Handling Uncertain Place Names

RootsMagic
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In a certain sense, this message is more about “how to do genealogy” than it is about “how to use RM”. But I think there is enough connection to “how to use RM” to post it here.

I’m not very comfortable with what genealogical standards there seem to be about how to enter uncertain data. For the purposes of this message, I will focus on place data. For example, how do I enter a birth place for someone where it seems likely but not certain that they were born in Sevier County, Tennessee?

Here is what I have been doing for many years, and I don’t defend it as following any standards or as even being a good system for my own use. But I had to do something. If I have strong evidence that someone was born in Sevier County, Tennessee, then I enter it as Sevier County, Tennessee.

I don’t enter the country when the country is the United States of America because so much of my focus is on printed reports and I think that repeating USA or United States or anything like that over and over again is a terrible thing to do to a printed report. I would very much prefer to include the country in my database, but not print it in reports when it is the United States. But that’s hard to do. And for reasons that I have ranted about many times before, I do include the word County as appropriate. That follows some standards but it does not follow the most common standard.

If I have strong evidence that someone was born in Tennessee but I only have weak evidence or circumstantial evidence that they were born Sevier County, I enter it as [Sevier County], Tennessee. If I only have weak evidence or circumstantial evidence for both the county and the state, then I enter it as [Sevier County], [Tennessee]. In other words, square brackets as my indicator of uncertainty.

I would like to move away from the square brackets towards something more standard or at least to something more conventional. But to what? I ran across a style guide by Mary H. Clawson that suggests only including information in the place name field for which there is strong evidence, and putting everything else including a discussion of the evidence in the note for the fact. I really like that idea. And indeed in reviewing some of my data, I actually have been doing that to a certain extent without realizing I was following Ms. Clawson’s style guide.

But there is a problem. Namely, not all genealogy software includes notes for each fact. When I first started doing genealogy, the only note that was supported by the software I was using was a note for the general person. And I received GEDCOM at that time from several experienced and expert researchers that included extensive notes as one big general person note. Most genealogy software for the desktop these days does seem to support notes for each fact. But FamilySearch does not, and that’s a big roadblock to this kind of approach. And I even find Ancestry iffy because notes in RM do not transfer very cleanly at all to notes in Ancestry.

So what to do? I’m genuinely interested in serious suggestions. The RM connection is that I want anything I do in RM to transfer reliably to other software. The strange thing I’m doing right now with the square brackets actually sort of does transfer ok, although I’m sure anyone receiving data from me with the square brackets would be very unhappy with it.

That’s really the end of my already too long note, but I though I will add an appendix of a couple of examples of how difficult this problem can be.

My fifth great grandfather Peter Bryan founded our Bryan family in Sevier County, Tennessee when he moved there in 1790 after having received a land grant there as a reward for his service in the Revolutionary War. My grandfather Emmert Bryan was born in Sevier County in 1898 and he was raised there on a farm that had been in the Bryan family ever since Peter Bryan. I have seen the farm. I have walked the land. And it was still in the hands of the Bryan family until Emmert’s grandmother died in 1946.

Except that I really didn’t have any direct evidence that Emmert was born in Sevier County. He was born before Tennessee or Sevier County had birth certificates or any other official birth records. All I knew for sure was that the family was enumerated in Sevier County in the 1900 census with Emmert listed as son, male, 2 years old and that the land had been in the Bryan family since 1790.

So I was very surprised to discover just a few years ago that Emmert had what is called a Delayed Birth Certificate that was issued in 1955 that says he was born in Jefferson County, Tennessee. The Bryan land in Sevier County is very close to the Jefferson County line and Emmert’s mother was from Jefferson County. So she must of gone back to her parent’s house to give birth. I later discovered through a Social Security application that his sister who was born in 1902 was also born in Jefferson County. But his sisters who were born in 1908 and 1910 did have official birth certificates that said they were born in Sevier County.

The upshot is that I have become very gun shy of declaring a person’s birth place just from census records and the like. Well, such records provide a state, but not usually a county. So I want a good way to enter this kind of uncertainty into RM. That’s the subject for which I am soliciting suggestions.

The second example is a person named Minnie Belle Bray. The only evidence of her existence that I have found is a grave marker giving her name, the name of her parents (who happen to be my second great grandparents), and her birth and death dates of 25 Dec 1883 - 22 Mary 1887. The cemetery where the grave marker is located is in Loudon County, Tennessee. The family was enumerated in the 1880 census in Anderson County, Tennessee and in the 1900 census in Loudon County, Tennessee. So where was Minnie born and where did she die?

I found information about her at Find-a-Grave and at FamilySearch that said she was born in Anderson County and died in Loudon County. FamilySearch cited Find-a-Grave. But how does anybody know? Find-a-Grave indicated no uncertainty about the place names and Find-a-Grave provided no sources. But FamilySearch then used that weak information at Find-a-Grave as a source.

I have chosen to list her birth and death places as just Tennessee and then to have a note about the uncertainty of her birth place and death place for the birth fact and for the death fact. I still hope to find some record of where the family actually lived between 1880 and 1990, but I’m coming up dry so far. I have also changed her birth and death places at both FamilySearch and Find-a-Grave to just Tennessee. If somebody has some actual evidence of her birth place or death place, or even where the family was living at the time, I would love for them to post the evidence rather than just posting a guess as if it were a fact. More and more, I’m finding people’s guesses at Find-a-Grave being turned into sources at FamilySearch.

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I have switched software many times and because of that my database is awfully messy. I am on a clean up mission currently. I have created custom facts for many things. In your case to ensure that the information does transfer from software to software I would create a custom fact. I have one that is possible birth place, possible death place, etc.

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I deal with these issues in several ways. Some of the time I simply put possibly or probably after the place that I am guessing was the most likely. At other times I use residence facts when I know some particular places the person or family lived during their their lifetime. If close family, I sometimes go into detail about all the possible places in a note for the birth, etc. I try to avoid custom facts because I do not know how they might transfer in databases I submit online via. I do attempt to make my choice of place names short enough that the most important aspects of the place print on a pedgiree chart that I am sharing online or in a family history folder at I place where I am doing research.

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The location you enter is your hypothesis; the evidence you link to it is your validation.

A location with no evidence is a weak / working hypothesis. A location with lots of corroborating evidence is a strong hypothesis that you can consider a “fact”.

For me, a hypothesis doesn’t need to be further called out as one with additional markings.

That’s how I approach everything I enter into my research. So if I look at something in my tree without sufficient evidence I don’t assume it’s correct.

I also avoid things like brackets for the additional reason of trying to not affect hinting systems.

So, in the case of Emmert, I would have just initially entered Sevier County, TN as his birthplace based on the circumstantial situations you mentioned. Then I would have gone about trying to validate that hypothesis, updating the location when I found evidence of the different one.

PS: I have lots of ancestors from over the ridge in DeKalb :hugs:. Hey neighbor.

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Not something I have run into but how about using parenthesis instead of brackets? Thomas W. Jones (author of Mastering Genealogical Proof) uses them all the time in his citations.

So for weak evidence you might put (possibly Sevier County), Tennessee; for stronger evidence (likely Sevier County), Tennessee; or (most likely Sevier County), Tennessee.

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I add estimated places as “of, Sevier, Tennessee”. I don’t create a lot of narrative reports to share with anyone. If someone does want one I would use Search & Replace to change “of,” to possibly or probably so I don’t have to fix the sentence template to support of.

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@rzamor1 I think this would be a great case for enhancing the Proof field (as has already been requested) and allowing it to be used with branching logic in reports.

Example:

If a death fact entry had a Proof field value of “Hypothesis” (a new value), the sentence would read “Estimated to have died in X”. But if the field value were later updated to “Proved” the sentence would read “So-and-so died in X.”

Behind the scenes there would be the usual sentence template language coding at work, but using the Proof field as a toggle.

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I have been looking seriously at using RM’s Proof  field moving forward, even though I haven’t used it so far and even though it supports an insufficient number of adjectives. But one problem is that most facts are really two facts in disguise - namely, a place and a date. And the Birth fact is really three facts in disguise because it’s the introduction to a person’s name.

For example, Emmert Bryan was born on 1 Nov 1898 in Jefferson County, Tennessee is really three facts.

  1. His name was Emmert Bryan
  2. He was born on 1 Nov 1898.
  3. He was born in Jefferson County, Tennessee

My evidence for each of these three “facts” may be different, and the strength of the evidence may be different for each of the three “facts”. But I only have one Proof field that has to cover all three “facts”.

In this particular case, his Delayed Birth Certificate is strong evidence for all three “facts”. But in my experience it’s very common that the evidence for the date is not evidence for the place and vice versa, and the evidence for the name is all over the place and typically is not evidence for the place. For example, I have never seen a family bible that says anything about where anybody was born or died.

That all being said, I was still love to see enhancements to RM’s Proof  field.

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Oh don’t get me on a rant about that! Sooo many times I’ve wanted doubled-up / tripled-up facts to be split. :enraged_face:

For a refresher on the Proof field enhancement requests, the two recent ones are:

Those two, plus being able to reference Proof values for reports would be such a tremendous asset.

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That’s a very interesting approach, and I used to use it a lot. But I quit doing it that way after I came to realize that the “of” designation was often used for U.S. postal addresses that actually had little to do with where people lived.

For example, my mother’s family was Peters and they moved to the Scarbrough community of Anderson County, Tennessee in 1797. Their land ownership was not as continuous as was the Bryan family’s land ownership in Sevier County, but their residence in Scarbrough was just as continuous all the way up to 1942. My mother attended the Scarbrough Elementary School. Nevertheless, there are numerous people in my database who lived in Scarbrough and whose obituary describes them as being “of Edgemoore”. But the Edgemoore community is in Anderson County on the other side of a large river. So what gives?

Well, the U.S. Post Office in Scarbrough was closed about 1915 and thereafter the mail service was to Scarbrough was delivered out of the Edgemoore Post Office. People in Scarbrough were on rural routes that had Edgemoore postal addresses. There were no bridges until the 1940’s and the only way across the river was by ferry. My mother told me that after a heavy rain the river would rise and there would be no ferry service. And as result, there was no mail service. So despite living in Scarbrough, the people had a rural route Edgemoore postal address and that address usually got picked up for some reason in obituaries.

A similar thing happened in Jefferson County although there was no river in the way of the postal service. Rather, the postal service was rural routes out of the town of Dandridge. So people had Dandridge postal addresses, even though they lived out in the country and no more lived in Dandridge than the man in the moon lived in Dandridge. And their obituaries picked up the “of Dandridge” description. So I don’t like “of” places very much.

On the other hand, I do like your idea of having something in place names that can easily be adjusted by a global search and replace in a report file. I’ll have to think about what I might use. And I still would prefer to have some way I could print reports the way I want and still be able to do things like use RM’s Family Search Central to copy data into FamilySearch. Right now I cannot do that and I type everything into FamilySearch by hand. I sort of wish RM had something you might call “place templates” for lack of a better term that could be used to control the appearance of place names for reporting purposes.

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There is always the option of using the Abbrev field on the Place List. Then adding [Place:Abbrev] in the sentence template.

I also grew up on a rural route. The postal address had the nearby city name, different than the town I lived in. The hamlet I lived in inside that town sent us to a school in a different village, not to be confused with the school with the same name as my town. Fun times when someone asked me where I lived. The answer depended on why they wanted to know. It was usually safe to say the city where my mailing address was, because it had the only hospital and everyone was typically born there. It wasn’t until I moved away that the town became large enough to have its own postal address. The school system is still rather messed up. At least the census records give the correct town name.

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Or possibly 6 or more facts! In the England/Wales civil records anyway you would have the name of the father and mother as well as her maiden name and the details of the informant. In Scotland you get the time of birth (only shown for multiple births in England/Wales) and the date and place of the marriage of the parents.

I’ve come across so many census returns recently where Ancestry tries to force the details of a subsequent step mother into the tree as the biological mother. There is a reason why ‘vital records’ are so named!

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Have you considered using the local property tax records in the local courthouse? Ross County, Ohio has yearly tax records in the Auditor’s storage vault. They are usually in the name of the male owner of record. Of course, it is not proof of the birthplace for a baby, but it does provide evidence for the residence of the family. If the owner had multiple tracts of land. that provides more uncertainty about where the family actually lived.

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Short answer, yes, I’m trying to find property tax records.

In Anderson County, Tennessee, the access to property tax records is a hit and miss proposition. Some have been microfilmed and are available at a couple of libraries A very few are even available online. But the ones I need for this project are in a vault in the county archive that are not available to the public (long story). I can occasionally finagle access, but it’s very difficult. They also have never been microfilmed at all.

In Loudon County, Tennessee, I haven’t yet had time to research the availability at the courthouse. They are certainly not available online or at libraries.

Another resource for Tennessee is a special 1891 head of household census, but the head of household I’m looking for doesn’t show up in either county in that special census.

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Jerry---- you MIGHT try checking to see if they show up in a newspaper article in the time frame you are looking for—no one has EVER been able to find my grandparents in the 1920 census (not even Ancestry) — I have gone page by page thru the census–have looked for 20 years-- well I recently found a newspaper article abt a fight that my Grandpa and his brother got into a fight–it was dated the exact time frame as they were doing the census–guess Grandpa was at the doctor getting patched up when the census taker came by :laughing:
The news article I found online was actually put out by a local library/ genealogy group rather than newspapers. com etc…