Indigenous ancestors
Thank you for all you do for the community. I would suggest including race in the suffix box next to the name. Being Indigenous is a great honor to have. But most important, it is hard to find information and documents about our indigenous ancestors. Having Indigenous next to the name would save researchers tons of time and does not need to click in person to look in the facts section for the person race. That the fact box should be for more detailed information about being Indigenous. Plus, many people would get lazy and not write Indigenous in the facts section because they do not want to do the extra steps. Seeing my ancestor’s indigenous race next to the name, I would be able to glance in the fan chart or portrait chart for that information and not need to click each person name to check in the facts section.
This subject is very important to me because I feel we are making it harder to locate our indigenous ancestors without wanting too. Not like our government friends and the federal recognized tribes that makes it hard to apply for indigenous. They want you to prove you are descendant of federally recognized tribe by proving a family member is listed in tribe list, but they do not want to show you the tribal list to prove it. They also want you to prove descendant of federally recognized tribe when they only have 3 tribes out of 200 tribes in the state of Texas.
What are you trying to accomplish?
I am trying to make it easily to find indigenous ancestors by having to be able to type indigenous in the suffix box after the name of the person.
Why? To be able to find our indigenous ancestors in a fan chart or portrait chart and not having to click in each person and clinking in the fact’s column.
What is the challenge or roadblock you are encountering? My fear, that we will assist in dismissing our indigenous ancestors by making it harder to find them in FamilySearch. It makes me unset that it is ok to have a Spaniard with the title of Capitan allow and proudly label next to his name, but like it be for years, the indigenous people are put as not importance. I am wrong feeling this way for that is how the system works today, but it is not fair.
What is your idea? Allow to add indigenous after the name of person in the suffix box.
How would solving this challenge improve your experience?
It is just that being indigenous is just as important as being a captain except that one person is a first-class citizen and the other made into a slave that do not have rights or a saying. I would improve the problem by allowing to add indigenous in the suffix box.
Is it proper? Not by the rules today. But can it be allowed? If the rules are changed or bent? I believe a suffix also defines a person’s honor. And being indigenous is the highest honor there is to humankind.
Please forgive me for I am new at FamilySearch. I do want to thank you FamilySearch, for I have been a better person and happier with my new hobby finding my ancestors in FamilySearch website.
Comments
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Because of the way the world tree is set up - and genealogy in general - your two terms, indigenous and race, won't work properly and I don't support using them in FamilySearch. The vast majority of people in the world are indigenous in that their ancestors have lived in that spot for a thousand years or more. The new world has usurped the word indigenous to mean the native people to AMERICA, not the rest of the world. Second, the word race is also an American invention that doesn't work for the rest of the world. Ethnic strife, including horrible massacres have taken place in the world between two different ethnic groups - who are often of the same race by the US definition. I would rather see African American and Indigenous American labeled in FamilySearch as ethnic groups so that you can apply the same approach to other parts of the world. I ran into a woman whose ancestors were from Alsace-Loraine and had apparently lived there for centuries. They had the surname Mueller. She was asking for more information about her French heritage, and when I pointed out to her that Mueller was not a French surname and that there is a sizable number of German descent residents of the modern regions that used to be Alsace-Loraine, she became rather hostile. French is French and there is nothing else. Hm. I did not respond and let her maintain her fantasy.
Now, what you are asking for in principle is CRITICALLY NEEDED; I do some African American lineage research and find FamilySearch not very helpful at all for this very reason. Ancestry at least has a filter I can apply to restrict my search to African American designated records, which is somewhat of a help, because it highlights some collections which contain ONLY African American records. Ancestry has a similar filter for Native American. Have you tried it?
I just don't propose using the words race or indigenous for general use in FamilySearch because those words don't work in the world setting. We need the same ability to search for German records in Poland, Russian records in Ukraine, Islamic records in the former Yugoslavia, etc.
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Even when there isn't strife or discrimination involved, determining and labeling human groupings is ...fraught and difficult. People regularly confuse language with ethnicity, ethnicity with nationality, nationality with religion, and so on. (And don't even get me started on a name's language versus a person's group identity.) "Race" is another variable in the mess; it has the added complication of being inapplicable or mostly-unknown on the continent that many of FS's users and/or their ancestors are from.
FamilySearch has -- wisely, I think -- mostly stayed out of the fray: users are free to enter grouping information as National Identification, National Origin, Race, or Tribe, or heck, even Physical Description, or if none of those suit, then as a Custom Fact. Perhaps what is needed is a means of searching by these attributes, but it's a complicated question, because the inputs can be so variable: one person may have simply entered a census form's "Indian", another may have used "Native" or "Native American" like he learned in school, while a third may use more current terminology such as "Indigenous" or "First Nations". (Similarly, one person's "cigány" is another's "Roma" or the old Maria Theresia-era euphemisms like "újmagyar": "New Hungarian".)
The more I think about this, the more convinced I become that this topic belongs in the Search category: whatever the method and labeling by which we group people, we want to be able to find those people by those groupings. You can search by "race" in things like U.S. Censuses that have such a field, but you have to come at it from the collection-specific search page, and I don't know of any listing of which collections have this available. And I don't know of any sort of parallel for searching in the family tree rather than in historical records.
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In a record search today, I just noticed this disclaimer.
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