained. The reason I and my friend are doing this study is primarily to find one such "stray". His grandfather was born in 1869 to a man and his wife who were married in this county in 1868; the woman's family is known and numerous in the county. In the 1870 census, the boy and his mother are living 300 miles away in Alabama; in 1880, she is in the same locale and married, but the boy cannot be found, and indeed doesn't resurface until he married my friend's grandmother in 1909 several states away (Missouri). So the grandfather himself is presumably a stray in 1880 and 1900 (his stepfamily is nearby in 1910, though his surname is misspelled and he and his wife are boarding, so any non-diligent search would have called him a stray in 1910 as well). But his father, the "stray" we are seeking, we have only a name for from the marriage license and the family name (Burgess), and Y-DNA shows that my friend is not related to any other known Burgess (and not closely related to anyone else at all, though a couple of single-base-pair differences pertain to families found in South Carolina.). The father has been found on no census, and is probably unrelated to any Burgess in the area. But perhaps somewhere in the county, we will find a clue. >From the above examples of strays - the grandfather. his father, and those in the mining town who did not remain there, each would probably have different data available that might be useful in identifying them. I don't want to send this without noting another kind of stray: wives. Without a marriage record, virtually every married woman is a stray of a kind with no obvious link to ancestors unless the family has inlaws present in the household. And yet surely one would not want a strays database to include all married women whose maiden name and parents are unknown without something distinguishing them from other sorts of strays. lojbab --- Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist [email protected] Lojban language www.lojban.org