Is there any benefit to categorising people based on census location/according to time? [closed]

Question

I was just adding some census records to some profiles and I noticed that two of my ancestors that their grandparents lived on the same street in 1861, and thats not the only time people have lived close together and I am sure others have seen it too. I also saw discussion of the french census categories this past few weeks too.

I was wondering if there was any benefit to having categories by census e.g 1861 England Census > ... (sub categories ) > streets / or districts /areas > people.

The location categories help find people of the same place but thats spread across a large amount of time, so its hard to see who was living at the same time and place together.

 

Edit: Thank you for all the replies

Comments

Classification is always good problem is that WikiTree just have Categories that is not the best tool for Classification..... better if we moved WikiTree to support e.g. RDF and SPARQL ..... then you could create queries and reports and maps and be much more flexible what relations you add to a person...

Tim Berner Lee says in this presentation that when you get more data that is connected then you can start analyze and present it in new interesting ways and that is the future of Internet.....

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I see nothing wrong with census categories, but please let's fit them into a sensible structure rather than just create them randomly. So start from the top down rather than the bottom up.

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We are fortunate to have such exciting discoveries.

In 1891 my future paternal grandparents were next door neighbors. He was 12, she was 6.

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@George using geospatial queries open up a new dimension. Problem in Wikitree is that we have no good location model, we dont use coordinates and have no report generator

Sample queries done in WikiData:

• Map with WIkiTree People born 20 km around Caraquet 
• Image Gallery

 

• All people in Wikidata born  20 km around Caraquet order by distance 
• Image Gallery

 

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Magnus,

Very thoughtful of you to use Caraquet to target your reply specifically to me, and generally to all other readers of this G2G collaborative discussion. Your personalized response to my comment is appreciated.

I'm enthralled by your proposition. Do you see potential for WikiTree to eventually enable users to generate reports such as these:

WikiTree Profiles of Residents of Côte de Lauzon in 1667

and

World Wide Web entries for Residents of Côte de Lauzon in 1667

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You can already do a Google Advanced Search with one of the search terms being "wikitree.com" and the other being Côte de Lauzon.  Such a search does not require anyone to do anything additional to any of the profiles involved;  Google simply searches for any files anywhere on the internet that contain both search terms.

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@Jack no you can't

1) How does Google know what you are searching after when you search for Venus?

Video https://vimeo.com/36752317

The answer is linked open data we would like to link not between pages we would like to link between data

2) How do you search for profiles 20 km from Caraquet  that is nothing you can do with text retrieval... you need data enriched with locations with coordinates  

Example of a search after National Register of Historic Places.... 
within 100 km fromFreehold Township, New Jersey

 Link

Same query but 10 km from Anne Arundel County, 10km around Chicago, 10 km around Mohave Valley

You need structure in your data and do that in an intelligent way... 

Also Googles tells us not to have unstructured text and instead get structure to our content see

A video from Google what about structured content

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Magnus, I can and i do -- do what I said I do.  No, I can't search for everyone within 20 miles of a specific location.  Google Advanced Search will find every internet file which contains both the specific words specified.  Primitive by the standards of what you do, but a significant improvement over what's available within Wikitree.  I have found a number of profiles to be categorized within our Indonesia project by searching for wikitree.com + West Java or Sumatra or Borneo.  Some word strings don't work as well as others for this purpose -- the search engine thinks Java is a programming language and it thinks Bali is a bra.

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Yes Jack that is a good example with Java....

With structured search I can easily find all people in Wikipedia with citizenship Indonesia and plot place of birth death and burial on  a map

See link 

Adding structured information to Genealogy would add so much

Video

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Magnus,

Re: query for 10 km from Anne Arundel County

The map is insightful, by lacks utility because it does not give the individual locations pinpointed on the map nor does it open up pinpointed locations when they are clicked on.

I note the data set you chose to query, “National Register of Historic Places”, is relatively static and relatively permanent. People are not like monuments/statues. They move about in time and space.

Does the technology presently exist for WikiTree members to readily access a cohort of individuals known to have been in a particular place on a particular date, and display that information in detail rather than in the aggregate?

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1. You can click on it  see video
2. You can add more locations and also add start end time so its flexible. See video when I add Swedish Priministers
   1. Adding start date
   2. Adding end date
   3. Adding replaced by 
   4. Adding replaces
      
      One attribute you can set for a person is WikiTree ID = P2949 see https://www.wikidata.org/entity/P2949 and people marked with this attribute can easily be displayed on a map using a query or on an external tool Histropedica that also access WikiData with a query and displays a timeline
      
      
      
      Big pic of a query done in Histropedia displaying 3200 wikitree profiles found in WikiData. See video how WikiTree meets Histropedia
       
3. No WikiTree doesn't have this BUT we have some people in WikiTree that are also in Wikipedia/Wikidata and then you can use this technique

Everyone can access WikiData and do queries this is the URL to the query

 

More examples

• Wikidata query examples
• my blog 
• my youtube channel

 

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I stand corrected. The pinpoints are indeed clickable. Perhaps my earlier experience was a consequence of clicking on a pinpoint as soon as the map displayed and not waiting for the page to fully load.

I'm pleased I was wrong. Others will learn from my mistakes.

Thank you for your patience Magnus.

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Thank you for all your replies, Magnus it's nice to see how dedicated you are to this new way of searching information - do you have a free space page to explain it, I would love to find out more

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@A C Raper

More examples below but this is rather technical. My thought is that we need to rethink inside WikiTree and start use categories and templates to get more structured data in our research....

• Wikidata query examples
• my blog 
• my youtube channel

A video from the founder of the internet that we need to take the web to the next generation https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web

 

Its rather technical and I am getting more and more convinced that doing genealogy without structered data is the wrong direction... 

 

I learned SPARQL from a training at futurelearn Introduction to Linked Data and the Semantic Web

Answer 1

I am not at all sure about this. I feel we could end up with so many catagories that they become useless clutter. When I want to know who a persons neighbours are, I trawl through the census pages like we used to do before the records were online.

Comments

Strongly disagree

Wikitree has today a very very very simplistic data structure

1. You have birth an deaths dates but with no calender
2. You have birth location and death location with some possibility to add those validated
3. You have marriage date

A standard Genealogy software has the possibility to add events, sources, occupationd, grave location, grave plot, grave coordinates, Cemetery...... and create advanced reports...

 

As Wikitree miss this the second best way to get the  research better structured is to add categories or templates....

 

Just having all Genealogy research as free text makes that your research will be less structured and less good....

 

You also need better reporting tools. Feels like Aleš the Wikitree superhero is starting to give us the  possibility to create list combinibg profiles with category xxxx and category yyy and ?????

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>>> I trawel through the census pages like we used to do before the records were online.

Feels more that you express that Wikitree lacks functions supporting your way of doing genealogy....

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Lets agree to disagree. I have stated my opinion. You are entitled to yours. I have more to do than enter in a long argument about it.

Answer 2

Some will say yes and some will say no. For those who are studying a certain location it is always a good thing to have a category and may even offer some clues about if a source is applied to the correct profile when you have several similar names.

Answer 3

Greetings A. C.

Early in my genealogical endeavors concerning my colonial French heritage I found Intendant Talons handwritten censuses of 1666 and 1667 of New France and initiated the WikiTree categories you mention. The populace enumerated is exceptionally unique because they are:

• French Catholics

• the progenitors of a vast number of continental North Americas having their surnames

• the significance of their history in North America deserves recognition

• their numbers are relatively small

Answer 4

One thing you may want to look for are atlases and wall maps.  Ancestry.com has a lot of them and for my place of especial interest. Monroe Twp., Licking County, Ohio, USA, there is a Licking Count combined mapbook which has four different maps for each township with an index which is available online at the Licking County Genealogical Society.  There are probably such research resources available for many areas.  I believe most county courthouses have maps used for use by realtors,  lawyers or title agents to check to see the status of property.

Answer 5

A.C, I would be conservative in answering your question.  It is easy to create a category, but the category then is only useful if (1) it aggregates a group of people that is helpful for genealogy, and (2) it is used by enough other people so that the category will contain profiles worth finding.  

So I would say that SOME Censuses would not be useful at all.  The 1940 United States Census is (and prior censuses are) very useful to go and find data on but having everyone who appears in the 1940 Census categorized that way would not, in my opinion, add any information that could not be gotten easily by going to the census itself.  Even the 1776 Maryland census, which is much more limited and affects fewer numbers -- yes, the data is very important to capture in the biography with appropriate inline sourcing, but categorizing this person according to the census would just be duplicative.  Secondly, if the category indeed IS useful, it would depend on getting all the eligible profiles categorized, which would require the work of a lot of people.  So it would seem to me to be a big expenditure of effort for limited results.  

Now I could see the value in what I call a "micro-category" which is created by a particular researcher for a particular purpose, e.g. grouping 25 people who are all on the same street in the 1870 Census.  You are wondering what their interconnections are, so you create this micro-category and link the 25 profiles to it.  Now you have a quick way to go back and forth among the 25.  You may add some common features you discover to the narrative lines in the category.  The value of this microcategroy is not limited only to you, but it really is limited only to anyone interested in those 25 people.  There would be no expectation that all the streets in the 1870 Census would receive similar detailed attention, although you would properly link this microcategory to the town in which the street appears and other appropriate higher categories so that an interested person could find it..  

As a member of the categorization project, I always try to ask (and answer) the question, "how does this category contribute to genealogical research and understanding?"

Comments

I agree with Jack.

For a resource like the 1776 Maryland census, a free-space page presenting the data for a particular community could be useful. I'm not familiar with that census, but I've found value in pages like the list of householders in the 1697 census Albany, New York published by the New York State Library. I imagine that the early census of Maryland could have similar value.

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And it's available so readily and so cheaply on the outside that there's a question as to why you need anything within WikiTree other than a link so people could find it easily.  I'm archaic enough to own a hard copy of Brumbaugh's 1915 work with the 1776 Provincial Maryland Census in it, but I discover Amazon wants you to have it on kindle now for $2.99.  Now, how much of your time do you want to devote to save someone $2.99?

https://www.amazon.com/Maryland-records-colonial-revolutionary-county-ebook/dp/B00CHRG6KW#navbar

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No need to pay Amazon for the Kindle edition of a public-domain book that's available for free on Hathi Trust and the Internet Archive (volume 1 and volume 2).

But sometimes a focused extract from a freely available document can help researchers make connections or interpret data that might be hard to mine from the original source. 

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Regardless of the cost of the source document, contributors who see related people on a census enumeration sheet can include information about those neighbors in the profiles they are working on.

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Thanks for the replies, the profiles I mentioned in the question where Irish immigrants to Leeds (generally North Leeds) as the families seem to be interconnected and living in quite a small place and usually in similar industry.

The city of Leeds has had lots of migration from places such as Russia, Poland, Ireland, Jewish immigrants from those countries, as well as the Irish.

So would it be more advisable to look at this from an immigration standpoint, or as you discuss are particularly community within Leeds, Quarry Hill, Sheepscar, Newtown

Answer 6

I wanted to share with you all that I ended up creating a free space page and it means i can group households and neighbours together

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Ebenezer_Street%2C_Leeds%2C_West_Riding_of_Yorkshire%2C_England%2C_in_the_1861_Census

it's not complete yet but it has the basics, but I haven't added it to any categories yet

 

Comments

Nice 

If WikiTree had been more flexible then you could have added properties to people and done reports based on the data...,

• Follow the development of people moving in out and where they ended
• Number of people from Ireland....
• ....

 

Answer 7

The big problem here is that all the location data would need to be reversed.

I do this in my data base, have over 10,000 names (all family related) I can sort on Birth, death, marriage, or census and gets grouped by country first, then State, then county, then city or sub district.  I can then see everybody that located in close proximity to one and other, nice for missing that lost person with miss-transcribed name or whatever.

Answer 8

Something like this would be very useful. Looking for people on the same census records is one of the tricks I use when I am stuck.

Answer 9

Census location has definitely help me find lost ancestors. I've found they all lived close together, and knowing the street names from the census definitely helped me when narrowing done the search criteria to find more of them. But that was searches elsewhere, not here on WikiTree.