Family History Lexicon

[Luther Tychonievich]

When I started on family history tool development I found that my practical knowledge of how to locate my ancestors left me woefully ill-prepared to discuss the field with others. Months of searching turned up tidbits here and vocabulary there; I though I might share what I've gleaned and hope that others can correct and expand it.


Genealogy is the study of ancestry and the relationship between people.
Family History subsumes genealogy and also studies stories, events, and personalities.
Family Tree Climbing is a pejorative term used to describe people more bent on getting a big tree or one that touches famous people than on getting a tree that reflects reality.


A source is an artefact that sheds some light on the topic under investigation. A source contains information which can serve as evidence supporting or refuting particular conclusions about genealogy or family history. Sometimes people also speak of the claims or assertions of a source as a way of identifying pieces of information or evidence.

It is not uncommon to see people use the word "evidence" to mean "information or evidence of claim or assertion". I personally find this informality confusing.


There is a lot said about evidence. Elizabeth Shown Mills's Evidence Explained is the most-cited text here, and it surprisingly large. For example, on page 824 she defines indirect evidence as "relevant information that does not answer the research question all by itself. Rather, it has to be combined with other information to arrive at an answer to the research question."

From Mills' work and others, I ave developed the following evidence lexicon:

Direct evidence: stated by a source explicitly. Many genealogists only call it "evidence" if it is being used to establish some conclusion; otherwise it is just information. I personally intentionally use "direct evidence" for both cases because "information" is such an overloaded term in computing.

Indirect evidence: derived from direct evidence plus additional context or information (such as historical, cultural, or geographical context or the joint impact of several sources believed to be related to one another).

Precision is different from directness: a source that says "I was born in the 20th century" is direct (albeit secondary), may be very reliable, but is also very imprecise.

Reliability is different from either directness or precision. For example, my grandmother produced many direct, precise, and unreliable records of her birth date; all exactly five years incorrect because she did not want anyone to know her husband was younger than she was.

Primary Information: recorded at or near the time of what it describes.

Secondary Information: recorded later than what it describes. Also sometimes used to mean second-hand information.

Most sources contain primary and secondary direct evidence; e.g., a census provides primary evidence on the location, of the household and who lives within it but is secondary on ages, emigration, and many other details.


Three general data models get referred to on this list with some regularity:

Conclusion model: you store everything you believe in a single data structure, with a set of citations for the whole person.
Persona model: you create a record for each (person, source) pair. Each conclusion person is a collection of these personas ("personas" instead of "personae" is intentional).
Source model: you create a record representing all the information from a single source; each claim may be individually referenced. Each conclusion person refers to a claim in some source for each property it contains.
Evidence model: depending on who is using the term, could mean any of the above or something else altogether. I'm not claiming it should refer to one or another; I'm merely observing it is used pretty freely.

[Andrew Hatchett]

"Family Tree Climbing is a pejorative term used to describe people more bent on getting a big tree or one that touches famous people than on getting a tree that reflects reality."

Not really.. Pat Richley-Erickson (DearMyrtle), one of the more renown genealogist and Blogger, uses that phrase "Happy Tree Climbing" and she certainly isn't interested in having a big tree or one that touches famous people.

What you are describing are known in the circles I run in as namegatherers, treebies, or clickologist- usually all three as in "namegathering treebie clickologist".

;)

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[Tom Wetmore]

Luther,

Great beginning. Basically agree. I've not run into the term "family tree climbing" enough times to have formed any opinion upon it.

Pet peeve (nothing to do with you). Genealogy in the past was strictly limited to mean the discovery of biological ancestors and descendants. In the modern world people seem to believe they have the right to redefine terms to mean whatever they think they should mean; blame it on Humpty Dumpty who famously said, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." As a crusty old f**t I get very amused by "survey" questions such as, "What does genealogy mean to you?" or "What do you think genealogy should mean?" Genealogy means what it means. Look it up in a dictionary if you want to know. Yes the language evolves, but there is a big difference between slow evolution and individual redefinition ad nauseum.

[Andrew Hatchett]

Tom, you and I may disagree on some things but this redefinition thing isn't one of them.

Andy (COF Emeritus) Hatchett

;)

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[Wayne Pearson]

This is really nice to have, Luther; thank you. As I putter with writing libraries and, eventually, software for things genealogical (or do I mean family arboreal?), I often trip up, even in my own head, on what I mean with certain concepts. I'll be taking your list and using it to finally cement some concepts.

I definitely agree with your interpretation of Direct Evidence; if it's "just" information, and not evidence for a conclusion -- if it's somehow inferior in its classification -- then perhaps it shouldn't be in your research at all. Given that, calling all of it direct evidence seems to make sense to me, regardless of how far you've taken it to reach conclusions.

I'd also like to thank you for your posts over the last few months -- they've kept this mailing list active and interesting. 

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  Wayne

[Wayne Pearson]

By this I meant the posts that you've initiated -- of course everyone's comments are what keep things interesting. *:^)

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  Wayne

[Luther Tychonievich]

Andy, you are absolutely right about Myrt using family tree climbing in a positive light. I suppose those I heard use it pejoratively were of a different mind. I've head namegatherers before; the other two are new to me.

Tom, Wayne, thanks for your kind words.

Tom, Andy, I personally would love to see an even more static language where, e.g., "literally" means "of or pertaining to text"… alas, I watch with fear as terms like "geneablogger" help cement the redefinition of "genealogy" in part because there is no family-history-based equivalent phrase in circulation. If only we had stuck with the the old English "folctalu" which spanned everything from folk tales to the chain of progenitors; or "ancestor" (one who goes before) or "pedigree" (literally "crane's foot," referring to the branching symbol drawn by the Greeks next to progeny in text).


I just had a fascinating conversation with a genealogist about evidence vs information expressing her frustration with how the developers confuse the two. Grossly over-generalizing, her alternative definition was

Evidence only exists in the context of an argument supporting a conclusion. If that argument is of the form "the sources state that this is true" then you are using direct evidence. If it is of any more complicated form then you are using indirect evidence. If you don't have such an argument you just have information.

This is probably the most common non-techie usage; I've not seen developers use it much probably both because of the overloaded meaning of "information" and because from a data model standpoint what is is whether some argument is using it or not.


Two more terms I've not seen used in the wold much but that I find personally useful in my own thinking about tools and workflow:

Top-Down: you start with a goal or question, seek out information, analyze evidence, and create an argument for a particular answer to that question.
Bottom-Up: you collect what information you can find without much focus and then piece it together however it fits to see what it suggests.

The end result of both processes is the same (information used as evidence in arguments supporting conclusions).

[Tom Wetmore]

Luther said: I just had a fascinating conversation with a genealogist about evidence vs information expressing her frustration with how the developers confuse the two. Grossly over-generalizing, her alternative definition was

Evidence only exists in the context of an argument supporting a conclusion. If that argument is of the form "the sources state that this is true" then you are using direct evidence. If it is of any more complicated form then you are using indirect evidence. If you don't have such an argument you just have information.

 

I've heard this argument many times and I agree with it. It is, in my mind, however, a rather pedantic argument. Information becomes evidence when we use it to support conclusions. True. But most of the genealogical information we collect, I believe, is in the hope that we will eventually use it to support our conclusions. It's part of the bottup-up attack that you mentioned later. So I think of the information I collect as "potential evidence" and for me, sloppy with terminology as anyone else, that's good enough to loosely call it evidence. If that frustrates Genealogists I apologize. And this from the guy who just ranted and raved about how others use the term genealogy! I know my credibility is low.

[Tom Wetmore]

Another point I should have said in the last.

As some of you know, I am a strong advocate of the persona (and corresponding event) records as a way to record information/evidence extracted directly from sources. When personas are grouped into conclusions they are clearly evidence. When they are still stand-alone records they are "just" information. When pushing good research methods, which the persona is excellent for, one must stress primarily how conclusions are drawn from evidence, and how personas represent that evidence and higher level person records represent the conclusions. This seems trivial to me and to many others, but it seems to cause some consternation among family historians who are deeply ingrained with the types of thinking that our conclusion-only systems of today cause. If we complicate matters by adding in the distinction between which personas are evidence and which are just information, I think we might confuse the issue even more. We can put it in the fine print somewhere.