Genealogy Chat

Maurice There is absolutely NO WAY I am going to clutter up my offsite tree with speculation, as you are suggesting. If I have a birth date, then it is noted on this site. If I have a birth place, ditto. If I have neither, then tough. I have used the survey to ask that GR override birth field with baptism details - not an action, I would have thought, beyond the wit of man. The more interesting names in my tree are meaningful without dates, while requiring the mortar of the boring ones. On such names I trust myself to be able to decide whether or not it is appropriate contact others. Frankly, the difficulty you are encountering with this site is precisely the sort of difficulty you find in research. There are flaws in most records and you just have to develop strategies to deal with them.

Ah, Maurice! If ONLY it was that simple! I have sent for a total of fifteen birth certificates for the son of this first marriage. Only two have the 'right' father. Neither wife looks correct, I have 99% eliminated one, because she appears on the 1881 census with various other children. The other is called Mary Holden!!! Do you know how many women called Mary Holden died between 1855 and 1859 in Lancashire? A mass-murderer was at large, targeting Mary Holdens, it seems. It is complicated by the fact that Greater Manchester Register Office will no longer undertake searches, and I know from past experience that many events registered in this office did not reach the GRO. Believe me, I am doing my best to find out this damn womans name etc, but have next to nothing to go on! I have searched marriages from 1837 to 1855 - again, far too many to narrow down. I await a miracle. Old Crone

Olde Crone Holden ! If you have the Baptism/Birth details of your 2xGG and the town have you tried to see the parish records ? The name of the mother and father will likely be shown. If you can find her name i.e Mary Holden then look at the National Burial index for that county spanning say 1855 to 1900 with a bit of luck there may only be one Mary Holden that fits. The NBI should show age at death, so by deduction you can at least find her birth date (within a year) Then you can trawl the parish records, for the place of birth or add about 20 years to her birth date and look at Pallots Marriage index. If your family were of some substance and not the usual Ag Labs the chances of finding old local newspapers on film of 1855 are often quite good in local libraries, births of Affluent people made local news.Parents would be named. I have found a few real gems from old papers. Maurice

Maurice Many of my verified ancestors were not baptised for months, some not for YEARS - I have incidences of two sets of parents being fined for not having their children baptised. In these cases, I do put the date of birth as 'circa', however, with no idea really, of an accurate birth year. On my own, private tree, I have a column headed 'alive in' for people who were alive in a particular year. My unknown, 3 x GGM must have been alive in 1855 to give birth to my 2 x GGF, for instance, but her age could be anything between 12 and 50. Of course, on my GR tree she appears as Uknown Unknown, b abt 1825?? in UK??? Not much use to anyone at all of course, least of all me - no-one is going to contact me from those details. But GR demands that I enter a name etc, so that's the best I can do. Far more irritating to me are all the Darth Vaders, Mickey Mouses etc - they really DO clog up the site. Old Crone

Kim, I have my tree on 'Family Tree V11' I agree with you over the problem of Baptism/Birth dates. But there is an easy way around it. Show the baptism date as normal, say 15 March 1822 ,if you do not know the birth date show the birth as c March 1822. In most cases the birth was very closely followed by the baptism as infant mortality was very high in those days. by placing the 'c' for circa you are showing that the actual date is not definate - but is 'best value judgement', It is better than no date at all. On the name summary no date at all will not even indicate the century ! I have in my tree persons who were Born,Baptised,and Died on the same day. Baptisms of others are rarely longer than one month following birth, so I feel it is more helpfull to indicate a circa date than none. Hope this is of interest Maurice

one thing everyone needs to remember is: If you export your ged file to GR and only have a 'baptism' date for your rellie (which most of us get off the LDS), the GR system will not recognise it, so it is an invalid field, and you get zilch by the name. Also, if the a child is illegitamate or you don't know the spouse' name, or the person is linked to someone else, or, Gr system does doesn't like their name or ................. you get 'unknown unknown'! (I think I have over 100 at present!) Kim

As regards searching for a place, it pays not to be too specific - a few letters is enough, you don't need the whole name. CUM will find Cumberland, Chorlton cum Hardy, Cumbernauld etc. Hopefully, someone giving a birthplace will get 3 or 4 letters in the right order.

Hi Maurice, There are those of us who put as much info as they can on the site as they genuinely want to get in touch with others. This is surely what the site is all about. I have many friends and connections as a reult Then there are people load their info from a PC program without actually realising they have a lot of poor information, such as names but little else. I suspect that some are not even aware that they are cluttering up the site with so much useless data. On the other hand there are others who have an obsession with 'secrecy'. Whether this be about revealing that their brother was born in Putney or an aversion that someone may 'steal' their information. I do wonder, sometimes, why these people even bother to come here in the first place. Regards, Peter

Sarah, Berkshire??? may have been an idea , in this way you would at least convey serious doubt, but at the same time indicating that his family were from that area. At least you had the date to guide would be interested parties. Maurice

Hi Maurice I wish GR had a better way to add entries more clearly. I have seen a lot of examples where the place given is misspelt and so warrants a separate entry in the place index. Even adding a comma between town and county can change the whole thing. It would make life easier if you could choose a county when entering names - then be able to search by that county. I know this wouldn't help the uploaded files but its just a thought. netti

Thank you Peter, for your support, Though I am more concerned with people who insist on posting entries like:- John Smith 1890------ when it should be possible to add at least a country or more hopefully a county. I accept validity of the the points made on on living relatives. Although with a modicum of common sense they can be traced anyway. It is the relatives prior to 1901 which is the stumbling block for most researchers, especially those before 1837. It must be of benefit to all if they at least could be tidied up a bit. For example Annie Nunn born C 1821 Essex? is better than just Annie Nunn. Maurice

But if we GUESS when or where an event occurred and are completely wrong, then surely this is just as bad (worse??) as having no details? Surely guessing is not why we are doing this hobby??? If I had guessed at my gg-grandfather's date and place of birth I would have said Reading, Berkshire in 1835. Date would have been spot on, but since the 1861 census came out on Ancestry I now know he was born in Tasmania!!! Maybe we will have to agree to disagree over this! Sarah

It is a condition of this site that you shouldn't put up details of living people without their permission. If you have a large number of living relatives in your GEDCOM, the only practical way to meet this condition is to privatise the file before you upload it. If that means that some names are then not ''usable'' to others, then too bad - but you wouldn't get the details anyway if the names were completely deleted, so why worry about it?

I'm with Maurice. Given that the main purpose of posting details on the site is to encourage others to get in touch to make connections, then it is all rather pointless putting names on with no dates or places. Why the obsession for deleting places and dates anyway? So what if the fact that Fred Smith was born in Putney in 1970 and is visible on Names Summary. He will have had to have given his permission in the first place to have his name there with or without his place or year of birth. If anyone seriously wants too get hold of personal details, for illegal purposes, they will look in the telephone directory, not on this site.

Also, because GR doesn't have an option to hide the details of living individuals, then before a tree is uploaded via a Gedcom it is necessary to ''privatise'' it in your family tree software. This strips out the dates and places for persons who could be living, leaving just the name visible in GR. When you have a tree of several thousand names, it's too much work to go through & delete all these names once uploaded to GR. If a name doesn't have any details attached, then just ignore it - why is that a problem? Richard

Maurice, Many member like myself upload our tree from a gedcom. Going through a whole tree, adding bits here and taking bits out there is very time consuming. The family history programme I use has certain rules, where I have to add a person, whose details I do not know, before I can add a related one. ie. I have found the father of a person in my tree, I also know the names of several of his siblings, but in order to put them in the tree, I must enter their parents. If I dont know who they are, then I must use a ?? I know it is annoying, but these things sometimes cannot be avoided

We are still getting many new entries on the name summary showing only the persons name, often without a year. I appreciate that it is not always possible to pinpoint the place i.e. Kent Essex but surely if the name is deemed worthy of inclusion in a tree then at least an attempt at narrowing down must be possible. Example: England ,Scotland, Eire, Northern Ireland, or other country should be possible at the very least. Or (Essex Kent Sussex ?) if the South East is most likely. if you think you know the county but are not sure put Sussex? , Yorks? etc. I like many others on GR do not bother to follow up single names especially those with no date or place.So help us to help you and tidy up some of the vague entries. Moan over Regards Maurice