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Archiver > TMG > 2000-06 > 0959872275


From: Ida Skarson McCormick <>
Subject: [TMG-L:] TMG-L: Modified Henry tree pruning (was:Re: Automated Relatedness...)
Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2000 08:11:15 -0700


At 08:48 AM 05/31/2000 EDT, Teresa Elliott wrote:
<snip>
>1...Many of us research more than one [bloodline].
>2...related to someone more than one way....
<snip>
--------------------
Neither of the above is a reason not to use the Modified Henry Numbering
System (modified for computers, that is).

A. Pedigrees (ascendancies) are truncated by pruning out the duplicate
ancestors with cross referencing ("same as #xxxxx"). This is called a
"collapsing pedigree" and saves paper. So, too, can a descendancy be
pruned to remove the duplications when there are cousin marriages. In a
good implementation of the Modifed Henry Numbering System, we would have
several options:

1. Pruning the duplicate people by lopping off the female cousin's
descendants (grandchildren & beyond) and providing cross-reference numbers
to her children under their father's name. This option would suit many
people with one-name studies.

2. Pruning the duplicate people by lopping off the male cousin's
descendants (grandchildren & beyond) and providing cross-reference numbers
to his children under their mother's name. <g> Actually this would work
well for my Susannah Project, a descendancy of 300+ years, in which I lop
off the descendants of anyone who did not have a child named Susannah. I
set a Susannah flag for the descendants who qualify.

3. Pruning the duplicate people by lopping of the descendants
(grandchildren & beyond) of the marriage partner/cousin with the higher
number. That is, if male #13568 married his female 3rd cousin #12479, his
children would be cross referenced to her number, and his descendants
(grandchildren & beyond) would be lopped off, because his cousin/wife comes
before him in the descendancy. This is my personal preference for most of
the descendancies I work on.

4. No lopping at all.

B. The Modified Henry Numbering System lends itself to generation of a
descendancy on the fly by the software, and thus the numbers would not need
to be "stored" anywhere. The numbering would probably be different every
time. Any person with descendants in the database could be #1 for a
particular report. This means my child would have a totally different
number if my father's maternal maternal great-grandmother is #1 than if my
mother-in-law's paternal paternal maternal great-great-grandfather is #1,
etc. I do not think of either of these numbers as a permanent addition to
my child's record.

C. On a another topic relating to the Modified Henry Numbering System, it
was pointed out on another list that the printouts could be either
horizontally (breadth) or vertically (depth) oriented. In the horizontal
option, all the persons in 1 generation would print before those in the
next. In the vertical option, all the descendants of the 1st child would
print before the 2nd child and his/her descendants would print and so on.
Both options are needed in a software implementation of the Modified Henry
Numbering System.

D. For more information about Henry numbers, please see Richard Pence's
lengthy article on
numbering systems:

http://www.genealogy.org/~st-clair/numbers/

--Ida Skarson McCormick, , Seattle
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