Verify person's occupation place
In verifying place names, quite often an occupation is listed. Skip that or put a place where the person's residence was around that time?
Answers
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I like to put occupation followed by street address (in parentheses) in the Description of Residence line. Date, then City / State in place. Typically good info for the person on the census, what their job was, where they specifically lived, and good city/state at one specific time.
Apparently, it is OK to put residential address ahead of the city/state on the place of residence line, but I feel that disturbs the Standard Place preferred location that I believe helps the algorithms find better sources.
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@Jack Hern said
Apparently, it is OK to put residential address ahead of the city/state on the place of residence line, but I feel that disturbs the Standard Place preferred location that I believe helps the algorithms find better sources.
As I understand it, any algorithms are driven from the Standard Placename and not from the Displayed Placename. So there shouldn't be any disturbance if there is an address ahead of the settlement name in the Display name.
Having said that, sticking an address in front of the settlement name can make it tricky to get the right name in the Standard Placename - I do wonder how well the system would process a Display name of Southampton Row, London, England. It might be impossible to standardise on the correct name - in which case, I'd sacrifice the address. It all depends.
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To answer the original question, I would have thought that the correct course of action is to skip any place that contains an incorrect word such as an occupation. Verify Places is supposed to be just about standardising place names, and that excludes altering someone's research by changing the place that they entered. Anything further is conducting your own research on that profile, which might be fraught.
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This situation is provided for in the routine:
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@Gordon Collett - thank you. Oh dear, I confess that I'd never noticed that "Not A Place" flag - I suspect because my eye starts at one point and drops down the screen and I'd expect any "conclusion" buttons (such as "Not A Place") to be down at the bottom alongside "Skip".
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Now that you mention it, having that flag down by Skip does seem like a much better place since neither you nor @MaryAnneReynoldsSmith noticed it.
They also need to change the Skip button to read "I can't tell" and add another button "No one will ever be able to tell without in depth research" for situations such as the one that I used for my illustration.
I did go to that profile and the single source on the profile that provided the birth information was a Social Security profile that gave most recent residence of Wren, Jefferson, Georgia, (whoever attached the source did not pull over the residence) and there are census hints that if they really are for the same person (and with so little information who can tell?) give a birth place of Georgia so it probably is Jefferson, Georgia, but we're not supposed to do those kinds of guesses.
How many times will Bessie Mae be skipped in this routine before someone actually does research on her? Or I wonder if the routine keeps count and if, for example, an entry gets skipped three times or even once is never presented again?
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I took 5 minutes to look up Bessie Mae's parents on the 1930 Census which indicates daughter named Bessie M Lane (alternate name) aged 9 born in Georgia USA. This is a perfect example of why Verify Places requires a little research of known family facts before casually skipping over a little girl's birthplace
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@maryellenstevensbarnes1 - yes and no.
If you are committing to researching the person behind the profile - at least as far as that particular event goes - then that sort of thing is absolutely fine and takes FS FamilyTree forward.
However, so far as I understand, that is not what Verify Places is about. It's supposed to be, IIRC, a simple way of filling in the gaps where, for reasons unknown, there is no Standardized Placename. One of its attractions is its simplicity and I am very wary of anything that suggests to a user that they should be going beyond the details that are visible on the VP screen.
So I would not advocate to any user of Verify Places that they do research beyond the VP screen. Let them just use the facility as it was intended, and skip an entry such as Bessie Mae.
People who can research her, don't need me suggesting that they do so.
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@Adrian Bruce1 Then why does the VP offer the option of fixing the person page? Also, it seems to me that accuracy for that specific person is critical; ie "Jefferson" is a city in more than one state and checking the person page may offer clues that aren't available on VP. By the way, I'm the first to admit that I'm very old-fashioned (emphasis on old ) and that I don't always understand all the technology 😎
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@maryellenstevensbarnes1 - I suspect that there is probably a spectrum of options with different degrees of difficulty and therefore different degrees of risk.
- The VP screen gives other life events that may offer an answer which "Jefferson" it is.
- It's also possible to navigate to the person's profile page to get what might be a more comprehensive list of clues (eg birthplaces of siblings)
- At the most sophisticated end, one might do further research, such as finding other sources that give us the answer.
If someone is a complete beginner who wants to help by using VP, I would only ever suggest that they do option 1.
More experienced users of VP and FS FamilyTree as a whole will probably find option 2 for themselves and I don't have any problem with that - I'd never, however, run the risk of confusing a beginner by mentioning it myself.
If anyone wants to do option 3, fine, but they need to understand that is no longer a simple 5 minute help but full scale research with added risks from not understanding the family or the area.
I remain wary of encouraging VP contributors to go beyond what they are comfortable with. Anyone who is comfortable with such extended research doesn't need me to encourage them!
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