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Concerning General Genealogy. When historians in the past has given abcdef notations to individuals they did so with the information available at the time and children of say b1(whatever the surname - each surname has a b1, otherwise he would not have been a stem father) normally would be arranged in order of birth OR IF NO DATES OF BIRTH WAS AVAILABLE IN THE ORDER THAT THE NAMES WERE MENTIONED and as new information becomes available the order of children needs to change, when their dates of birth becomes available. If b1Jan b2 Piet b3 Chris b4 David (Without dates) in order of new dates of birth becomes b3 Chris b1 Jan b4 David b2 Piet, it should be changed back to b1,b2, b3, b4, b3 Chris should become b1 Chris; b1 Jan should be b2 Jan; b4 David should become b3 David and b2 Piet should become b4 Piet. After all that is what a1b2c3d4 means - the 4th child of the 3rd child of the 2nd chils of the 1st child of the stemfather. Not only their notations should change but also that of ALL their descendants and not just in their own tree but in every shared tree. Some people do this and other stick to the old notations and some discard the notations altogether thereby throwing the baby out with the bathwater. abcdef notations help to identify specific individuals - you can't confuse a b3c4 Piet Pompies with a b4c3d1 Piet Pompies and you can work out the relationship between them. The Genealogies of Old South African Families was a great publication - the only problem is that we seem to use different versions of it that don't correlate with each other and the price of the full Genealogy set is becoming out of reach of the normal person. This is the main reason why the family trees of so many people gets corrupted. New relative matches should be added individual by individual en not in a bulk. It is by adding all the siblings of your direct lines that you make contact with people from other trees, thereby avoiding ev erything becoming just a list of names. The exchange of Photo's is a very helpful way of avoiding this, so is bibliographies or just analysis of facts as age at wedding age of wedding partners, age of each parent when each child was born and the comparrison to a historic event timeline for instance their ages during the Anglo boer war and whether they were on the Great Trek and their locations at different times in history. If all this is worked out every one should have much, much more than just a list of names and dates. I would be very interested in comments of other participants of family research.