Tidy up webpages by merging and economizing information displayed
Hello
It would be infinitely more useful to users if in "Events" the "Residence" was attached to the Event itself and for it not to appear separately and unconnected as it does currently.
To have the "residence" appear separately with no obvious connection to any Event such as a Census, or a Marriage etc and with no date or other clues, is not helpful.
e.g Residence "High Street" How many High Streets are there in the UK and the World?
Also to include and repeat "Baptism" twice in Events when it is (or should be) perfectly visible a mere inches above on the same page in Vitals, is a waste of space on the persons webpage.
"Alternative names" could be grouped together under one heading instead of separately.
All about "at a glance" gleaning of all the information we need to see instantly without laborious deeper searching.
All the best
Comments
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@FrancisFrench said:
It would be infinitely more useful to users if in "Events" the "Residence" was attached to the Event itself and for it not to appear separately and unconnected as it does currently.
To have the "residence" appear separately with no obvious connection to any Event such as a Census, or a Marriage etc and with no date or other clues, is not helpful.
I think what you're look for here is source tagging. A residence is certainly an Event (it occurred at a place at a time or timespan). The usual connection between a Census and a Residence is that the census record is a Source (a historical document that provides genealogical information). The connection between a Source and an Event is called source tagging.
For example, a person may have lived in Los Angeles in 1940, as documented in the 1940 US Census. The best practice in this case would be to have a Residence event for that person with the date 1940 and the place Los Angeles, California. There would also be a 1940 US Census record attached to the person as a Source. Finally, that particular Residence event would be tagged to that source. The result would nicely connect the Residence to the Source record that documents that residence, looking something like this:
Also to include and repeat "Baptism" twice in Events when it is (or should be) perfectly visible a mere inches above on the same page in Vitals, is a waste of space on the persons webpage.
I'm not sure what you're describing here, unless a person actually has two Baptism events connected to them. In that case, you could do research to determine if both actually occurred (unlikely) and remove the one that does not apply.
Or perhaps you are referring to the confusion between Christening and Baptism. That has been discussed many times here. It's definitely a problem, but the solution is not obvious. See, for example, this discussion: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/93268/christening-and-baptism
"Alternative names" could be grouped together under one heading instead of separately.
That seems to be how it works already -- here's an example of how alternate names are grouped together under the heading "Alternate Names":
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Well, some people are going to add anything the Source Linker gives them to Other Info. Getting the linker to behave more intelligently with what it allows to be added during linking is apparently too difficult, and even if they improved it, we still have a decade's worth of polluted profiles. The good news is that there's nothing stopping you from cleaning up yourself.
If you see the same information in both christening field and baptism custom event, delete the custom event. If the info is only in a Custom Event, enter it into the Christening field, then delete it the Custom Event.
A residence that lists only a street without a city or date (probably due to weird indexing, like with English censuses): delete it. The information is still in the source, and if somebody thinks the street to include in the the regular Residency entry that gets added, they can manually add it if they want. Same with that weird 1935 "Same Place" residence that gets added from 1940 US Censuses. Multiple Residence entries with the same dates and cities because somebody inevitably imported a GEDCOM of duplicates and then merged it keeping both? Delete them.
Leftover crud that no longer applies because it was from a source for a different person that has already been detached removed but the editor didn't remember to clean up the residue? Someone for whatever baffling reason added a Find a Grave memorial numbers, draft registrations, pensions, pension payments, obituaries, marriage registrations, and all that other inessential detritus that is just fine to have on the Sources page but doesn't warrant being added as big ugly clunky Custom Events, anybody can clean that stuff up.
Along with at least three of the Alternate Name entries above. Alternate names weren't intended for listing every typo and misspelling ever found, initials, every possible permutation of name order, and a repeat of their actual name.
Or perhaps you are referring to the confusion between Christening and Baptism. That has been discussed many times here. It's definitely a problem, but the solution is not obvious.
No, the solution is obvious: add the information to the Christening field during linking and don't offer to add it as a Custom Event. Info from sources labeled as "baptism" not getting propagated to the Christening field isn't an intentional design based in some deep respect the subtle distinction in meaning between two words most people consider interchangeable, and if any evidence is needed for that: even though the information isn't added to the box, a "Baptism" source do automatically tagged as a christening source when linked. It's just poor functionality.
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@FrancisFrench , Excellent suggestions and reminders to all of us users of Family Tree of the need to be good housekeepers. I hope that as you have the opportunity to teach others about Family Tree and good practices there that you take the time to teach these principals (except for your comment about Alternate Names which falls in a different category).
However, I don't think there is any way the program can be changed to accomplish what you would like to see other than popping up reminders, kind of like my mother's constant refrain of "Hang up you coat!"
My suspicion is that the situations you are referring to are primarily due to users who spend most of their time in lists of Hints and Tasks working to get all of those attached but leave it for others to go a person's Detail page and tidy up after them. These users also seem to always move all information in a source to the detail page while in the source linker without checking to see if that information is already on the profile.
For example, in a record collection I work in frequently the indexing resulted having birth/christening records show the residence as a single word (just the farm name) on only the mother's copy of the record. The dates of the birth and christening are only on the child's copy of the record. Also, there are usually two copies of the birth/christening record for each child (one from the priest's parish register and one from the deacon's duplicate copy of the register).
So, if a family had ten children and other users working off their Tasks lists have attached all twenty birth/christening records, which I do appreciate because that saved me an hour of work, the mother will now have twenty residence entries that are a single word, because that is all the source had, without dates, because her source did not have any dates. That is all the source linker can do because the source linker can only add information that is in the source.
Now when I come to that record, I just go to work cleaning it up.
There are two ways to go about this tidying:
1) I can go on the theory that if someone wants to know where a family lived when a child was born they can just go to the child and check the child's birthplace. In this case, I would just delete all 20 residences with the view they don't add much to the mother's profile.
2) I can delete duplicate residences and cut the list down to the two or three different places the family actually lived, correct any misspelled place name, expand it from the single word to the full place name, examine the births of all the children, all the census records, and any other information on her profile and put an approximate date range on the residence such as "from about (birth year of first child born there) to about (birth year of last child born there)."
The program can not and should not make this decision for me, do this research for me, or make these changes for me.
It is the same with baptisms which are actually christening. The source linker can only look at the indexed record to see what type of event category has been placed on it. Baptisms are ranked as a type event that can occur multiple times so the source linker does not check for duplicate information and if there are two sources for the same baptism, both can be added via the source linker. It is up to the user to notice that these are christenings that may already be on a person's detail page and not, when in the source linker, add them to the page. But if one user does add both of these then it is up to another user to record the information in the Christening spot if needed and to delete the two baptism events. This should also be a user decision, not a program decision.
Regarding Alternate Names, it would save a little space to leave off the "Alternate Name" title over each alternate name. But then that section would clash in appearance with the rest of the page. They can't be compressed into a simple list because each name would still need a label for what type of name it is and the ability to view the reason statement for it.
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@FrancisFrench said
" ... It would be infinitely more useful to users if in "Events" the "Residence" was attached to the Event itself and for it not to appear separately and unconnected as it does currently. ... "
Just to make it clear (and apologies if anyone thinks it already is) that many of us regard Residence as a separate event under Other Information / Events. So if we get a (UK) census event that takes place at the person's residence, then we could create a census event and a residence event. In that particular case, you might argue that it's just duplicating the place in question. However, there are other events - for instance signing up to join the military - which take place at (say) the recruiting depot but the document also lists the person's residence (and yes, you may need to consult the image to read the residence). I'd record both the recruiting event at that place and also a residence event at the place of residence.
The converse of this is when an over-enthusiastic creation and / or indexing of a placename held against a burial fact results in someone being described as being resident in the graveyard. Err - yes, but I don't think that's what it means... So a little thought is always necessary because actually, it's sometimes quite tricky to sort things out.
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Good points that needed clarification.
I would say that I probably would think that I would expect a residence to nearly always have a time span.
If I had a single census record for a person and no other information, I would just create a census event and place for that one day.
If I had a lot of information on a person, I would probably put a single residence entry per time span and still have multiple important events that occurred during that timespan with date and place on the day they occurred even if the place for that event was the same as the residence.
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Taking the specific issue of Residence, the problem here can largely be traced back to the way the residence (at the time of the event) has been indexed, and subsequently the source linking process making it possible to carry the item(s) across the the Other Information section of the Details page.
I admit it is sometimes usually helpful to find the residence has been indexed - but not when (as mentioned in the original post) something like "High Street" has been indexed, which immediately shows as needing standardizing if carried over to the Details page. Worse still, there are often two, separate pieces of data headed Residence in a source, which causes further clutter in the Other Information section.
Whilst I find it difficult to suggest not including Residence data in indexing projects, they can very often (literally) prove to be a waste of space once appearing under Other Information: through being too vague (e.g. "England"), too "centred" (e.g. "High Street") or just completely wrong (e.g. where the parish of a christening is shown as the "Residence" when another place is shown in the original document).
Briefly, on the point raised on Baptisms occurring twice as a Custom Event, this can happen when a baptism is carried over from two different sources. The answer here is to delete the piece with the lesser amount of detail (or wrong detail, in the example I have just encountered).
As suggested, we can carry out our own housekeeping to some extent.
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I feel I must bring up (again) that it's not the same everywhere. The UK census records where the person slept the night before. The US census generally records the person's usual place of residence. IOW I wouldn't see a need to document residence separately from census.
If my father was out of state on business when the census enumerator came by, my mother would still have given his name as resident and HOH. In the unlikely event that I live to see the release of the 1970 US census, I'm sure I will see my name enumerated with my parents (in one state) while I was away at uni in a different state.
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