User:Ceyockey

I am Person:Living Yockey (1)

I am a contributor to Wikipedia (where I am an admin), Wiktionary and OpenStreetMap in addition to this Wiki.^[1][2] I have been involved to a greater or lesser degree in genealogy research since the mid-1990's. After I had picked most low-hanging fruit from my own family tree, I began trying out a variety of contributory activities meant to help add information to the available pool so that others who might have reached a bottleneck might be able to progress. Most of that contributory work to date rests either in the Rootsweb environment, on various personal web pages or on paper, not yet converted to online form. --Ceyockey (joined WeRelate 2008-09-24)

A small word about my background: I am a biologist turned informatics scientist, the latter term meaning that I work with data, meta-data and data transformation and organization on a daily basis, in my case in a commercial research environment ... among other activities.

Tools

• APSalin, an online conversion utility for translation of decimal lat-lon coordinates to degree-minute-second (DMS) format and vice versa. Useful, for instance, in converting coordinates for Wikimapia locations (decimal) into a format suitable for inclusion here (DMS).
• The top or root category for WeRelate is Category:Browse.

Principles

• I am an advocate of crosslinking among Wikipedia, Wikimapia, WeRelate, the SSDI (Social Security Death Index) and Rootsweb (and its many resources).
• I am opposed to the inclusion of information about living people in any on-line genealogical resource, even if such person is a celebrity or public figure, unless that person has added such information themselves.
• In general, Wikipedia articles should not be used as sources; rather, use Wikipedia to find sources for inclusion here and as a cross reference to provide an encyclopedic treatment of a topic.
• I believe that every category, article, image, etc. should sit in at least one category in order for it to be taken in context of related categories, articles, images, etc.

My resources

I have created a Repository page at Repository:Ceyockey which contains sources which I have immediate physical access to, typically less common or hard to find items.

Cemetery transcription

As noted above, now that I have come up against a number of difficult to penetrate walls in researching my own family, I have turned to transcribing cemetery populations. This section contains information on the methods I have come to around collecting and organizing this information. I consider the companion pages Interments in Lombardy Cemetery, Bellefonte, New Castle, Delaware, United States and Place:Lombardy Cemetery, Bellefonte, New Castle, Delaware, United States to be representative of the method I am currently using.

Data collection

I no longer collect full information on each plot when transcribing, a very labor intensive process. Rather, I have adopted a skim-and-organize method which focuses on surveying the surnames, surname-plot associations and years of birth and death. This provides the minimum information that (I believe) a person investigating their family using on-line resources would need to determine whether a closer look is needed at a particular cemetery / plot. This method allows for the collection of information on between 100 and 200 people per hour of physical inspection of headstones.

Data organization

The organization of data about people is straightforward - ordering by surname, then birth year, then death year. More difficult is the recording of sufficient information - in the absence of official plot maps - to be able to find a plot again without extensive hunting of the cemetery grounds.

Notes

1. ↑ For one discussion directly relevant to work here, see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tag:landuse=cemetery .
2. ↑ I was formerly a contributor to Wikimapia. A complete breakdown of trust and communication between the site administrators and major contributors led to my departure; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimapia#UL2_status_and_strike for a NPOV take on this event.