* Author vs Publisher for GRO sources

[Peter Collier]

When setting up sources for GRO registers, it seems pretty clear the publisher is the General Register Office in London (or Southport, depending on the date of publication). What about the author though? Is there an argument to be made that the author is the Registrar General, on whose authority the registers are created, rather than the actual institution s/he heads? What say you?

[mjashby]

Peter,

I'm afraid I can only respond with a counter-question: "Do you actually need an 'author' under these specific circumstances?" i.e. it's not the same as a third-party individual or organisation (e.g. FreeBMD, Ancestry, FindMyPast etc.) independently transcribing the so-called original indexes, many of which are now in reality typed copies of the 'original hand-compiled and hand-written national indexes', which themselves were manually compiled by copying from the Superintendent Registrar's Quarterly Returns.

In short, I haven't really got a clue who the author(s) is/was/were; and I don't think it matters, as the copyright belongs directly to the Government agency responsible, not to any individual.

Mervyn

[Peter Collier]

You make a valid point. For all practical purposes, I think I agree with you, i.e. it is pretty much surplus to requirements. Depending on the audience though, sometimes you want/need watertight references.

Equating the author with the original copyright holder could be a good gauge most of the time. That may be a little too vague though for anything under crown copyright.

[tatewise]

Peter, first of all the Source record fields are designed to cater for a wide variety of document types, so it is not mandatory to use all of them.

The Gedcom specification says the Author field should hold "The person, agency, or entity who created the record. This could be author, compiler, transcriber, abstractor, editor, individual, government agency, church/private organisation, etc."

The Author and Publisher details are more obvious for say a reference book.

Usually for GRO Certificates the Author is the GRO and Publisher Info is the Certificate Index entry reference.

[AdrianBruce]

No less a person than Elizabeth Shown Mills the author of Evidence Explained, the American citation bible, is quite clear that duplication is inherently pointless. Imagine an index authored by Ancestry, published by Ancestry and held in the Ancestry repository. Err - no. Conversely, she often points out that you might want to hold some duplicate data in your database for personal usage, rather than publication, if there is a pragmatic reason for it.

One objective is to indicate how to find the data again - the fact is that we wave our hands in the air, say "Get it from the GRO" and that suffices for all but the beginners. Putting more than that into the source may, therefore, be unnecessary.

I set the Author to be "General Register Office (England & Wales)"; and the "Publisher" stuff to "certified facsimile copy, made dd mmm yyyy" (with obvious change for date). My publication data therefore, tends not to be just a straight Publisher, Date, Place. You might prefer to move "certified facsimile copy" to the title / description. Up to you....

Alternatively, I could have used a blank author and moved the GRO(E&W) text to the publisher stuff, but it seems to me that the "authorship" is more important - indeed, the author will normally appear first.

It's probably not sensible to start to split hairs over whether the author is the Registrar General themselves - not least because, of course, they're not. It's the clerks and they only transcribed it anyway.

[Peter Collier]

Some interesting thoughts. Thank you, people.

When I need a full academic reference, I have something along the lines of
General Register Office (GRO), Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth: 22 Dec 1867 Robert Collier (Southport: GRO, 2009), citing King's Norton 6c (Q1 1868) 453.
Most times though, as you say, GRO Births King's Norton 1868-Q1 6c 453 is more than adequate! It all depends on the audience.

[AdrianBruce]

Please take these comments in the spirit they're intended - one of helping (while recognising that there are times when this all gets a bit too pedantic!)

Can I suggest that if you want the full Monty, then "General Register Office (England & Wales)" is more appropriate than "General Register Office"? The UK, after all, has at least 3 GROs....

I would also quibble with the "citing ..." text. It's not actually citing that reference. Citing means that the certificate says that it's got the data from "King's Norton 6c (Q1 1868) 453". But that's not what's happened. That reference is what you used to access the certificate - the GRO certificate got its data from the certificates at the local Superintendent Registrar's office. But you can't say "Citing Superintendent Registrar's certificate XXXXX" because it doesn't say where it came from.

"King's Norton 6c (Q1 1868) 453" is hugely important - personally I record a repository of GRO and a call number within that repository of "King's Norton 6c (Q1 1868) 453". Alternatively, you could stick the reference as part of the title, I suppose but that may be bulking it out too much.

Adrian

[jmurphy]

I've just ordered the new Third Edition of EE, and look forward to writing spiffy new source citations.

My opinion? When you have been thinking about source citations for a while and your head starts to spin, go back to basic principles. Unless we are in the middle of preparing something for publication, what we need to focus on is capturing all the information we will need to get back to the source, plus any information we need to evaluate the source.

It is important to talk about the form that the citation takes (e.g. whether one should say "A citing B" and so on) but the purpose of that should be to understand what we have looked at first, and communicating it to someone else second.

If we don't understand the nature of the source we've seen, we can't communicate accurately to others what we have looked at -- unless we do it by accident.

I have been lurking on the Genealogy Do-Over group on Facebook, and I see this all the time -- people get anxious about whether they are "doing it right" and in their worry to get the citation letter-perfect, they lose sight of the reasons we are asked to do it that way.

I don't mean to say that the for-publication form of a citation isn't important -- but we can't craft a good ready-for-publication citation if we're missing pieces.

As I understand it -- the GRO is the author of the original data -- but if we retrieve the data from a website, the website is the Publisher of the database form of the data. We might retrieve a digital image from Find My Past or FreeBMD which are both copies of the same physical index book, but their transcriptions of individual entries might differ, and if the digital images were made at two different times, or one website has cleaned up their digital images and one not, the digital images of the same book might be different, too. So in order to write a good source citation, we need to say whose version of the GRO index we looked at.

In 99% of the cases this won't matter, but I have seen cases discussed on ESM's site where it does -- the one that sticks in my mind most vividly is a case where Ancestry apparently has re-arranged the pages of the census images to suit themselves, so that if you go through the census 'in order' in an attempt to follow the path of the enumerator, you get a different impression of what was done, compared to what you might see when viewing it on another site.

If I were master of the GEDCOM universe, I would dictate a new container to hold the information about online sources -- where newbies could put the "what website did I get this from" information -- so we wouldn't have to stuff the information into the Repository field. That would bypass the entire argument about whether a website can be a Repository.

[CurtisB48]

Peter

I found your post when looking through the forum for source citations etc.

"When I need a full academic reference, I have something along the lines of
General Register Office (GRO), Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth: 22 Dec 1867 Robert Collier (Southport: GRO, 2009), citing King's Norton 6c (Q1 1868) 453."

I would like to record a full reference for my sources, but not sure how and where to record them in FH5, could you please let me know how and where you do it within FH5. I have been struggling with creating source citations for quite a while and thought it was time to ask for help.

Brian

[AdrianBruce]

You should consider using "Ancestral Sources" to assist with the most usual forms of source - that should help. I think...

Having said that, for all sorts of reasons that basically come down to me simply not wanting the effort of changing, I don't use AS, so if you want to hand-craft your stuff here's an example from me for a Death Certificate obtained from a local Register Office (not the GRO). Note that I've used "Customise Data Entry" to show both the Title and Short Title on a Source Record:

Record Title (i.e. "Short Title") "Death Certificate: Williamson, Samuel, 1877, Baddiley"
Name (i.e. "Title"): "death certificate for Samuel Williamson, 27 October 1877, Wrenbury sub-district"
Type: "_BMD; copy"
Author: "Cheshire Register Offices"
Publication Information: "This is a certified handwritten copy, made 17 March 2015"
Repository: "Cheshire Central Register Office"
Call No.: "WR/11/071"

Why do I have two Titles? The Record Title is there to provide a simple means of navigating up and down the Source tab - it's short and potentially doesn't distinguish between varieties of sources (e.g. I call all my marriage records "Marriage Certificate", even the pre-1837 ones that aren't certificates, just to keep them all together). The Name or Title is the long one that is often a description of the source and is the one that gets printed.

Type is just to help me choose which format of items to use. I have dummy source-records that I can copy and use as templates to remind me which items to record - these are distinguished by their Type.

Publication Information: This is as vital as the Name / description - don't be tempted to skimp or fit it into the template of a book. This tends to be where I record data about the origins of this source - for instance this particular example warns me that it's a hand-written copy with all the potential for error that involves. On the other hand, it is a certified copy so it is supposed to be accurate.

Repository and Call - where did I get this source from? (Not - where is the source kept now - that's in my folders, which isn't much use to anyone else wanting a copy!) What reference did I have to use to get it?

That's one example to start you thinking - different people will do it differently. Some people will shift some of that stuff from the Publication into the Title. That's the way I do it - I guess the Publication slot for me is where I put stuff relevant to the history of the source / information.

PS - if you don't try at least 3 different schemes and get totally confused, you're not thinking enough!

[CurtisB48]

Adrian

Thanks for your reply and example for a Death Certificate.

Do I need to create something to create/achieve a "Customised Data Entry" ? Sorry if I appear not to understand what you mean, I have not used FH for a while and have not been able to find anything about customising in "Getting the most from" or the Family Historian Help.

Brian

[tatewise]

Adrian is talking about the Source record Propery Box.
I think that both the Name or full Title, and Short Title are shown by default.
But if not, then in FH V5 click on the Property Box menubar Menu command top right.
Select the Customize... option and then you can add Title or Short Title & Type to the Main tab. This is what Adrian calls Custimize Data Entry which is the option name in FH V6.

While the Property Box is open and selected, press the F1 key on your keyboard to obtain a contextual Help page. (This works in most windows in most programs.) At the top follow the link to Customize Property Box dialog.

Alternatively, use Help > Search Help... and enter Customize Property Box then click List Topics and appropriate Help pages are listed at the top. Unfortunately, you must spell Customize with a z or it won't find anything.

[CurtisB48]

Mike

Thanks for your help, I have now found how to record the information in the way that I wanted to achieve. Quite a satisfying feeling after making source citations that record everything I want in them.

Brian