I see stuff like this that someone has typed into as a note. What does it mean?
!#21-v6-p270; !dau & coh; w/d 10 Nov 1767, w/p 20 Mar 1771; `Duchess of Hamilton; ^marr-L1> St George Hanover Square;
Is this just garbage?
Answers
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The Community was recently able to decipher a similar bit of gibberish as a latitude and longitude (https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/538562#Comment_538562), so perhaps with a bit more context (such as the PID where this is found), we could do likewise here.
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That series looks like it could be the kind of abbreviated info that can be found in older printed genealogical books.
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Anne Spencer ID: LCJT-GGG collaborate comments entered by mfunit2710871.
It seems like some data pasted out of gencom database or some other system.
Entering this sort of garbage doesn't add to the communication process, might be meaningful to some people in the know but doesn't work with the uninitiated.
I see a lot of this in profiles I'm interested in and are tempted to just delete it, but restrain myself from doing so.
It's very tempting to just cut and paste it seems, if you can't be bothered to communicated in plane text why bother(?).
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Have you tried communicating with the contributor who entered the info? He or she may have the book in question and be able to share more details. Such books usually have a key (at the front or back) explaining what any symbols or abbreviations mean.
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Well, the note in question was last changed a decade ago, so trying to contact the contributor is unlikely to be fruitful, but the dating does support Áine's guess that it probably comes from a genealogical publication of some sort. My suspicion is that it's from a "noble families of __"-type compilation; space was often at a premium in those, so they tend to be full of abbreviations and symbols. The beginning of the note ("21-v6-p270") implies a multi-volume work.
I'm not seeing any reference to 1767 in a quick poke at Anne Spencer online, so I don't know what "w/d" is supposed to be. (My first guess was "widowed", but the tree on FS has the death dates of her husbands as 1743 and 1780.)
I also can't figure out why there's a date two weeks after the death date assigned to her, and what "w/p" before it is supposed to mean.
Until/unless you or someone tracks down those two dates, I wouldn't remove the note. It's not in anyone's way or anything.
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"w/d" is "will dated" and is the date the will was written and witnessed. "w/p" is "will proved" and is the date the will was proved (verified) in a probate court after the death.
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Thanks for everybody's comments.
Certainly takes a lot of interpreting, retrospectively, to begin to make sense of it.
Would have been a lot easier to provide a comment referencing the publication it came from so others could crosscheck the facts.
Wouldn't remove it now, Julie, as it's a good example of not being helpful and reinforces my desire to make sure to provide meaningful input.
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! was a notation used in PAF to indicate a note.
When I used a GEDCOM file to transfer everything from PAF for Mac to Reunion years ago, all the notes for people in Reunion ended up looking like this:
I have never got around to going to every note in that database and removing all the !.
I did a few GEDCOM transfers from Reunion to New Family Search and noticed that notes such as this were brought over as notes into NFS and when NFS was converted to Family Tree, those notes went along automatically, including the !.
Looking through the change log, the note in question was added April 2013 without a contributor which means it was an import from an older database. Even with the late date, I suspect that was probably New Family Search. The auto generated title which just duplicated the first several characters of the note is also typical of the NFS to Family Tree import process.
So what you are seeing is almost certain to be a private note using someone's personal code (or a notation from a book as suggested above) that he entered into PAF or something similar and probably didn't even realize when using a GEDCOM to upload information to New Family Search that the note was included. That person may not even ever have looked at Family Tree.
The first part of the note, #21-v6-p270, probably means that the rest of the information is found on page 270 of volume 6 of the book which is the 21st book listed as a source in the person's PAF or other database. Likely that program would substitute #21 with the actual title in any reports printed out by that program.
Such ancient flotsam and jetsam from old databases can sometimes be mined for useful information but in situations like this where the actual title to book #21 is likely lost forever, their usefulness is limited.
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I can think of several explanations (or excuses) for the highly-abbreviated text. It may have been in the source publication in this form, and the contributor didn't have access to anything but the page itself and thus couldn't decode it; or the note may originally have been entered in another system with a length limit on profile notes.
Obscure as it is, the note has served a purpose: thanks to YColeman's comment, we know there's a will to be tracked down.
(It never ceases to amaze me what this community can do, given half a chance.)
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The notes appear to be referring to Anne Spencer, of Rendlesham, see
The book reference appears to be
G.E. Cokayne; with Vicary Gibbs, H.A. Doubleday, Geoffrey H. White, Duncan Warrand and Lord Howard de Walden, editors, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant, new ed., 13 volumes in 14 (1910-1959; reprint in 6 volumes, Gloucester, U.K.: Alan Sutton Publishing, 2000), volume VI, page 270. Hereinafter cited as The Complete Peerage.
This is available www.familysearch.org/library/books/idviewer/483528/282 (page 270, digital page 282 and you need to be signed in)
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And there goes Maureen, proving my point: give this Community half a chance, and they'll decode even the most complete gibberish you've found. :-)
Relevant bits from husband's entry:
He m., 3rdly, 21 Aug.(d) 1737, at St. Geo., Han. Sq., Anne (a fortune of L70,000), da. and coh. of Edward SPENCER, of Rendlesham, Suffolk. [...] She d. 9 Mar. 1771. Will dat. 10 Nov. 1767, pr. 20 Mar. 1771, directing her burial to be at Easton afsd.
(d) Scots Peerage says 23 July. V.G.
I cannot find a list of abbreviations anywhere in volume VI. Clearly, m. is "married", d. is "died", da. is "daughter", and dat. is "dated"; pr. is either "proved" or "probated", and afsd. is "aforesaid", but I don't offhand know what coh. is, nor what V.G. (at the end of the footnote) refers to.
Ah: a quick online search reveals that coh. is "coheir(ess)", whatever that means. Nothing on V.G.; it's not the initials of any of the authors mentioned at the beginning of the volume.
FS has a bunch of probate records from Suffolk (https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/results?count=20&placeId=1927855&query=%2Bplace%3A%22England%2C%20Suffolk%22%20%2Bsubject%3Aprobate), but they're all cameras-with-keys (FSC/AL) for me.
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Coheir/coheiress means that two or more people jointly received an inheritance. I've seen it more often used with females than with males.
V.G. is probably Vicary Gibbs one of the authors of the book that @MaureenE123 found as the reference and is probably just his note in contrast to the other information listed about her.
Great detecting everyone!
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It looks like an old DOS computer format for a fill. Dos can be accessed on most desktops and laptops. However, I do not think any web-based files have access to it anymore. I have not accessed DOS in the last 2 or 3 years and only in Windows 10.
Michael
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