British Colony America

DAC515

I am finally to the point I am researching family from early 1700's/1750's and have noticed the city/counties are the same but the country listed is "British Colony America". Do I start listing this as the country of birth or do I continue with USA?

Gail Swihart Watson

@DAC515 You should also be noticing that many states didn't exist either. State and county boundaries before and during the Revolution were very different and huge changes took place by 1800. Lots of counties existed before their final states were established.

Adrian Bruce1

Basically, I suggest that you have 3 major choices:

• Use the current country of "United States" - depending on the individual settlement / county, that could get complicated when comparing to the sources if the counties and states / colonies changed a lot. And I've always thought it makes no sense to say the equivalent of "George Washington was born in 1732 in the United States. He later played a crucial part in the creation of the United States". Hmm. At birth?
• Use the standardised name that's date-appropriate - e.g. "Virginia, British Colonial America". My objection to this is that BCA is a concoction by FamilySearch - it did not exist at the time.
• Use the standardised name that's date-appropriate for the Standard Place but then alter the Display name to just read "Virginia" (or whatever), keeping "Virginia" linked to the Standard Place of "Virginia, British Colonial America" - it's OK, the whole point of the system is to allow Display and Standard Places to differ. This is what I'd do if I had any pre-1776 rellies and it's similar to what I do for early Canada etc. The point for me is that if I read Wikipedia, there is no over-arching jurisdiction - the colony just reports to London, so why create an over-arching jurisdiction? (i.e. why create BCA?)

And if you get outside the Thirteen Colonies, you may find yourself using "New France" and "Viceroyalty of New Spain" - those were real entities (unlike British Colonial America) with a Governor-General or whatever, so I'd be happy to use those.

Have a think, have a play with the possibilities - you can't break anything (famous last words!)

Julia Szent-Györgyi

It's up to you, but the USA didn't exist yet back then.

Gail Swihart Watson

I believe the whole question of which place names to use is very wibbly wobbly. I will generally use historically correct place names, but if that becomes totally meaningless because the town, province and empire no longer exist with those historic names, then for clarity I use the modern location names. This could impact searching for sources, and I understand that.

Adrian Bruce1

You raise a good point @Gail Swihart Watson - that of Searching if you want to just press the Search button without doing any refinement. It's no use me being pedantic over place-names and using the contemporary name if the data has been indexed with the present-day name. Arguably it shouldn't be but...

Gail Swihart Watson

Adrian Bruce1 You are correct that clicking the search button without doing any refinement is not normally a successful exercise. I occasionally win the lottery, but yes, serious researchers need to fully understand the history of the place and to conduct a series of searches and either use the filters for different place name values or type different values in the search fields. Same with looking for non-indexed images in the catalog.

DAC515

Thank you for your help, it has given me great ideas to work with.

BraydenGraves

Personally, I use British Colonial America. I could go into a bunch of reasons on why that would be more correct, which do exist, but the reality is that people marking it as part of a government that didn't even exist yet is a pet peeve of mine, and I change it to BCA whenever I see US used before 1776. The same goes for people marking England as the UK before 1801.