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Archiver > TMG > 2005-09 > 1125583639


From: Richard Cleaveland <>
Subject: Re: [TMG] Proper Terminology
Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 10:07:19 -0400
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Kevin Sholder wrote:
> All,
>
> I'm curious as to how other people handle the fact that in the US census
> records (1850, 1860, 1870) so often it shows the country or birth as
> Germany. When in fact this is incorrect. ....

While I find the responses you have received to date extremely
enlightening, I think one or two aspects have been neglected.

The first and most important is to consider the end use of the product
you are creating. For example, do you wish to search on a country field
and gather together people who have some connection to an area? Then
feel free to use a generic term such as the much-referred to "Germany"
(without the quotes). However, if you are preparing a genealogy to be
read at some time in the future (100 years?) by a geographical scholar,
you should probably be very precise, indicating not only the term used
in the source (census, church record, book) but also as near as you can
figure out, the names of the political subdivisions as they existed at
the time of the event you are recording. That sort of thing is what the
memo field is all about. For another of the many possible examples, this
one closer to home to us USA people, I am prone to use things like
"Plymouth Colony" rather than Massachusetts for the appropriate time period.

Now for a far-out but more satisfying solution for an engineer:
Consider not only writing for the casual reader but for those who want
precise and enduring information. Make use of the Lat-Long field. For
this to be practical, we probably need an automatic translator from the
textual description of the location to the geometric position(s), and a
search routine which would allow us to make use of these numerics. As a
precursor we also need a more extensive lat/long field, so that it can
include the boundaries of places. I don't recall which one, but one of
the one-at-a-time translators I have run across int he past provides
these boundary locations.

Well, I SAID it was far-out, didn't I?

Dick

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