US, Michigan—Naturalization Records, 1887–1943 [MQFC-VDX] Previously in this forum,

Lisa Kay Horlacher

I was advised that if the principal refers to "his wife" I could mark his sex as Male. However, in the first sample, the term "my wife" is used but no sex is marked in the field. So following the PI's, I will mark it blank, correct?

https://www.familysearch.org/indexing/batch/7819fb2e-d9d0-4d48-a896-99c29fd44298

erutherford

From the Sex Field Help:

Index the sex only if it was specifically recorded or you can tell what it was from relationship terms, such as "son" or "daughter," titles or terms, or other evidence in the language.

"Wife", "husband", "he" and "she" are also included in the terms. You will index the sex on both images as Male. If the wife husband part of the DEC was not crossed out (giving you the sex of the spouse), leaving you with {wife husband} and {she he}, then you would index it as Blank.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

<nitpicker mode on> Technically, it's not the language that tells us that a person with a wife is male. That's cultural, not linguistic. In "his wife", it's the "his" that reveals the sex. There is no equivalent linguistic clue in "my wife". </nitpick>

In the long run, how you index the sex is largely immaterial. I don't think I've ever used that field in a search, and the hinting system is certainly well-trained to ignore it, given the huge numbers of index entries where the principal's sex is Exactly Wrong. (On the Hungarian church book indexes, my theory is that they ran the translation algorithm once too often.)

erutherford

Except that the DEC doesn't contain the words "his wife". The closest any document comes is "my wife is", and that was found on older DEC's and PETs. The question on the DEC is "I am ____ married; the name of my {wife husband} is ___ and {she he} was born at ___". On this statement in both images, the person typing the document has crossed out "husband" and "he", leaving "wife" and "she." These are the indicators that say the applicant is a Male. These DECs replaced the one that had the blanket "my wife is" that was on naturalization document before the passage of The Cable Act of 1922 (and later, the Equal Nationality Act and the Nationality Act).