The 12 Labors of a genealogist – #08 – Take care of the individuals

Because genealogy is the story of the men and women who make up your family, this month I’d like to take care of the people in your genealogy.

So why do we need to take care of people?

While it’s important to check regularly that you’re not forgetting anyone in your research, it’s even more important to know whether a person should be the subject of your research. For there are cases where it’s useful to determine that you won’t be able to find more information for that person. And to rationalize your search.

The most obvious case is that of a child who died shortly after birth. You may conclude that he or she never married or had descendants. Why keep him on your research list if you know his parents and the dates and places of his birth or baptism?

A more delicate case is that of an ancestor who had no children. The absence of a union may help to indicate this, but in genealogy we don’t necessarily know whether a person was married or not. Profession can help. A religious ancestor is a good example. The absence of descendants in the decennial tables of the town of his marriage may also lead you to think that he had no children.

Can your genealogy software help?

If you’re convinced that this ancestor had no descendants, your genealogy software should be able to help you exclude this person from your research.

In the case of children who died young, the situation is fairly straightforward: if the information on the child’s death is known, a simple filter based on age at death will enable you to exclude him/her from your lists.

The problem is that most genealogy software programs don’t allow you to simply indicate this, and you may have to use a note on his death to indicate “Died without having had any descendants”. You’ll then need to export the data in Excel format, for example, and use the filters to organize your searches.

4 periodic checks

To limit the number of cases where you risk spending time unnecessarily searching for information, I suggest you clean up your data regularly (or twice a year), and in particular carry out the four checks described below.

1 – Check for duplicates

For this check, you need to be able to compare several pieces of information and define the probability rate at which you think a duplicate person has been entered.

In general, it is quite common to use the following criteria: date and place of birth, first names, father’s surname and first name, mother’s surname and first name, father’s date and place of birth and mother’s date and place of birth.

This check can be performed automatically using specialized software.

2 – Search for deceased persons

It’s likely that your genealogy contains a significant number of people for whom you have no information on their death.

If you know their dates of birth, you can apply a rule of thumb that considers them as necessarily deceased from a certain age, for example 110 or 120.

Once again, this check can be carried out automatically using specialized software.

3 – Search for people with no ancestry

For this check, it’s easy to identify people for whom no father or mother is indicated.

However, you need to make sure you haven’t made the same mistake as I did, by using a fictitious “Unknown” individual to create a family in which you know neither the father nor the mother..

Once again, this check can be carried out automatically using specialized software.

4 – Search for people with no descendants

As mentioned earlier in this text, you need to apply logical criteria here, and automation is more complex to achieve.

– Age at death

– Absence of union

– Profession

– ..

Here, automation will probably be only partial, unless you use software that can handle this case.

In conclusion: you will probably need to supplement your genealogy software with specialized software capable of carrying out these checks. Fortunately, using GEDCOM files exported from your main application will enable you to verify data with other tools without too much difficulty.