Haines Brown wrote: > A very interesting thread. I hope no one minds if a non-genealogist > jumps in with questions. > > My sense of the distinction of a relation-based and an event based > structure is clear to me only in the abstract, but not in concrete > terms. Would someone be willing to offer a simple example of each to > help make the distinction clearer? > My issue is between evidence-based structures and interpretation-based structures. > As an historian, I'm puzzled by the debate over whether it is necessary > to go beyond presentation to include the source evidence. Without > defending the point, let me offer my impression of the > difference. Presentation and content seem the contradictory aspects of > one process. They are interdependent and equally necessary. Under modern > conditions, we distinguish form and content (CSS markup being a familiar > example) because we distinguish individual and society. It seems to me > that a set of conclusions in themselves (that is, disconnected from the > supporting evidence and argumentation) have no truth value because > truth is a social phenomenon. An interesting thought! Imagine, if you can, that you have been wrongly accused of a serious crime. Now, is the truth of your innocence a social phenomenon or an absolute? This sort of thinking is, or should be, part of the approach on anyone investigating the past. The truth of the situation may not be knowable to the investigator but it is (or was if the past is sufficiently distant) knowable to those involved. It's our attempts to grasp it which are the social phenomenon. > On the other hand, presentation conveys a > socially constructed truth in a form meaningful for the individual, > which is obviously a condition necessary for the social construction of > truth. One without the other makes no sense. I think your "social construction of truth" is my "interpretation". > > I'm also unclear why people are having so much difficulty handling > ambiguity in their databases. The reason may be that I'm unfamiliar with > the software so far mentioned. I happen to use LifeLines, and if there's > ambiguity, I can readily inject a note in the GEDCOM saying so. I assume > other software can do the same, and so am not clear about the problem. > How would you handle this situation: Two men, Andy and Bob with the surname each have a son called Charlie in the same year. Subsequently a man called Charlie with the same surname and who can be shown to have been born in that year marries and has a child called David. The sons of Andy and Bob are the only two candidates for David's father but with no good grounds to distinguish between them. How do you then show David's ancestry? Do you choose to link him back to Andy with a note that Bob might actually be the grandfather (or the converse)? If so then you may have *noted* the ambiguity but you have not *recorded* it in your structure. -- Ian Hotmail is for spammers. Real mail address is igoddard at nildram co uk

Ian Goddard <goddai01@hotmail.co.uk> writes: > Imagine, if you can, that you have been wrongly accused of a serious > crime. Now, is the truth of your innocence a social phenomenon or an > absolute? A crime is socially defined (Robinson Crusoe could not commit a crime), but the act is individual. Hence we are back to the notion that individual and society are aspects of one process (this is conventionally called "social being"). Anyway... > How would you handle this situation: Two men, Andy and Bob with the > surname each have a son called Charlie in the same year. Subsequently > a man called Charlie with the same surname and who can be shown to > have been born in that year marries and has a child called David. The > sons of Andy and Bob are the only two candidates for David's father > but with no good grounds to distinguish between them. How do you then > show David's ancestry? Do you choose to link him back to Andy with a > note that Bob might actually be the grandfather (or the converse)? If > so then you may have *noted* the ambiguity but you have not *recorded* > it in your structure. I respond, not to answer your question, but to get a better understanding of the issue. This David would have a GEDCOM entry like this: n @<XREF:FAM>@ FAM For example, 0 @F4@ FAM So couldn't Charles I (son of Andy) possibly be F4, while Charles II (son of Bob) is F5? So a David with "0 @F4@ FAM" would umambiguously be the son of Charles I. What am I misunderstanding? -- Haines Brown, KB1GRM