* Citation assessment & Occupation Place

[Adrian Robinson]

Hello,

I am new to this forum. I have just upgraded to FH6 and have discovered a bit late in the day ( after painstakingly adding hundreds of census events individually - doh!!) that AS can simplify adding data from census returns etc.

I have run a couple of test to see how it affects my FH project and it looks pretty good.

However there are a couple of questions.

1. In FH I use the citation assessment of "primary evidence" for these facts - how do I add this via AS? Do I have to edit every event citation in FH?

2. FH allows a "Family" event for census - the report then states "they were recorded" AS shows this as an individual event - is there a resolution?

3. The Occupation flows through to FH but states they were a Blacksmith or whatever at the place of the census - which is invariably not right.

Am I inputting data incorrectly or is there some other method I should be using?

Thank you
Adrian

[BillH]

Adrian,

I think I can answer two of these.

1. In Tools > Options > Census settings you can set the Citation Certainty:.

3. In Tools > Options > Census settings you can set whether or not you want to record the census place in the occupation or not.

Bill

[tatewise]

Welcome to the FHUG Adrian.

May I suggest you try the ancestralsources:index|> Ancestral Sources Tutorials that answer most of your questions.

1. As Bill says, set the Census Options.

2. AS only uses Individual Census Events because the Family Census Event too often is inappropriate. Often the Spouses are not in the same Census Household either because they are not yet married, or one has died, or they are living/working apart. So you can finish up with a jumble of both Individual & Family Census Events that can make Query Reports, Diagrams, etc, inconsistent. The Narrative Sentence wording saying 'they' is slightly misleading when other family members are also in the Census Household.

3. As Bill says, set the Census Options, but since the Place is only the jurisdictional location such as the Registration District and not the home Address, then they would usually work in the same Place.

[BillH]

Mike,

I don't know if I would totally agree with what you said on point 3. For over 20 years I lived in Everett, Washington and worked in Seattle, Washington which is 40 miles away. The two cities are in different counties, different voting precicts, etc. People often work in different states than they reside in if they live close to the state border.

Bill

[tatewise]

Yes Bill, that is now, but we are talking about Census entries, mostly in the 19th century, when most people worked close to home, if not at home. AS is set for the majority scenario where working near home was the norm.

[BillH]

Mike,

While it was pretty true in the 1800s, even as early as 1910 I have folks that worked in different places than they lived. I was just thinking that you probably want to start using AS in such a way that you can be consistent in its use over time. Saving the census place as part of the occupation could lead to inconsistencies at some point down the road.

Bill

[tatewise]

Agreed, and perhaps with that change in work demographics in more recent Censuses, a future update to AS could allow the Occupation use of Place to be set in each Census Template rather than globally.

Currently, the user would have to change the Tools > Options before working on a particular Census Year. In any case, whichever AS Option is chosen, the resulting FH Facts always need to be ratified by inspection. The same is true of the Auto-Text feature, where AS assists but is imperfect.

[Adrian Robinson]

Thank you both for your help.

The suggested resolutions for Q1 & Q3 have worked perfectly. I accept that individual narrative for census is probably more efficient resolution for Q2

The question of whether or not people in the 1800's or 1900's worked locally is up for debate. In my case my grandfather worked in one parish but lived in another.

As I am self-taught using FH I have never used the address option. Instead I used the place separating the address by 2 or3 commas-

1 High Street, Maldon, Essex for example, and have found it to work well for me. Since joining this forum earlier this week, it is obvious that there are differing views on this.

At the moment I am pondering on how to add my 1911 census details as up to now the census has been a single source (ie Census 1911) and all citations hung on that. I can now see the benefits that AS bring by having each individual census record as a separate source ( ie census Ezra Sampson 1911...) and adding an image to that source.

I think 1911 will be via AS and in time I will backtrack the 1901etc.

It is obvious I still have a lot to learn

Thank you both

[NickWalker]

[Edit: Adrian replied while I was writing this but I thought I'd post it anyway]

Bill and Mike have answered your questions I think but I thought I'd add a couple of comments.

The family census event is not worth bothering with in my opinion. A typical census entry may consist of a father, mother, several children and perhaps a grandparent. So why apply a special family census event to 2 of those people but then treat all the others as individuals? But, some might say that surely a family is a group of people so perhaps the family census event is really meant to apply to the parents and their children (this is how a 'family' is defined in GEDCOM) but then if it does, what happens when in one census only 4 of the children have been born, in the next there are 6 children, and so on, it wouldn't be able to distinguish which subset of the family it applies to in each of those census. So we're stuck with an odd situation where 2 people in the census might have a family census event and all the rest of the family have the individual census event. But in other census years when perhaps the husband is not at home on the census night the wife gets an individual census event. It isn't logical to have this odd mismatch of mainly individual census events and occasional family census events so stick with the individual ones.

Regarding the Occupation place. As Bill and Mike have said this is totally configurable so you don't have to agree with the default settings which suit my way of working. It is my belief that it is rare that in any of the 1000+ census records for my family (all 1911 or earlier) that the place of occupation wasn't the same as the place where they lived. AS doesn't, by default, include the address because of course most of them didn't work from home. However, I don't think commuting to work was common in the 19th century and I feel it is a reasonable assumption that they worked in the same town or village. Ultimately I have occupation events stating a place but the source of those are census records and so from this I know that they aren't necessarily correct. This is similar to when AS creates a birth event based on a calculated date using the age and place of birth stated in the census: there is a good chance that the age and/or birthplace isn't entirely accurate and the source being the census alerts us to that. However, I do think it would be a sensible future enhancement to AS to allow you to review this on a census by census basis, particularly as later census records are becoming available when commuting was more common.

[NickWalker]

As I am self-taught using FH I have never used the address option. Instead I used the place separating the address by 2 or3 commas-

1 High Street, Maldon, Essex for example, and have found it to work well for me. Since joining this forum earlier this week, it is obvious that there are differing views on this.

Indeed there are different views but the common method for FH users (which AS assumes) is that the Place is for the Village, Town, County, Country and the Address for the building name/number and road. So Address: 1 High Street and Place: Maldon, Essex.