On Certainty in Genealogy

I really enjoyed this, Randy. You phrase what I am finding out (by trial & error!) so very well.

Thanks Erica.

Randy, Thank you for putting into fine words the approach I seem to have stumbled into -- and why I like Geni. It is the ability to muster evidence that others can see and dispute, which will lead to revisions, which are pretty easy to make on Geni. Who knew that I a Popperist? Thanks for the blog post. David J

You point out the importance of sources and documents in your blog and I can't agree enough with that. I have uploaded about 500 documents so far and have been going through them tagging profiles and facts and I probably have another 500 documents that I am backlogged on. It would be great if more people would take the time to add documents and tag facts and all of the relevant profiles in the document so that we can all see where they connection comes from and often extra eyes can pick out missed facts.

When used properly this a great site for collaborating rather than ten people all creating the same tree seperately on their private sites and duplicating the same work- such a waste of effort. The flip side is some of the speculation that borders on fantasy that occasionally creeps in.

Great blog post, Randy!
Bravo!

One of these days I will ask you about how to add two sets of parents to the tree. I was adopted, so it's complicated. I have refrained from adding the birthparents, but have thought about doing so. Afraid the tree will get very messed up.

Randy Schoenberg Bravo---what a philosophically profound and progressive point of view!

. . . "I think of every genealogical fact I put on Geni as a hypothesis waiting to be tested by other genealogists.  If they find a fact that tends to disprove the hypothesis, it is easy to change the hypothesis to fit the newly discovered fact.  That flexibility is what I like about Geni." 

. . . "Wikipedia and Geni are not mechanical arbiters of objective truth according to some positivist rule book.  Rather, they succeed because they are platforms that allow scientific collaboration by many millions of people, each presenting empirical facts and testing hypotheses."

Your post would / should be a great intro to all of those entering the GENI world - to better understand both their opportunities for participation and discovery and their obligation to make work accessible to those that follow.

I wish this had been my intro instead of the floundering I felt for so long ......

Good article.

My quibble: You say that on Geni "Each profile includes a “Revisions” tab that records any changes that were made, so prior hypotheses can be revisited." -- However, when profiles are merged, only Revisions of the Primary Profile (the one that 'won') remain. This means the records of many changes are continuously getting lost. [I believe the programming Team may be working on something to address this -- but so far, definitely not available to the vast majority of users, if to any].

Bravo, Randy - a work of art indeed. The positivist approach to genealogy must be a very lonely one, in contrast to the collaborative feeling gained from interacting with other Geni researchers on a daily basis (if desired) in order to achieve more "certainty" in our trees. Oh, and way to promote our rellie, [Karl Popper '''Karl Popper''']!

Randy,

Excellent! You merit a right of reply in Avotaynu, a broader audience should read this.
Saul

I definitely enjoy the collaborative aspect of Geni, and have also gained some valuable information from others regarding family connections during the years I have been a member . What I disagree with is those who believe in making hypothetical merges without any real certainty(either with documentation or from other sources) to encourage the belief that the proper connection has in fact been made. Many of us have been researching for years (some more painfully than others) to come up with the information that we have accumulated in our trees. It would be a disaster to add "hypothetical" information from someone else that has not been verified to the satisfaction of both parties prior to making the merge.

*Amen* to Joyce E. Eastman's remarks re "making hypothetical Merges without any ... documentation . . . It would be a disaster to add 'hypothetical' information ... that has not been verified to the satisfaction of both parties prior to making [a] Merge." OR, for that matter, prior to Adding new individuals. Those, too, need to be supported by visibly-stated evidence (especially re birth- or living-place to the extent one has that, or has a hypothesis about it). The Geni "Overview" tab is an ideal place to inform others about the basis that one used for asserting certain facts in a Profile, or about hypotheses bring brought to bear in the Profile's creation. Empirically-based science entails not only gathering of facts, but visible citation of them. Happy Geni'ing....

As I explain on the Prague project page http://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Families-from-Prague/7995 with the example of the Zeltmacher family, the Geni platform allows me to work in a more efficient manner by making hypothetical connections. As far as I can tell, no one has been seriously injured by this process. :-)

I usually leave enough clues on the profile for me to figure out where I got the information, but there's only so much time in the day. Just yesterday someone asked me to look up the family of a young Holocaust victim. I found her in Yad Vashem and was able to connect her and her parents to the big tree. I just didn't have time to copy and upload the Page of Testimony, but I did add each of the victims to the Auschwitz project. That, to me, is a signal that if I want to find out more, I should check at Yad Vashem.

The point, to me, is that adding documentation does not make the tree more correct. It merely helps others check the available sources to see if they come to the same conclusions. It certainly is preferable to add sources and cite documents. Indeed, I have uploaded about 14,000 documents to Geni. But I don't get upset when I don't find them on the trees. If you know what you are doing, you can usually find the sources within seconds. And when you can't, that's where the fun begins. :-)

With regard to bad merges and lost revision history, all I can say is what my dad always says: "you have to take the good with the bad." In other words, Geni isn't perfect and there are going to be problems. By making it easy to merge (good) we also increase the number of bad merges (bad). Hard to have one without the other. If we're lucky, we can convince Geni to make improvements that will limit the bad stuff we have to deal with. As I like to say, if anyone has a better alternative platform where I can work on a giant public tree with millions of other people, please let me know, because we'll all switch in a heartbeat when that happens. But until then, let's just keep going with what we have.

Excellent blog, thanks! It is nice to see an explanation of how many of us have been working.

I agree that we have to take the good with the bad with Geni, but it would be great if Geni would take some of your methodology to heart, and incorporate things like multiple birthdays, etc., and do a more thorough job of sourcing.

Mark - I would say it's on the members to do the more thorough job of sourcing.:)

I like Randy's approach. I work primarily in the "historic" tree with profiles that were already on Geni. I upload a tremendous amount of documents & images and add "pointers" to where I believe the information originated - a lot of GEDCOM uploads from people's individual databases with sketchy (at best) details. Then I can go back and source better a piece of a line, with confidence that my collaborators are doing something similar on "another" piece of another line.

Geni has projects to keep us coordinated. Haven't seen that in any other venue.

I work iteratively. I always have evidence for profiles I add or merges I make, but I don't focus on making each profile the end all and be all immediately. I try to get the parents and children correct and add some sources and an About Me. At a later date, I come back to the profile and that area of the tree and add more sources and a better About Me.

Like Randy, I think it's important to get the World Family Tree in a form so that descendants can find their ancestors and can find us, their cousins. I have found many cousins this way on Geni and with them have improved the profiles and their branches of the tree. Had I not put the profiles on the tree until I had all the evidence, they would not have found the tree and been able to contribute much more than I could.

I do also, as Erica mentions, create projects for the town or region and sometimes for the family.

While I am "new" to genealogy, having started in 2009, I found quickly that you need to understand the context -- marriage patterns, socioeconomics, migration patterns, and the other families in the small town or village in that era to make any headway considering that even in populations where the records are good, such as Suwalki in some towns, there are many gaps and in some towns like Kalwariya there are barely any records. This is true also of early American settlements, our projects help us provide CONTEXT to solve some of the mysteries, break through some of the brick walls. As does genetic genealogy.

I enjoyed your blog article and agree that your approach to genealogy has many merits.
I find that with Moravia Jewish genealogy the "facts" from documents can be quite fluid, especially ages and first names and surname spellings. Coupled with hard work of trying to decipher Kurrant Script and compounded by some awful handwriting!

The World Family Tree is a good idea, and Geni is an excellent site, which allows you to contact other profile managers to possibly make merges to add to your own personal tree - once both parties are satisfied that the merge is justified. If there were a way to be able to compare differences in both merged profiles once the merge is done (and have the ability to make corrections or removal if need be) then it would indeed be great. I am sure that there is more information out there to add to my tree that I have not yet discovered. However, I believe in amassing all that I can about a family branch in a personal file on my computer - documenting my sources - and only entering the information into my Geni tree once I have a good idea that the pieces fit. Geni is indeed a valuable resource, as well as other online resources such as JewishGen and even Facebook.

Hatte Anne Blejer I tend to work in a similar way, I get a family group together and enter it. When I hit a brick wall in one area I go back and do some sourcing- upload a batch of documents for a particular part of my tree, then come back later and tag profiles and facts. Often this allows me to look at something fresh and see things I might not have noticed earlier.

I think the big tree is exactly the point of genealogy, I have had some discussions with those who do not like it and while I understand privacy concerns for the living I do not really understand why one would engage in this endevour only to keep your research to yourself and not try to connect your tiny piece to the rest of our community. It is really only by collaborating that we really begin to make the bigger picture connections and understand some of the patterns and context that Hatte lists above. You can't do it in a vacuum.

.... besides, profiles of living persons *are* private (only visible to the connected Family Group of logged-in Geni members).

Dan Cornett, yes exactly. Some folks are still paranoid about it though. . . and some are just uncomfortable with technology and you will never convince them otherwise. oh well.

Genealogy does not differ from any other academic approach: You are free to have your hypothesis and search for confirmation of it.
There are reliable and unreliable sources. All sources are man-made. This implicates that they can have errors, even the most serious ones. You have to check and double check as much sources as there are available for specific data.
You can mail the person who put a specific archive on the internet for advise before you go on to use problematic data.
Furthermore, as mentioned before, people of different tree branches have their personal knowledge as input, which makes it so nice to work on Geni.

Exactly. Everyone has their own hypothesis and method of research to confirm any information they have received. However, if someone is unwilling to share the source of their information, before a merge is confirmed, then I would be skeptical of making that merge at all. Sharing information is exactly that - sharing where the information came from so that both parties are comfortable with any profile merges being made. Surely there will be some errors or incomplete information perhaps, but if both parties are not comfortable with the request for a merge (due to lack of information confirmation to either party), then the merge should not be completed. Disclosure of information sources must be mutual so that everyone is comfortable in adding the information to their tree or any other tree.
For example, my maiden name is WILDER, this does not necessarily mean that I am "automatically" related to Billy Wilder (as someone suggested to me in the past). Only if I was comfortable with the their sources of information to encourage the belief that they are in fact related to me would I add that information to my tree.

I put up Billy Wilder , in case you want to work on his tree.

Joyce. I agree that hypothetical connections should be precisely labelled as such. However, my approach to analyzing trees is similar to that used by any fact-finder in a court of law: the quality of the information is entirely a function of the foundation upon which it is based. So to me, a tree that is entirely speculative must be looked at warily. A tree based on records is nice. But a tree based on the personal recollection of someone who knew all the individuals is best of all. Seems like every day I pick up some book by a professional genealogist, published by a reputable house like Avotaynu, and quite professionally and beautifully printed, with a gorgeous tree that has not backed up by one shred of evidence included in the volume. I find the ability to easily upload and share my supporting data and images to Geni to be one of its finest features. Let anyone with questions go to a scan of the source material and try to prove me wrong. Happens every day and I love it!

That has been the amazing thing for me, is finding my Israeli cousins or American (distant) cousins who have trees from personal, family knowledge that connect to my trees from either Suwalki / Lomza or old Massachusetts / Connecticut. Many times even the best genealogy source is incorrect compared to the records of the family because for instance, they were published before the youngest children grew up and married or even before the youngest children were born.

I think you need a good combination of personal recollections etc. and documents. Both can be wrong, not entirely accurate, accurate at a given point in time etc. My grandmother left me a great tree of her father's family but she had some names of her father's siblings listed only by what they used in the US and she was missing others; and as long as I had known her she talked about how her family was from Budapest and Vienna, but it turns out that they were all BORN in Khorostkiv and Nitra so I spent three months chasing the family in the wrong place. And a first cousin of my paternal great grandfather had a great tree of his side of the family but he had a few names wrong or matched the wrong spouses or had some birthdates mismatched. The flip side is that I have found several documents that are clearly erroneous, have significant typos/misspellings or dates that cannot be correct.

documents can be wrong, recollections can be wrong, that is the nature of history, it is subject to revision, new data, refined data, etc. Even if desirable, an absolute certainty standard is not attainable. A reasonable doubt or even a preponderance of the evidence standard for much older relationships seems much more reasonable.