Tom Wetmore 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. > I should think we are all always in the realm of person-based genealogy; otherwise, we could fill in our pedigree charts with position-titles (great-grandmother, great-great-grandfather, etc) instead of names of people who hold that position/title. That we each HAVE 8th great-grandparents doesn't need further proving; mathematics does that for us. > 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 ad! > d the hard fought information to them. > If I've understood parts of the discussion so far, it seems to me that more-than-one of the participants is suggesting we can NEVER be certain that recordA about Tom Wetmore refers to the same Tom Wetmore as recordB. How the researcher stores, organizes, accesses, or displays either record won't change that. That makes HOW to store, organize, access, or display sort of like nailing Jello to the wall: certainly do-able if you work hard enough, but just as certainly futile in the long run. > 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. > As someone famous once said, now there you go again. ALL genealogy is record-based, if one uses the word record as a synonym for the word source. As someone else famous keeps saying, genealogy without sources is myth. HOW one organizes, stores, accesses or displays those source-records doesn't change the fact that we all need them to de-myth our genealogy. > 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? > It's very difficult to follow about persona vs person sometimes. Evidence does not exist in a vacuum any more than people do. IF there's people, there's evidence; one can always remove references to evidence if one can conclusively prove it's irrelevant. IME, though, if I don't SAY I looked hither, thither and yon, someone will suggest I missed thither. So putting it in and then debunking it is easier on my nerves. To debunk it, I need to attach it to who it might but doesn't concern. > 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? > Yes. > 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?" No. I want all that evidence raw if I need to re-evaluate it. I don't want it filtered, as it will be by extracting bits of it to codify. As someone mentioned, the bit you don't extract may be the only important bit in there. And creating a database for the purpose of comparing documents when the documents to be compared are NOT identical in content is going to drag AI into it; I'm not up to speed on the current state of AI, but I know as recently as Y2K, it couldn't make the same sort of judgments a people can because people STILL use unconscious, subconscious, and even subliminal info in analysis. Cheryl