Advice on implementing WikiTree Sourcer support for Victoria BDM

Question

I am working on implementing support for the Australian site Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria in the WikiTree Sourcer extension. Several people have requested support for this site in the past.

If anyone who uses this site a lot is interested in helping answer questions about the best way to support it let me know and I can discuss ideas with you offline.

I am aware of the FSP for Victoria sources.

I have looked at tips on place name abbreviations here but currently it doesn't look like there is a reliable way to automatically convert an abbreviated place name to the full place name.

One thing that is awkward is that there seems to be more information in the search results list that there is on the record page when you click on a search result. For example the age at death is shown in the list. But if you click on the result then the age at death is not shown. So possibly Sourcer should create citations from the results list page.

(edited to add Australia to tags)

Comments

Thanks so much Rob, for looking at this! It would be marvellous to be able to use Sourcer for the Victorian BDMs. It looks like you're on top of most of the issues. I'm not sure what resolution you came up with for place name abbreviations. Unfortunately, for whatever odd reason, the abbreviation for a specific location can change from one record to the next. Also sometimes the same abbreviation can be used for different locations (eg Sand for Sandhurst or Sandridge).

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Hi Gillian, I'm still trying to decide whether to do anything to interpret/lookup place abbreviations. I could do something in both the Search and Build Citation parts of Sourcer.

In the Search, in the the "Search with specified parameters" dialog I could have a drop down for the place name to search where I could show all know abbreviations for the place names on the current page.

When creating a narrative or a data sentence in Build Citation I could try to convert the abbreviation to a full place name. This would probably do nothing if there are two known places that use that abbreviation. I have noticed that FindMyPast seems to have auto-converted a lot of place names in the Victoria Births collection on their site.

What is your opinion? Is it worth trying to do these things in Sourcer?

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Others may have a better idea, but I'm thinking that if you just leave the citation with the place abbreviation as it appears on the index, that might be the most accurate option. Then if people aren't sure of the correct location they can do their own research and/or just leave the location as Victoria, Australia or Colony of Victoria. Maybe within the Australia Project we can also put together a table that people can reference as well and/or a link to a good table already out there. I don't think we've done that yet as a project... but I could have missed a great initiative. I guess if you didn't convert the abbreviation, the narrative option would need to avoid the place name.

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With the search option, if it's not too difficult to add the unabbreviated place name, that might be handy, but we could test out the alternative for a while and see how it is, if you prefer.

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Do you have some example profiles with Victoria BDM cited in a format that you prefer?

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I have created a free space page with some examples of how Sourcer could generate citations for BDM along with how it cites the same indexes on Ancestry and FMP. Any feedback is welcome.

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Hi Rob, thanks for the Freespace page. Those examples all look excellent to me.

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Great. I should be releasing the new version in the next few days. Just doing some testing and bug fixing. As a teaser, here is the documentation page.

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I have released a version of Sourcer (2.3.0) with the BDM Victoria support. It is available for Firefox and for Safari iOS. It should be available for Chrome and Safari macOS sometime tomorrow. Documentation is here.

Answer 1

Hi Rob. Two points:

1. The place name abbreviations are erratic and often ambiguous. No automated expansion of them will be fully reliable. The following site was informative, but copyright so it probably should not be scraped:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230328031046/https://bdmabbreviations.steveparker.id.au/

2. You are right that the search results pages contain all the data. Ignore the linked record pages, which are just meant for purchasing certificates.

Comments

Perhaps I should have mentioned that there are no permalinks, only session links which rapidly expire, but you probably already know that.

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For death records it does seem that there is more info in the search result list. For example these values are in the list but not the record: Age, Birth Place, Spouse at Death

However for marriage records there can be more information in the record page than the search list. For example the 1846 marriage of John Wilson and Elizabeth Brimmer has an event place of "PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH MELBOURNE, Australia" that is only shown on the record page.

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Thanks for the link to that doc. I'm not sure if I can use it in the extension. Possibly I could use it for generating a possible list of place names to search for in the search dialog.

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It is interesting that the FindMyPast collection "Victoria Births" has the non-abbreviated place names.

For example Victorian BDM has:

Registration number:  10051 / 1887
Family name:  NICHOLSON
Given name(s):  Sarah Elizabeth
Place of event:  COLL, Australia

But the record on FMP is here:

https://www.findmypast.co.uk/transcript?id=ANZ%2FBMD%2FACTBIRT%2F868655

and says:

Birth place:  Collingwood

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Update: I have come up with a way to combine the data from the search results list and the record page. So I can build a citation from the record page and also use the data from the search result row that was clicked on to get there.

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Sounds good, Rob. I didn't know about the extra marriage information for early records.

Answer 2

Hi Rob The link for place names provided by Jim in no longer used.

We currently use https://fanningfamilyhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/eBook-Placenames-Abbreviations-13-June-2011.pdf

Personally I would keep the record as it is written with the abbreviation as it is a district and not necessarily the actual place of birth or death.

Marriage records for Victoria do not have a place name unless they are an early church record which are generally pre 1852/3

Comments

The link I gave (still available on the Internet Archive) has over twice as many entries as that PDF, and is much more easily searched. In addition, it has helpful notes about many of the entries. It is still used, by me at any rate :-)

Answer 3

Thank you, Rob. As a frequent Vic BDM user, this feature in Sourcer would be an awesome addition.

I don't always understand the abbreviation and in those cases, I don't try to expand the abbreviation. Thus I think you should not attempt to convert the abbreviated location name. In the citation keep the abbreviated location as it appears on Vic BDM and in the Narrative just use Victoria, Australia unless it says At Sea. Then it is up to the user's discretion to expand the location if they can.

My other thought is it would be awesome if you could extract the data from the search list as it does have more information. However, I'm unsure how the user will select a record they want Sourcer to build a source. If you click on a source it goes to the results page and there is no select function on the page at the moment. So it might be easier to build the source from the results page.

Comments

I found a way to extract the information from both the search. list and the record page. As you say, there is no convenient way to select a row in the search list so that Sourcer can work off it. So what Sourcer does is to collect the data from the row when you click on it and remembers it. So when you get to the record page Sourcer has both sets of values to work with.