What substantive value is being added to a time line with these 2 commonly added events?
I’d appreciate the viewpoints of others on:
With the addition of these two new record sets “United States 1950 Census” and “United States, Social Security Numerical Identification Files”, these indexed details are being added to an individual’s “Events” section as the sources are attached. This, in turn, is generally populating a person’s “Time Line”. There is clear value when adding the 1950 date/residence from that census, but details from *non-sampled* individuals like “1949…United States” are also being added.
Also, what employment or otherwise detail value is added with “Social Program Application” on the “Event” section which in most instances transfers to the “Time Line” section? My understanding this is just an application date that may or may not represent the start of employment, which many times started in childhood.
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I'm pretty sure that having to add an additional level to the historical records in which someone goes through each record set and marks each piece of information as "automatically move to righthand column of Source Linker," "allow option to move to righthand column of Source Linker" or "do not allow to be moved to righthand column of Source Linker" would take far too many years to complete to be useful, never be able to be done in a way that makes all users happy, and cause more problems than it is worth. The current action of the Source Linker in allowing any information on the left to be moved to a blank field on the right, should probably stay the way it is. It doesn't take all that long to follow up after other users and delete Other Information, like that SSI index, that really doesn't need to be there. Deleting it from Other Information will also remove it from the timeline.
I run into this most often with a set of birth records in which the child's birth place is in the database as the mother's residence. I'll come to families in which the mother has a dozen residences under Other Information which are all the same place, usually with most of them mis-transcribed and so spelled wrong, with no city, county, or country, just the place itself, and none of them standardized. I delete all of them with the reason of "Child's birth place is recorded under the child and does not need to be repeated here." I would leave it alone if someone had gone to the trouble of consolidating these to a single entry, finding the correct place name, linking it to the correct standard, and putting in a date range, even if just "from about YYYY to about YYYY" so that it did have some value.
I do find it a bit frustrating that a lot of users seem to just work through Tasks lists, attach a source using the Source Linker, then go on to the next task on the list without ever actually going to anyone's detail page to look at the result of their work.
The other type of "robotic genealogy" to use @melville,dl's phrase, that I find less annoying but still wish people would take more care with, is the tendency to never assess the default tagging in the Source Linker and to tag absolutely every source to everything. If every source is tagged to every vital, it defeats the entire purpose of tagging. I don't find it so annoying that I do anything about it at this point but sometimes when I come across fifty sources, including four duplicate sources for each of a person's nine children's marriages, with all fifty sources tagged to his name, I'm very tempted to untag the forty five marriage sources for his children. It's not so much the extra tags that just clutter the data and makes it hard to see valuable sources that really support the information that is annoying but rather the feeling that too many users do not give any thought to what they are doing.
But back to the point, I would agree @branvarn, that there is no value to having the SSI file information as an Event under Other Information. Feel free to delete it. Also, if a census record does not give valuable residence information it does not need to be there as a Residence under Other Information and can also be deleted to clean up the Other Information section and the Timeline.
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The NUMIDENT file contains, in general, an exact DOB, an exact DOD, and often has the names of both parents. I find those fields to be of considerable value.
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Thank you for your kindness in responding so quickly. I so appreciate the time you took to look at this.
Hopefully, my visuals are better than my other explanation. What is in question is the *supplementary* (optional) data that can be pushed out to the “Events” section on these NUMIDENT and 1950 Census records as they are attached. Only the “Social Program Application” with a date as Custom Event or “1949 United States” for Residence appears in the “Events” section and subsequently the person’s “Time Line”.
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In my opinion, there is NO substantive value in adding "1949 United States" (1950 Census) and/or "Social Program Application or Special Claim" etc (NUMIDENT). I believe this is an example of "robotic" genealogy and the software (source linker) should not allow this as an option to add as a Custom Event. It is at best "non essential" or even "clutter". Sorry for the "rant" but that's my opinion.
I understand the value of having birth/death information in the NUMIDENT source, which can be "tagged" accordingly. But, I would submit that Census records are not usually evidence of a person's name or birth date and should rarely, if ever, be "tagged" as such in the Source Linker.
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The Timeline is incidental to this question. The Timeline shows everything with a date in the Other Information section, and the contents of the Other Information section is dependent solely on what people have entered in it. There are multiple ways to enter conclusions in that section; one of them is via the Source Linker.
Source Linker's offering of conclusions to enter depends on the structure and contents of the index entry that's being attached. When the structure of an index is determined, the resulting behavior of Source Linker is just one (probably rather minor) consideration. Said structure also has to consider speed and ease of indexing, speed and ease of searching, the generation of search results and detail pages, and probably a bunch of other aspects that I haven't a clue about.
It is a long-standing characteristic of Source Linker that it is, shall we say, highly literal-minded: if the indexed event happens to be labeled as a "baptism", then Heaven forfend that it should offer to put it where it belongs under Christening. Similarly, if the event is labeled "death registration", then Source Linker hasn't a clue that it has anything to do with "death": it offers to put it under Other Information as a custom event, same as a baptism. One corollary of this narrow view is that it offers to create conclusions for available fields regardless of the contents of said fields, resulting in "1949 United States" residences and "Social Program Registration" events.
Short of taking away Source Linker's ability to create any conclusions, I don't think this situation can be changed. I personally seldom take up Source Linker on its offers, but this doesn't mean that a census residence is not a useful conclusion, so I think the only real fix is better attention to detail from users. Of course, I haven't a clue how one could go about educating people not to automatically click that arrow just because it's there.
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As @Julia Szent-Györgyi noted, the Timeline is incidental to this question. I'd go one step further and say that the source linker is also incidental. The key, as Julia also noted, is "Source Linker's offering of conclusions to enter depends on the structure and contents of the index entry that's being attached." It's entirely appropriate for the source linker to offer to add conclusions that are in the indexed data; the big question is what conclusions are included in that data.
When FamilySearch set up the indexes for these two record collection, these conclusions were specifically added to the structure (the same is true for any record collection that includes a Death Registration or Baptism conclusion). Generally the conclusions that are included in a record collection's index are wisely chosen and I have no complaint.
But I fail to see how a "Social Program Application" date is valuable for any of the people I care about in Family Tree. The NUMIDENT index is very helpful, but that data is not. I personally never add that conclusion when I attach these sources, because I see it as useless clutter, but of course there will be plenty of users who choose to do so, either because they blindly attach every possible conclusion, or because they carefully consider its value and choose to add it. I have the exact same feelings about almost every 1949 Residence from the 1950 US Census collection.
[As a side note, if I could have my wish for the NUMIDENT collection, it would be a simpler way to add Alternate Names to the person -- for some records for females, the list of alternate names (mostly married names) give valuable clues about spouses they may have had during their lives.]
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I will freely admit I rarely look at the version of the timeline that includes the gimmicky icons. I use the Events listing to check for gaps (where were they in 1920?), duplications (3 immigration events from assorted census records), or standardization issues.
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Thanks to all! I am so grateful for the input and granular thoughts. This really helped me!
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