"Steven Gibbs" <[email protected]> wrote: >"Bob LeChevalier" <[email protected]> wrote in message >news:[email protected] >> >> That is the difference in my approach. I generally don't add someone >> to my data base unless I have connected them to at least one other >> person in my data base. Unlinked individuals are better dealt with in >> a flat table (spreadsheet) than in a relational data base. > >How do you do that when the data in the record is inadequate to provide >linkage? Then I don't add it to the genealogical data base, and it remains in the spreadsheet. (Actually, for one parish, I simply add individuals unlinked, because my experience has been that 90-95% of the records will be linked in eventually as a parent, spouse or child of someone else. But this is a special case even for me.) >I used to keep my parish register extractions sorted in text >files, but it became impossible to find things once the files became >significantly large. That is why I use spreadsheets. The key fields are kept together in a single column, and I can sort or search or select from the entire sheet or a single column. Finding does not seem to be a problem (I have some 7500 vital records for one parish and 6500 for a second, so these aren't small files). >Imaginr that you have the will of a John Smith which names his sons as >William and Thomas. Imagine also that you have a marriage certificate for a >Thomas Smith that names his father as John Smith. Clearly on the evidence >I've presented they may or may not be the same people. Can you search your >text files easily to find all candidates for the Thomas Smith who married, >subject to the constraint that his father is called John? If, not having >looked at the family for a few years, you later come across a document which >confirms that Thomas has a brother William, or a document which suggests >that Thomas has no brothers, can you rearrange your thought processes to >take this into account? I've done a little work in British genealogy, including one line of Smiths, and indeed it is difficult. Alas, I don't accumulate evidence for such lines - if I can't find a link with what is immediately accessible, I simply move on - I have thousands more that I can spend time on. >I certainly couldn't. I was going through old bits of paper thinking "I'm >sure I decided that these two definitely weren't the same bit I haven't a >clue why I thought that at the time". I have occasionally made a text note that indicates that a certain record does NOT apply to a specific someone in my tree, and why it doesn't. >It was only when I started to build >up possible persons from the available data that the more obscure >coincidences or contadictictions started to jump out at me. So often >previously I would build up a person, realise that this person wasn't >relevant to my research and discard it. Then I'd do all the same work again >a few years later. Now that person stays, fully formed, in my database, and >if I can link an otherwise vague document to that person, I can tell, within >a trivial amount of time, what the relevance of that document to me is. If I have a person, fully formed, then likely I have several other people who are definitely attached to him, even though they might or might not be relevant to my tree. Your two Smith examples above, will and marriage certificate, each link (at least) 3 people. You thus have not several individual jigsaw puzzle pieces, but several connected groups of pieces - these tend to be easier to fit, and in any event are meaningful objects of study in themselves. lojbab --- Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist [email protected] Lojban language www.lojban.org