User talk:HoodedDemon

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Next step: Review your GEDCOM [7 January 2016]

You're not done yet!

WeRelate is different from most family tree websites. By contributing to WeRelate you are helping to create Pando for genealogy, a free, unified family tree that combines the best information from all contributors.

Now that you have uploaded BrandonMasterson.ged, your next step is to review what your pages will look like, review any potential warnings, and combine (merge) people in your GEDCOM with matching people already on WeRelate. You need to review your GEDCOM before it can finish importing. We will keep your GEDCOM in the queue for two weeks to give you time to review it.

Note: if your gedcom contains many errors or multiple families, we’d ask that you resolve and correct the errors, delete this gedcom and re-submit it without the errors before merging it with families already on WeRelate. If the gedcom is very large, we’d suggest breaking it up into separate files (or families) and importing them one at a time, which makes the review and correction process easier.

Click here to review your GEDCOM

Once you have finished your review and marked your GEDCOM Ready to import, one of our administrators will review your GEDCOM and finalize the import. This usually happens within 24 hours. You will receive a message here when the pages have been created.

--WeRelate agent 15:36, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Next step: Review your GEDCOM [7 January 2016]

You're not done yet!

WeRelate is different from most family tree websites. By contributing to WeRelate you are helping to create Pando for genealogy, a free, unified family tree that combines the best information from all contributors.

Now that you have uploaded BrandonMasterson.ged, your next step is to review what your pages will look like, review any potential warnings, and combine (merge) people in your GEDCOM with matching people already on WeRelate. You need to review your GEDCOM before it can finish importing. We will keep your GEDCOM in the queue for two weeks to give you time to review it.

Note: if your gedcom contains many errors or multiple families, we’d ask that you resolve and correct the errors, delete this gedcom and re-submit it without the errors before merging it with families already on WeRelate. If the gedcom is very large, we’d suggest breaking it up into separate files (or families) and importing them one at a time, which makes the review and correction process easier.

Click here to review your GEDCOM

Once you have finished your review and marked your GEDCOM Ready to import, one of our administrators will review your GEDCOM and finalize the import. This usually happens within 24 hours. You will receive a message here when the pages have been created.

--WeRelate agent 15:59, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Next step: Review your GEDCOM [7 January 2016]

You're not done yet!

WeRelate is different from most family tree websites. By contributing to WeRelate you are helping to create Pando for genealogy, a free, unified family tree that combines the best information from all contributors.

Now that you have uploaded BrandonMasterson.ged, your next step is to review what your pages will look like, review any potential warnings, and combine (merge) people in your GEDCOM with matching people already on WeRelate. You need to review your GEDCOM before it can finish importing. We will keep your GEDCOM in the queue for two weeks to give you time to review it.

Note: if your gedcom contains many errors or multiple families, we’d ask that you resolve and correct the errors, delete this gedcom and re-submit it without the errors before merging it with families already on WeRelate. If the gedcom is very large, we’d suggest breaking it up into separate files (or families) and importing them one at a time, which makes the review and correction process easier.

Click here to review your GEDCOM

Once you have finished your review and marked your GEDCOM Ready to import, one of our administrators will review your GEDCOM and finalize the import. This usually happens within 24 hours. You will receive a message here when the pages have been created.

--WeRelate agent 17:05, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Source citations [8 January 2016]

I glad you were posting sources. Dates without sources are virtually useless. There is so much bad, misused, miscopied, assumption-based data out there, unless one knows how the dates are known, you might as well not post anything.

Most Ancestry sources are simply indices: an index of records stored somewhere else. Most of the records they are indices for are available on the Internet directly, or in a better form, for free.

Most Ancestry citations includes so little information you cannot identify the original source. Verification is an important part of serious genealogy. The citation needs to help other people be able to find and verify the source of information.

Specific examples:

You changed Thomas Cook to have an alternate birth in Wayland even though his page already had a birth in Sudbury with a source. The citation you added for this alternate birth was "Massachusetts, United States. Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988. (Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011)": RIN: MH:SC77010.

Did this source say he was born in Wayland? You can't tell from the citation, and although I don't have an Ancestry account, I suspect this citation wouldn't enable one to find the record you were using even if one had such an account.

Now at the time Thomas Cook was born 1702, the area was called Sudbury, and Thomas' birth was listed in the records for the town of Sudbury. In 1780 part of Sudbury became East Sudbury, and in the 1800s changed its name to Wayland, so it is possible he was born in the part of Sudbury that is now Wayland. In that case it might be correct to specify Wayland as his birth place.

But the records of Wayland online here do not list Thomas Cook's birth. So how could "Massachusetts, United States. Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988" give his birthplace as Wayland? Did they record the birth from some other kind of source, and make it look like town records? Or is this not the source of the location in Wayland? Usually determining such a fact comes from studying deeds and figuring out where the family homestead was located.

Which is the problem with Ancestry sources. Other indices have similar problems: the familysearch Massachusetts Marriages index does not differentiate between a marriage and publishment of intentions. Getting past the index to the original source of information, even if you don't see it directly, is important in knowing how reliable it is, and may be the singlest best step to avoid copying bad data or misusing good data. Is it a contemporary source by a first hand witness: good! Is this information printed in a book by an author with no explanation of where he found it: how does he know?

Now one would suspect indices like "U.S. and International Marriage Records, 1560-1900" and "Dodd, Jordan (compiler). Massachusetts Marriages, 1633-1850" are two indices who both would contain an entry for the same recorded marriage off the same page in some book of town records. So what is the point of including both on a page? It merely says two people saw the same entry, and yet neither gives the actual contents of the record (e.g., was the month given as a number or a name, was the woman called Mrs or widow, was double-dating actually included in the record or added by the indexer, etc.) If they are the same, having two tells you nothing one doesn't, and if they aren't the same, you have to find the original anyway to resolve the discrepancy.

"The New England Historical and Genealogical Register. (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society).": RIN: MH:SC74648. This magazine is in its 170th year of publication. With roughly 500 pages a year, that is somewhere in the neighborhood of 85000 pages. I see no volume or page number is specified in the citation, much less author and article title? Even a name like Temperance Chase occurs multiple times over the years, and even with an index available to me, it took four tries before I figured out what page number you wanted.

The point of this website is collaboration, and the postings on pages should be posted with the other people in mind. Especially the source citations. --Jrich 15:17, 8 January 2016 (UTC)