If a person is listed as a 'nun' in their job description, can I list them as 'female'?
I realize the only listed exception to job description is 'housewife', but I feel nun is equally gender specific unlike terms such as 'nurse' 'waiter', ect.
Answers
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The only exception is for housewife. Was she female? Probably, but we do not make assumptions about anything.
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What about 'Sister' or 'Miss'? Sometimes it seems stupid not to categorize them as Females. What does "or other evidence in the language" mean?
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Sister is a lot like Rev.; it's historically female, but not specific enough for FS. Rev. Is the same. If it says Sister Mary Frances, but without a sex indicator, it's left blank. The researcer can see that "Oh, my 2x great-aunt was a nun." by the indication of Sister.
Miss/Ms/Mr are both a sex indicator and other evidence in the language. Other evidence would be bride, groom, Mary Smith, daughter of Nick Smith, and for the purpose of Nats, Joe Jones' witness, Ben Doe, states during his deposition that he has worked with him (Joe) for 5 years.0 -
I would consider "sister" (and "brother", "father", "mother") to be "evidence in the language". Ditto for "housewife" — but of course not for "housekeeper" or "homemaker", which is I think why FS took so much convincing on "housewife": they were afraid people would conflate the terms, since they are equivalent in other aspects.
It's complicated, and slippery, especially once you get into occupations. Unlike relationship terms, the masculine form of many occupations can apply to either sex: an actor can be male or female, despite the existence of "actress" for the latter. However, there are some occupations, including "monk" and "nun", where no such ambiguity exists, neither historically nor modernly, and I think we should be able to use those as "evidence in the language". I don't expect FS to come up with a list (talk about slippery slopes!), but I think these types of words are covered in the instructions as currently phrased.
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Ditto @Julia Szent-Györgyi Also I believe that Surnames for Catholic nuns should be marked <blank> because when females took their vows they often took names other than their birth/nee names or "legal" names - example Sister Mary Therese should be Given name: Mary Therese with Surname: <blank>. I hope I said this correctly so as not to offend anyone. I leave it to researchers to find other evidence in linking these persons to any particular family 😎
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It took a lengthy discussion over several days just to get housewife and that discussion happened in late 2022 or early 2023; 8/9 years after I started indexing. Don't hold your breath for anything else.
Catholic nuns, in my experience, have never had surnames. There's the birth name, like Mary Jones, but if it's only Sister Mary Agnes, then there's no surname. If it's something like Mary Jones (aka Sister Mary Agnes), then it's indexed as Mary or Mary Agnes Jones without the sex indicator unless the sex is elsewhere on the document.3 -
For Catholic religious orders, if a person is named "Sister" or they are described by the order's document as a "Nun", then, by definition they are female.
Catholic Orders do not have community members who are presenting as male and having either of these titles.
Hope this helps.
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Just take this as my personal opinion but I've never seen the value (for genealogical purposes) of indexing an entry as Male / Female. I never use it to search on so it's wasted data as far as I am concerned. (Yes, there are ambiguous names like "Kim" but I don't trust enumerators etc to always get it right so even there I'll just plough through all the "Kim" entries.) . End of personal views!
NB - I am not suggesting anyone ignores the indexing rules!
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Catholic orders is an outside source, something FS does not use.
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I am not clear on what you mean.
Are not all sources used by FamilySearch actually “outside sources”. Perhaps I am not fully understanding your what you mean.0 -
Outside sources are things like Google, Wikipedia, church records (if they are available on the internets), other genealogical sites, and Nunnery Orders. FS indexes on the WYSIWYG concept; What You See Is What You Get. Now you and I may know that Sister is female, Joshua is male. In FS, we do not assume anything, including that of Sister or male. If it's not indicated, either by the color portion or by language like wife, Mr., groom, etc., the sex is not indexed. Was she female? Yes. You and I know that, but for the purpose of indexing, there needs to be an indicator for Sister Mary Agnes to be indexed as female.
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Quoth erutherford: "there needs to be an indicator for Sister Mary Agnes to be indexed as female."
Yes, and the word "Sister" is exactly that: an indicator that Mary Agnes is female.
But I agree with Adrian that indexes could just as well skip all sex/gender fields. They're almost never actually useful.
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Do you even index Nats or are they boring to you like City Directories?
And if you'll excuse me, I have WWII discharges to index. Those are fun.-1 -
I mostly index in Hungarian, so no, I haven't actually done one of these "index everything" naturalizations. I've just been looking at the shared batches. (When a project keeps coming up here in the Community, I sometimes end up doing a batch or two, but I haven't done so with naturalizations in the past few months.)
(The same "what constitutes evidence in the language?" question comes up for the Hungarian project, too, and it's complicated by the fact that grammatically, Hungarian is genderless — it doesn't even have gendered pronouns.)
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This answered questions I didn't even think to ask, thanks guys!
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