Stephen,
As you are likely seeing, for every person there is a standard that
suits you best. I developed a personal standard based on several
goals, not the least of which was how would the data read when
compiling a registry type report. And knowing that most of my work
was single name studies.
1/ For unknown surnames, I adopted the string [--?--] several years
ago. I recent article by Eastman or someone noted that this was
becoming popular as measured by the number of usages in RootsWeb's
WorldConnect. "Unknown" as a surname sorts into the middle of a
surname index. I preferred to have something that was lumped either
at the beginning or end of the surname lists. Something no one would
ever confuse for being a surname. "?" just did not seem strong enough.
2/ For children whose given name I don't know, I use Son, Daughter,
or Infant depending on my knowledge of their sex. If there is more
than one of a fictitious given name, I use a suffix I II III, etc. so
that each child in a family would have a unique name.
So as not to put extraneous stuff in the Place location, I add notes
like "Died in Infancy", "Died in WWI", "At Sea" in the Death Notes field.
3/ I use "Miss" and "Mister" for spouses when I do not know their
given name. This gets a bit tiring; however, it allows the individual
in the database index to be recognized as to what sex they are. If I
have documented their parents, rule 2 applies.
4/ If I have two siblings that I want to document as siblings in my
database but do not know their names, I create parents with as much
naming knowledge as possible from Mister [--?--] and Miss [--?--] to
Mister Jones and Mary [--?--]. Quite often based on the records
(census, etc.) you may have some knowledge about these people that
may be helpful in later identifying them. Such as possible place of
birth from an 1880 or later census or estimated deaths, etc.
5/ I should mention a bit about how I document dates.
First, if I suspect or presume that a person is deceased, I put
"unknown" in the first for the death date. This does a good job of
making sure that some zealous software does not decide to privatize
the individual.
Second, I use "about" dates when I have some documentation to provide
evidence for the date; examples: If an 1850 census give an age for a
child as 8, I will record the birth year as about 1842; if a 1900
census gives birth date as July 1842, I will enter about July 1842;
if a death record or gravestone gives an age at death, when I compute
the birth date, I enter it as an about date (and never give it more
precision that the age - ie, if age 42, I will never give the birth
date to greater precision than year.).
Third, I use Estimated Dates for birth dates (especially) when I have
no record, but I want the index to sort the person into the right
date range. For instance, I was entering some marriages into my
database for people I have not yet identified (based on various
marriage record compilations.). I gave an estimated birth date for
the spouses so when I went back to census and other records, I had a
starting point for identifying the people.
I have a lot more rules for my data entry, but that is enough for
now. And I am sure that a dozen people will tell you their system is
best and what is wrong with my system. That is OK. If anyone give me
an idea for how to do something better, I will try to adopt it. I
have evolved this system over about 10+ years of data entry. I
switched to Legacy as it provided the capability to better do some of
the things I had wanted to do. My databases have about a total of
100,000 names in them. Most of them are hand entered. If I do get a
Gedcom or family file from someone else, I will first re-work all of
the data so that it complies with my standard before I merge it into my data.
Listen to what others are doing and synthesize your own standard. And
always remember what your end goal is. And how that standard will
look when the data is represented in whatever charts or reports or
web sites you plan to create.
john.
Nashua, NH
At 09:06 PM 4/18/2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I have just started using Legacy and have three questions on its usage.
1) What is the best, standard, most efficient, etc. method of
entering a wife when the maiden name is unknown and there is little
prospect of determining it? I have varied between entering the
husband's given name and entering a question mark. Or can (should)
the surname be left blank?
2) How should an unnamed child that died in infancy be entered? I
want it recorded and have entered the child with "Unnamed Son Of" as
the first name and the surname as the last name. Is there a better method?
3) I have entries for people as spouses whose parents are unknown. I
want to add siblings to those people but Legacy doesn't appear to
allow the addition of an individual without a parent. How can I get them in?
Thank you.
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