Can I use the term tailor to indicate MALE?
NY Naturalization Records. The Indexer had marked the Petition for Naturalization as a duplicate of Declaration of Intention. I changed that and am indexing the info. Can I use the term tailor to indicate MALE? Or should I just mark it blank? See image 2.
https://www.familysearch.org/indexing/batch/cb1de684-6139-42dd-b7f4-cac1f3b4b04a
Answers
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We don't use occupations to determine gender. What we use to determine gender for documents like Image 2 is Line 5, I am ___ married and the name of my wife or husband is ___. If either the wife or husband is marked out, like it is on Image 2, you will mark the corresponding Sex. In this case, "husband" has been typed over. The name of his wife is Anna, so his Sex is Male.
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It depends if the occupation is gender specific, e.g., salesman, paper boy, housewife, maid.
If neither wife/husband had been marked out, the Sex field would be left blank.
Note: To avoid confusion--the last sentence of erutherford's post--we don't use the name of the spouse to determine the gender either.
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Although I have never agreed with this, we are not supposed to use occupation to determine gender unless there is a project instruction or field help for the specific project that tells us to do so. There has been one project where I recall that instruction - the Australia census records.
I suppose Tailor is a good example of why we don't use occupations to determine gender. As early as 1770, young girls were allowed to become apprentice tailors.
I have no reference for this ruling, other than my email disagreements with FamilySearch from a decade ago when I tried to argue that words like seamstress, salesman, actress, etc were gender specific terms. They pointed me to occupations like fireman, policeman, postman, paper boy, etc. where women held those titles for years, prior to the more current use the gender neutral terms: police officer, fire fighter, postal worker, and paper carrier.
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I've done hundreds of ship's crews lists where we were told not to enter the sex when it said "Seamen" at the top of the list on the image.
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Occupations like paperboy, salesman, fireman, actress, etc. should be allowed to be an indication of gender. Occupations like tailor, baker or architect are too ambiguous.
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No occupations are allowed to determine gender, unless the project instruction says to do so.
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