Person talk:Unknown Seaver (18)


Need for a convention [27 January 2017]

I am not sure I like the rename of this page from Female Seaver to Unknown Seaver, female.

  • First, it is not clear that the old version wasn't just as communicative as the new.
  • Second, I suspect the use of the word "Unknown" is not the best choice of terms.
  • Third, there is no appearance that the change was made based the addition of any new information, so it is apparently trying to implement a standard. Given the above doubts, I want to question this.

The child was born with no given name records 4 Dec 1865 ([1] line 95). This can mean she died before a name was given, or that a name was given later but not known at the time the birth was registered. The latter case is not uncommon, but then one would expect that later records would give the name of the child. No daughter is listed in the 1870 census ([2], lines 5-7), so clearly she died young, and it looks like it is probably the first case. The birth record does not indicate she was stillborn. No death record is found by normal searching. But after paging through deaths registered in Medford (because the given name is not known, and in case Seaver is spelled funny in the indices: i.e., end of 1865, 1866 (plus next 2), 1867 (plus next 3), 1868 (plus next 3) 1869 (plus next 4), 1870 (plus next 1)), still no death record was found. So with a fair amount of certainty, I think this child died never having a name.

I do think Unknown is not a desirable choice. While the name is technically unknown, it is most likely unknown because there is no name to ever know, i.e., it is probably not a matter of doing more research and the name will present itself. Thus there probably is no need to suggest this page needs further research, a conclusion that seems implied by the use of Unknown. I don't think this is a message that is intended in this case.

My personal preference would be to use the name Daughter Seaver. My usual terms for unnamed children (Child if gender unknown, Son, or Daughter when gender is known) are hardly the only choices, but I do think there could be some benefit to this website settling on a selected set of terms consistently. I think it is desirable that those terms reflect the gender because in colonial times, there were often more than one such children in certain families (some undoubtedly due to what we now know are unfavorable genetic combinations?) and reflecting the gender in the name providing some differentiation to aid in navigation. I don't like putting the gender in the title field because it is redundant. If Daughter Seaver's name is later discovered to be Anne, changing the given name will be all the change that is needed, with no chance that title is left saying female after it is no longer necessary. --Jrich 18:27, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

You are correct that this change was made in the interest of standardizing data entry and nothing more. I agree that we need to settle on some consistent terms, in fields that matter, if we wish to realize the full potential of the database we are creating. It is important to find a balance between what is best practice in genealogy and what is best practice in data management. I used to enter a variation of "Unknown Female/Male/Child/Infant" in Given name myself, but after spending most of my time here over the last couple of years dealing with page clean up, searches, and lists every day, I see the advantages of using the single, non-gender specific "Unknown" across the board, with any details or explanations entered elsewhere on the page. The original drive-by GEDCOM entered "Female", you prefer "Daughter", and others might have chosen from a list of subjective placeholder names, abbreviations, acronyms, etc., sometimes with and sometimes without punctuation, to convey the nuances of the unknown name. I assume you are aware of the effects that has on large scale searching and sorting. I realize that I may have grown weary of slogging through this mountain of maintenance tasks, but it seems that the time and effort needed to monitor an effort to introduce and mandate the use of a set of different types of unknown names would be significant, and I'm not sure that I see the same benefits to making that distinction in the Given name field as you do.
Re: identifiers in the suffix field. I sometimes use simple identifiers for the same navigation and family reasons you mentioned. I enter them in the suffix field, because it has the least effect on sort. Suffix fields are pretty harmless when it comes to our data management, so they can be very useful. I wish I didn't have to be redundant in entering gender, but, as you know, gender was left out as one of the parameters in searching. Entering it in a name field facilitates both searching and navigating the results. I am willing to trust our users to remove identifiers like "female" from the suffix field in the future, if it is warranted, but it is harmless if they forget. Nonetheless, I am willing to accept a better way of managing this, if we can all agree on one. --cos1776 21:09, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
Having useful conventions is going to be useful the earlier any of them get established. Haven't seen too much action on that front, though it's not for lack of suggestions from me and others. If there is no need, then perhaps we don't need one.
I'm not sure what problem you are trying to fix, and it would probably be better to establish a convention before doing a bunch of fixing that later will need to be refixed. Finally, fixing it should require knowing what the actual situation is, not simply changing it to "A" because you don't like "B". It seems like there are a lot more important cleanup to be done than this, in my opinion, like taking the source citation and standardizing it, or doing the research to find if she lived the 4 years and few months until the 1870 census, at which point her name could have been changed to what it was rather than another synonym for unknown. --Jrich 22:46, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
We can not change the way things were handled in the past, only the way we handle them going forward. Hopefully, we have a better understanding now of what is important to regulate and what isn't and can explain why. There will be more on this to report from the OC soon.
This page is part of many other data problems associated with this GEDCOM and originally came in as Given name = (female), with parentheses. It has nothing to do with the amount or quality of research present in other fields on the page. If the conventions for Given name were to change from the currently acceptable "Unknown" for unknowns in the future, this page and any others that have been standardized to "Unknown" could be easily found and updated in one step.
Not sure why you feel the need to pass judgement on another volunteer's time. For your information, I spend quite a bit of time on other "more important" tasks and projects, but occasionally need a break, which is when do this type of low-hanging fruit work. That is my prerogative. --cos1776 00:58, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
This website has had little leadership and there is a huge vacuum in that area. There is a huge number of fields that I believe need to be codified and conventions established so there is some commonality of appearance, the way towns have similar looking pages on wikipedia, for example. Some organized thought is needed about how to do things. I am an individual, I naturally have an opinion. Therefore, I "pass judgement on another volunteer's time", meaning I express my opinion when I think things are being done in the wrong order, for the wrong reasons, or otherwise in a less than beneficial way.
I inspect every change that crosses my watchlist. As a general rule, the majority of changes that do not require adding a source tend to seem unnecessary to me. Meaning the intent of the page is already clear to a reasonably careful reader, and while the change may make the page look prettier to one subset of users, it is no more true than it was before (by far and away my greatest concern), and another subset of users may now be unhappy. This is true whether it is changing a month from DEC to Dec, or changing given name Female to given name Unknown and title suffix Female (a convention I have not heard seen before today). In this case, for example, a reader might assume the use of Female for the given name while citing a birth date and citing a source for that birth date, clearly indicates that the name was left blank on the birth record (as it was). I don't know what motivated the change, didn't know whether the new form was meant to indicate the special case of people who had never been given a name, or if, as you hint was the case, you just objected to the use of female in the given name field. Regardless I still feel the intent of the original posting was as obvious as the changed posting. I am unaware when it was decided that a given name of Female was a "problem" or who decided it.
If it is considered useful to differentiate these two conditions (name not known due to lack of sources, vs. name never given), or have these two cases be findable based on some criteria (perhaps by using a certain value in the given name, or by a category, or by another method), consistency requires setting the convention before starting to do the change. If "Unknown, Female" ends up being the convention then fine. But shouldn't that be published first? Searching on various values of given name, there are currently 854 "Daughter" and 644 "Female", 30000+ Unknowns, but only 210 Unknown if female is added to the keywords (the encoding of gender on a raw page does not use the word female). Currently I don't see any way to search specifically on the title field, so do not know how to search specifically for Given name Unknown, and title suffix of Female. --Jrich 02:34, 28 January 2017 (UTC)