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

> 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