Family Historian User Group

Sorry to keep asking silly questions. I did try searching the Forum but didn't find anything relevant.

How do other users capture an occupation, when the source is a death certificate.

If we have for example a 75 year old person whose occupation is shown as say "Factory Worker", it does seem somewhat strange to add it with the date of death. On the other hand where is no other information, it may be all that you have.
The Sentence text however produces as an example the following text. "On 19 July 1982 he was an Army Officer"

Should it simply be entered without a date?

When a person dies at a "normal" working age it would seem correct to show the date of death.

The alternative might be a different text eg "On 19 July 1982 his occupation was recorded as Army Officer"

I record it with a 'before' date if I have no better information to go on.

Nice idea

In any death certificates I have, if the deceased is no longer working it has always said- Factory Worker (Retired) or similar. So my view would be that the person was still working, an example I can give is my Grandpa who worked in my dads factory until his late 70's even though he had retired as a Mine Manager at 65.

You can also mark the date as before bef 19/7/1982 so the sentence would read Before 19 July 1982 he was an Army Officer

My personal choice is to use the occupation fact without a date to record that they were an x, y then z, and record in the note associated with the event whatever it says on the source document. I think that gives a nice summary of a person at the beginning of a report and in diagrams, and keeps the event record correct as well.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll think about which is best for me

On a slightly different tack, I also 'normalise' the Occupation so a standard set of jobs are listed by Tools > Work with Data > Occupations. So for example, regardless of what the Source actually says, I record Agricultural Labourer for Ag. Lab, Farm worker, Farm Labourer, etc.

I have often wondered about how to standardise occupations:

1. Apprentice Draper
2. Draper's Apprentice
3. Draper

Are probably relatively easy; 1 & 2 are the same, but 3 is different.

But sometimes we don't have enough knowledge to do the standarising.
I have just come across (in the Syllabus to Else Churchill's RootsTech presentation, English Country Bumpkins! Tracing Rural Ancestors) this little snippet:

Ian Waller, My Ancestor was an Agricultural Labourer, wrote:A farm servant generally an adolescent boy or young single man who resided on the farm and was engaged for a short period of time usually no longer than a year at a time. No set working hours and available when required ...contracted at hiring fairs. Contract related to board and lodging,
An Agricultural labourer was usually married and resided with his family in a cottage or house off the farm or on its perimeter and worked for a weekly wage for fixed hours and with greater security of employment.

For genealogy the difference is potentially important.

I suppose we have to worry about whether census enumerators were aware of this difference - I wasn't!

I am with Mike in that I standardise occupations wherever possible, but sometimes you can't and have to go with what the source documents say. There is no right or wrong way to record occupations, there is a 'best practice' but at the end of the day it is whatever suits your purpose. This applies to many aspects of recording data, but the trick is to then be consistent.

I always record exactly what the source document says, even if there might be a 'standardised' occupation -- in line with my principles of always sticking to the text in the source. I might add a note clarifying what the source says, but in the fact value I try not to interpret the source, just report it.

Although, like Mike, I try to standardise occupations to some extent I agree with DavidF that there are cases where our unfamiliarity with the occupations is a drawback. A distinction which might seem unimportant to us may have been very significant to the people concerned. A young woman who was a 'servant' in a small household would have been a general dogsbody, but if she went to work in a larger establishment there was a vital distinction (and pecking order) between a scullery maid, a laundry maid, a parlour maid, a lady's maid... Sometimes the distinction was recorded by a census enumerator, and sometimes they were all just described as 'servant'. Where the distinction is noted, I keep it.

In another example someone who was a shoemaker's apprentice turns up in one census as a 'Sprigger'. A sprigger was a person who nailed the soles and uppers of boots together with small headless nails. Eventually he became a master shoemaker. There are two ways to handle this: either record him consistently as a shoemaker, with a note each time to expand on his status, or record his exact staus each time as his occupation. The first method makes it easier to use Tools > Work with Data > Occupations, but the second method makes it easier to see someone's progress through life when looking at the facts tab of the Property Box.

I think that what to record depends upon your objective. If you are transcribing, then exact replication is critical. But if you are interpreting to make sense or to 'make a story', then some flexibility is essential, which is down to personal choice.

Presumably (famous first words!) it would be a relatively simple enhancement to take some of the code use for place standardisation and use the functionality to allow occupation standardisation?

Any interest? Or do we just put the transcription in the "text from source" and our own cleaned up if not standardised occupations in the fact value?

"Text from Source" should contain the transcript. If it says, "Ag. Lab." in the source, then it should say "Ag. Lab." in the "Text from Source". The value can then be "standardised" / cleaned up to taste in the fact value.

The Occupation fact allows access to the existing list of my occupation values, which is "standardised" enough for me. Although I keep forgetting whether I'm supposed to be using "Apprentice Painter" or "Painter's Apprentice" (say). Usually the latter but one or two don't read well when the order is inverted.