lists@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> Your comments are valid when we're talking about
> sharing genealogy data among cousins.
>
> However, when people transcribe and index records, the first
> step for the researcher is to find the records.
>
> GEDCOM is a suitable format for storing genealogical indices
> so researchers will find out where somebody went.
>
Tom, let me start by quoting your original post:
"There are transcribers keying in their local vital records ... these
need to be uploaded in GEDCOM format so they can be read by ay genealogy
software and adapted to a wide variety of formats."
.... and let me quickly dispose of the last part of this: if you want to
adapt one format to another the easiest starting format would be XML,
not gedcom.
Transcribed records are valuable evidence, assuming the transcription is
accurate. However I've yet to see an original record in gedcom format
so uploading them in this format means that they have been interpreted
in some way. One of the basic rules of any form of scholar****p is to
keep evidence and its interpretation distinct.
To give you one example of this:
In the late C18th there are a number of records interspersed in the
baptismal records of Holmfirth (WRY) chapel of the form:
"wife of John Smith ch"
In the case of the wife of Philip Bray there are two such records within
6 months.
I've seen at least one record (27 Mar 1778) of this uploaded to IGI
interpreted as the baptism of the wife of John Goddard with the "ch"
interpreted as "Christiana". This interpretation would indicate that
(a) there were a lot of adult baptisms in the church of England at this
time (b) that a lot of women were called Christiana and (c) either
Philip Bray's wife has been baptised twice or, in quick succession, the
first wife died and he remarried another Christiana who also had to be
baptised (d) that John Goddard must have had two wives as he married
Mary Collier the previous year and she was recorded as the mother of one
of his children 20 years later. In short, without seeing the original
text one would not know that this uploaded gedcom record was a complete
misinterpretation of a record of the CofE ritual known as the churching
of women. It's also worth noting that in the late C18th the curate had
adopted the practice of recording the the mother's maiden name even when
the parents were a married couple: a century earlier a different surname
for the mother would have indicated illegitimacy.
That's an example of interpretation by addition. If we move on some
years we can see an op****tunity for interpretation by omission in
constructing a gedcom record. The same chapel is now using pre-printed
books for baptismal registers. In one column is the child's name, the
next is the relation****p, normally simply "son of" or "daughter of" and
the next column holds the parent's names. A week or so ago I came
across an entry which reads |George|the son of the late|George and
Hannah Fawley|. I knew from other information that the elder George had
died young but those three extra words in the relation****p column which
would have been lost had this been reduced to a gedcom record help
narrow down the date of his death.
This last example also includes a subtle example of interpretation by
addition. Note that no surname is given for the child. We assume,
because this is the norm in C19th England, that the child will inherit
the father's surname. This notion of an inheritable surname preceded by
one or more forenames is a cultural assumption built into gedcom and
much (?most, ?all) genealogy S/W but it isn't true for many contem****ary
non-western cultures nor even for that of non-contem****ary western
cultures. This, together with other topics on which, as Wes says, we
have been harangued is because the whole thing is constructed on a set
of cultural assumptions.
To come back to my original point; the idea of a site for the
publication of transcripts of original data is a good one. But a
transcription is one thing and a gedcom is something else entirely.
Ian
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