Ashes to Ashes, Artefacts to Bits

What do you do with artefacts in your family history collection? Are they connected to your software entities (e.g. in some database) and/or any digital images of the items?

An artefact is “an object made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest”.[1] The word is occasionally confused with ephemera, which are:

“Things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time”, and “Collectable items that were originally expected to have only short-term usefulness or popularity”.[2]

For the purposes of this genealogical blog-post, I will consider ephemera to be a subset of artefacts and will not mention them specifically.

Now that we’ve established the context, we should be able to see that this discussion is about physical items, including original photographs, actual letters, original documents, medals and other awards, paintings, clothing, jewellery, furniture, personal possessions, and family heirlooms. I’m particularly interested in this subject as I have several examples myself, including photographs (which many people may have, possibly stuffed in a biscuit tin), a police award, medals, military documents, an army uniform, and personal letters.

A recent post in a LinkedIn group caught my attention as it was about ‘Archiving your digital artifacts’. This confused me slightly since I would not have used that term to describe digital files. It was basically about their long-term storage (locally or in the cloud) and the preservation of their integrity and fidelity. It is true that there are preservation issues for digital data but this post conveniently skipped over the issue of real artefacts. More interestingly, though, a couple of responses suggested that people may be more interested in the digital editions because “…creating the copies is how we are able to preserve some physical artifacts. Some artifacts just don't last that long”. This belief contrasts sharply with the attitude in archives and museums where preservation of the originals is a prime objective.

So, should we be interested in preserving our own originals, or should we just endeavour to keep images of them? Preservation is not always easy, and very few of us are experts in that field. It is usually considered to be something of interest to those aforementioned institutions rather than to genealogists and family historians. Let’s look at probably the most common case: original photographs. If you’re sharing them with family and friends then digital copies, and other types of reproduction, are worthwhile and easily generated. If you want a copy for frequent consultation then a digital copy may also prevent excessive access to a delicate original. If you turn an original photograph over, though, then you may find invaluable annotation or notes in someone’s original hand. For instance, I have a picture here of a solider in 1915, the back of which is actually a postcard sent by him, from France, to his wife in Nottingham, England. Yes, an early form of “selfie”!

How, too, would a mere digital image convey the full shape, quality, texture, etc., of a wedding dress, or of an army uniform? Some of my relatives have a chess tabletop, carved in some type of stone — originally seated on a wooden table that’s now long gone — and dated “MDCCCLIX [1859] January I”. This was a present to my ancestor, Henry Procter, who is named at the top of it, and who was married a couple of months earlier. The initials at the bottom suggest that it was from a member of his wife’s family who I happen to know was a stone mason. The issue here is that although its preservation is easier, the digital images that I personally have of it do not do it justice. A project to recreate a supporting table is planned which would allow it to be put on show again, and possibly to enable it being used as a games table again.

Certainly, one feeling that underpins this fixation on digital copies is that it’s the information that’s being preserved. A scan of a photograph, or of a letter, preserves the information therein, suggesting that there’s no fundamental difference between the original and a good copy. There is some truth in this — otherwise we wouldn’t be content with those census scans that we all have — but anyone who considers their artefacts to be treasured memorabilia would disagree.

In Handling Transcriptions I explained that STEMMA® uses a Resource entity to describe both digital files and physical items, including any images of the physical items.

Some interesting fallout from this occurs when sharing such data. There may be many copies of your data — if you’re so inclined — but only one copy of the artefacts. When sharing your data, you will most likely be sharing just the digital contributions, and that means that any association between artefacts and images thereof must be broken.

If we’re famous then we may decide to bequeath our collection to a local archive, and presumably they would help with the issues of organisation and preservation. For the vast majority of us, though, we must learn how to become micro-archives.

This is a seriously neglected issue in private collections (i.e. outside of archives, museums, and libraries). I don’t have any answers for how to preserve our varieties of artefact, or the best practices for cataloguing them, but we should be learning from those institutions that do this. What I do know is that we’re not encouraged to record their presence in our family history collections, or even given the basic tools to accommodate them. The relentless march of commercial software is steadily turning genealogy into a digital-only world!

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[1] Oxford Dictionaries Online (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/artefact : accessed 15 May 2014), s.v. “artefact”; ‘artifact’ is the US spelling.

[2] Oxford Dictionaries Online (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/ephemera : accessed 15 May 2014), s.v. “ephemera”.

No Sex Please, We’re Genealogists!

Anyone from Britain will understand the humour in this title[1]. However, overly delicate sensibilities — and maybe some degree of ignorance — could be masking a related topic that happens to be worth discussing: How do we record sex and/or gender in our data?

I can forgive anyone that believes sex and gender are synonymous since the words are not always used precisely in everyday speech. They should be distinguished as follows:[2]

• Sex is either male or female and so reflects a biological difference. This includes physical, hormonal, and genetic characteristics.
• Gender is either masculine or feminine and so reflects a social or cultural characteristic.

Few people make this distinction nowadays though. It was sexologist John Money who originally proposed using the term sex to refer to the biological classification of male/female, and gender to refer to the differences in behaviour[3]. Before that time, gender was used in the context of grammatical categories. A deeper discussion of the history may be found at: Sex and Gender Distinction.

The majority of the records that we want to cite will, therefore, be recording sex rather than gender, as typically represented by the initialisms M/F.

My own belief is that inappropriate delicacy is at least as much to blame as ignorance of the history for the modern confusion. As an illustration, when I recently emailed findmypast to point out that their upgraded search field labelled ‘Gender’ was technically incorrect, my reference to ‘Sex’ was censored and replaced by asterisks. I tried to query this over-zealous censorship of the S-word and deliberately spaced the letters with hyphens to avoid it happening again. However, it was still censored and so my query ended up consisting of mostly asterisks and would be useless to any non-telepath.

OK, so enough of the definitions. What are the practical implications? Dealing with birth sex should be relatively straightforward (see below), but we now have many lifestyle choices to consider, as well as surgical procedures. These are just as much a part of a person’s history, and shying away from them doesn’t give just consideration to those people. The personal importance of the issues is illustrated in Sarah Mei’s 2010 blog-post: Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora.

Given the distinction above, Gender reassignment should include more aspects than surgery alone, although it is still treated as a synonym of Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS). People can travel to undergo these procedures but recognition of their changed status is still hugely controversial and may be denied in their own countries. Even if recognised by the corresponding government, it might not include a change to their passport, retroactive change to their birth certificate, their ability to marry someone of a complementary sex, or acknowledged if that person finds themselves in prison, or a hospital, or applies to join the armed forces.

A multilateral convention was drafted to provide acceptance in other countries but, to date, it has few signatories. See Convention on the recognition of decisions recording a sex reassignment. In the UK, the Gender Recognition Act 2004 is an Act of the Parliament that allows transsexual people to change their legal gender.

From a family history point of view, the most important thing to keep in mind is the distinction between recording the evidence of a person, or our conclusions formed for the person. All evidence will be related to some dated event, such as the birth event, but the relevant detail could be an attribute of birth or an explicit change thereafter, including conscious decisions or procedures. So, for sex, simply having a single property with more than two possible values may not be the best approach as it cannot represent the elapsed time preceding a change. It would be inappropriate to retroactively apply the changed information it as that would amount to genealogical revisionism. Even when a birth attribute is revised, you should not apply the associated evidence to previous dates.

Let me demonstrate this by considering the various possibilities. Any surgery, or related treatment, should be recorded as a medical event. Even lifestyle choices (which require a conscious decision) and gender realisations can be dated from an evidential point of view. Birth information — which basically means the child’s sex — can usually be recorded as a tri-state Boolean. For instance, STEMMA® uses 1=male, 0=female, and nothing when unknown, in order to avoid locale dependencies. The special value of ‘?’ is also available in its property values but is usually reserved for cases of unreadable transcriptions.

Sex is actually a combination of biological factors in addition to genitalia, including chromosomes, hormones, and neurological wiring in the brain. Problems get a little deeper if we have evidence that records any associated irregularities. Indeterminate sex at birth is part of a classification known as Intersex. This also includes irregularities of the sex chromosomes such as: Turner Syndrome and Triple-X Syndrome (for females), and Klinefelter Syndrome and XYY Syndrome (for males). From an evidential perspective, you’re unlikely to see this level of detail in a source, and historical medical practitioners would have made an on-the-spot determination; rightly or wrongly. Australia, Germany, Nepal, and New Zealand have taken steps to allow the recording of intersex on identification documents such as birth certificates.[4] Alex MacFarlane of Victoria, Australia, is believed to be the first holder of an indeterminate-sex birth certificate and passport, but they weren’t granted until 2003.

So what about our conclusions for such a person; the data that we construct based on the information from our sources? Well, for anyone with a particularly unusual history or status, I would say that a bunch of multi-valued properties in some database is not enough. Effort would be better invested using narrative to describe them and their situation.

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[1] No Sex Please, We're British was a British farce written by Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott 1971.

[2] Oxford Dictionaries Online (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/gender : accessed 7 May 2014), s.v. “genealogy”, under ‘Usage’ heading.

[3] J. Richard Udry, “The Nature of Gender”, Demography, vol.31, no.4 (Nov 1994): p.561, par.1; online scan at http://people.virginia.edu/~ser6f/udry.pdf : accessed 7 May 2014.

[4] "Intersex", Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Identification_documents : accessed 10 May 2014), under Identification Documents.

What is Genealogy?

The answer to this should be obvious to all of us, and yet it’s always hard to find any agreement. The subject has been discussed ad nauseam but I want to try and present a new slant; a parallax view. The case I want to make is that our collective uncertainty and our lack of agreement are holding us back, and in more ways than one too.

The fundamental issue with this question is whether you accept the literal definition of genealogy, or the more general context in which modern genealogy is practised. You see, the word genealogy is derived from the Greek γενεά (genea) meaning "generation" or “descent”, and λόγος (logos) meaning "knowledge". In other words, it literally means the study of biological lineage, but is that what we do?

Some people prefer to use the term family history as it is more specific. However, it has been suggested before that this term may be less common in the US than in other countries, and especially in the UK. This is borne out, to some extent, by our respective dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genealogy as:

“A line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor”, and “The study and tracing of lines of descent”.[1]

This is consistent with the original derivation of the word, but the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as:

“The study of family history”, and “The history of a particular family showing how the different members of the family are related to each other”.[2]

Clearly there’s a difference, and it appears to reinforce the suggestion that US genealogists believe they are already family historians.

In the UK, the Society of Genealogists (SoG) posts their distinction of the terms at: http://www.sog.org.uk/education/gandfh.shtml. I personally prefer the following more precise and succinct distinction that appeared in a UK genealogy magazine:

"We use genealogy and family history as though they are one and the same thing, but of course they are not. Genealogy is a purer search for historical connectivity between generations — building a family tree or pedigree, if you like — whereas family history is a broader piece of research into their lives and activities"[3]

So is this distinction necessary? Last year, there was a movement to merge the previously separate Wikipedia pages for Genealogy and for Family History. The new page is found under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_history but is entitled “Genealogy”, and this reflects one of the practical justifications for that change: people do not want to search the Internet using both terms. Many arguments were put forward for either keeping these pages separate or for merging them, and a summary can be found at: What is the Difference between Genealogy and Family History?.

Although I argued at the time that the terms were not synonymous, I can see the rationale for treating them as synonyms. Certainly the term genealogy is often employed in the context of family history. However, take a look at the Wikipedia page for: Family tree. This discusses the concepts of lineage representation through family trees and pedigree charts, but goes on to describe these in a heading as ‘Family history representations’. This illustrates one of the major failings of that merger, and probably justifies by itself the deliberate use of the term family history.

The term family tree is ubiquitous but it has also come to reflect the poorer side of our historical pursuit. Family historians want to study history, and want to write narrative articles. Their intended separation is primarily from people who compile family trees — especially online ones — but the term genealogy is implicated because it has an unfortunate split personality. I won’t argue that a family tree has no historical content but that content is thin, and devoid of the temporal, geographical, social, and occupational context for its people. Academic historians are known to separate their studies from genealogy but the same skewed association may be underpinning that too.

Anyone who disputes the association between genealogy and family trees should look at advertising on the Internet. It is depressingly littered with such references as “Research your family tree”. This very day, I received an email from Ancestry proclaiming “It’s Spring!  Build your family tree”. In my small experience of getting people started in genealogy, I found that they invariably used the term family tree when they really meant something bigger: family history, but they didn’t know how to describe it.

A common thread through most of my blog posts has been my declared interest in Micro-history, and its representation through STEMMA®. Micro-history is about the finer grains of history, whether they involve specific non-famous people, a family, a surname, a village, non-global events, or a military regiment. Being a superset of family history, it elevates the study of the requirements for historical data out of any potential lineage trap.

The UK’s Dr Nick Barratt has previously criticised the “rather sad division … [that] exists between the worlds of family history and local history”, and went on to point out that the earliest known origins of genealogy — the antiquarian historians of the Elizabethan era — researched history rather than merely lineage.[4] He has also advocated closing the gap between academic and public historians (which includes family historians), although this was not greeted well by the academic historians.[5]

It has been suggested to me before that there is no market for a software product with this degree of scope. Although I cannot estimate its potential size and commercial value, I can reliably say that there is such a market. The feedback I’ve had from experienced genealogists — which, for the purposes of this article, includes anyone who has researched the history of someone or something — has bemoaned the scope of existing software products. This sentiment was echoed during a discussion involving representatives of the Association of Personal Historians (APH) during 2012. By coincidence, during the writing of this article, I received a notification from StackExchange that someone was looking for a collaborative site that provided support for narrative stories as well as lineage.

Whether we admit to it or not, the design and scope of our current software products has been compromised by the association of genealogy with biological lineage. With some humour, I can almost imagine a conversation with a programmer designing one of the earliest genealogical products: “A tree? Oh yeah, easy, we use trees all the time in programming”, and then later, when some data wants to depict a spouse who is also someone’s second cousin: “Oh, this isn’t a tree is it? It’s a directed acyclic graph, so why didn’t you say that before?”. The tree paradigm is still used by all the products I know of, either internally or in their user interface (UI). If we add a picture, or a source reference, then this usually means people end up adding them directly to a specific person in their tree, which is demonstrably wrong. In Evidence and Where to Stick It, I posed the question of a family group photograph originally appearing in a newspaper. Do you attach the same image to every relevant person in your tree? If so, then where do you place the details of where and when it was taken, plus the newspaper citation, plus the newspaper caption and article that went with it?

Events are another example of this legacy since shared (aka ‘multi-person’) events are an essential element for representing any type of history. However, the lineage-linked GEDCOM data representation does not cater for them. Although most products that have an event concept will have since made them applicable to multiple people, the GEDCOM representation still prevents them being exchanged correctly with other products. Even those products that would claim to have shared events would probably expect you to add a photograph directly to one or more people rather than to an event representing the where and when of the photograph. In other words, addressing a timeline — again, an essential element for historical data — probably wasn’t part their original design paradigm, and may have been tacked-on in order to sequence the so-called vital events such as birth, marriage, and death. A similar case could be made for geographical context, including both large-scale (e.g. counties, states) and small-scale (e.g. streets, houses).

The woes of shoehorning the structure of historical data into some tree-like representation are nowhere more evident than in online Web sites. One reason has to be the seductive simplicity of a tree implementation compared to ... well, some real historical representation. When dealing with collaboration then even those simple trees introduce a mass of technical difficulties. This is not so much a fundamental issue with collaboration as the wrong model being implemented.  I mentioned earlier someone’s quest for a collaborative site that supported narrative as well as lineage. Although the responses included suggestions of a wiki and a blog, these are very one-dimensional approaches — again, how do you associate a given story with multiple people represented in a tree? Several commentators have suggested that the simple facts in a tree cannot be “owned” by anyone, and so a free-for-all collaboration should work. Interestingly, when narrative representations of history are involved then authorial ownership becomes very important. If you were to upload a recollection of your youth, or a story told directly to you by your great grandfather, then by what right would anyone else expect to edit or change it? In fact, collaboration on this level is possible, including those issues of ownership and association of narrative with multiple person entities, but it means using a different model. One such scheme was presented in a previous blog-post at: What to Share, and How - Part II.

In summary, the points I’m making here are as follows:

• The term family history was coined to distance the historical study of a family from the pursuit of creating family trees and pedigrees; a pursuit that can be implied by the ambiguous term genealogy.
• Genealogy will never be accepted as a genuine form of history whilst that ambiguity can be demonstrated.
• The association of genealogy with trees and pedigrees has had a crippling effect on the design and scope of our software products — both desktop and online — and attempts at data standards.
• The relentless reference to “family trees” in advertising leads newcomers to have low expectations of genealogy, and their enthusiasm to be subsequently unfulfilled if they try to take it further.

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[1] Oxford Dictionaries Online (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/genealogy : accessed 28 Apr 2014), s.v. “genealogy”.

[2] Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/genealogy : accessed 28 Apr 2014), s.v. “genealogy”.

[3] Dr. Nick Barratt, “The Origins of Popular Genealogy”, Your Family History, Mar 2013, Issue 38, p.74.

[4] Barratt, “The Origins of Popular Genealogy”, Your Family History, Issue 38, p.74, final paragraph.

[5] Barratt, “Insidious”, Your Family History, Aug 2013, Issue 43, p.74; Also reproduced in full at http://parallax-viewpoint.blogspot.com/2013/08/are-genealogists-historians-too_8.html.