20th Century Wikitree completeness for Western Australia

Question

This is pretty silly metric to look at and report on, after all more than half of people born in the 20th Century are still alive.

But still, the result is that 3.26% of all 20th Century births, marriages and deaths are in Wikitree. The completion rate is over one percent for very year up to and including 1992.

For comparison 19th Century completeness is currently sitting on 41.0%.

Answer 1

Wow, lots of work, however, I think you need to change your phrasing to "reported births, marriages, and deaths among the non-indigenous population."  Many were not reported, or have been lost.

With a non-indigenous population in 1898 of 3.665 million, and an indigenous population of up to 1 million there were approximately a total of 4.665 million people just in 1898.  To include all the 19th century, that could be guesstimated to be close to 7 million individuals.  41% of that would be 2.87 million profiles here in WT.  That is close to 9% of all profiles in WT total.  That doesn't fit with info published a couple months ago that showed all profiles in WT for Australia were under 10%, if I remember correctly.

So, 41% of the population is obviously too high.  41% of births, marriages and deaths could be possible, but only if qualified by the above-mentioned "reported" and "non-indigenous".

Comments

I see I calculated the population of all Australia, and you are doing Western, sorry.

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If you look at my other posts about the 19th Century in Western Australia I do caveat around indigenous people, but I forgot to mention it here.

I didn’t caveat the 20th Century totals because while I know under recording still exists, it should have significantly less impact on the numbers. Indigenous people are both more likely to be registered and are a smaller proportion of the population.

Of 6,400 persons in Wikitree born 1829-1859 in the colony only 37 have the indigenous sticker. Roughly 95% of colonist births for this period are in Wikitree.

Incidentally, approximately one in seven colonist births in that period were not registered, although baptisms for most not registered can be found on family search.

The 41% figure does not take into account unregistered births after 1859, but does prior to 1859. Once I get a clear trend (if ever) future years unregistered will figure in the calculation.

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Hi Mark,

I did notice you had more clarifications on your previous summaries, it was too late in my night to post again.

Quite impressive, it must be the highest percentage of a major region in all of WT.  I could only have previously imagined that sort of coverage for a small village.

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FYI Clare Spring has been looking at Victoria and that was sitting on 14.3% complete for 1840-1923 mid last year. Usual caveats apply.

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1623603/how-are-we-going-statistics-for-victorian-wikitree-profiles?show=1623603#q1623603

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Hi Rick,
I have been fascinated by the information that Mark has collated and analysed.

A few comments:
* Mark has often repeated that the registrations apply to colonists and not indigenous people.
* This work does refer to a small isolated population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Western_Australia#/media/File:Western_Australia_population_T.svg shows the population of Europeans in Western Australia passing 100,000 around 1890.
** I compare this with South Australia which was formally colonised in 1836 and had a colonist population of around 150,000 in 1850.

Answer 2

I assume this is comparing WikiTree with the civil registry of births, marriages, and deaths? Are you maintaining somewhere a list of all those records, and how they're linked to WikiTree — and can we help link more?! :-) It seems that there's no way to explicitly say on a WikiTree profile that it matches a given entry in the BMD index, other than free-form citations (or am I missing something?).

Thanks for working on all this!

Comments

Sorry, I was lazy with this post. But if you look up my 19th Century posts a lot of details are there.

https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1631816/8ths-of-all-19c-western-australian-profiles-are-in-wikitree

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Interesting! Thanks.