Genealogy Standards and Conventions

These are the standards and conventions used in compiling these family trees.

Privacy:

• Information and notes on living persons require login.
• No Social Security numbers (SSNs) are used.
• Information on living adopted children is not shown unless authorized by that child.

General Standards and Conventions:

• For each person, the reasoning and reliability of the relationship and other facts is discussed in the general notes, and notes in citations, if there are any problems or uncertainties. On Ancestry this appears as the Notes citation.
   
• Everyone is documented by their birth name. Aliases and name changes are documented as additional names (especially a woman's married name if she adopts the husband's surname or is so named in documentation). Often older birth names have various spellings so the most common or preferred is used.
   
• Serious name difficulties or variations are documented as a separate name. Spelling or typographical differences, and some minor variations are cited under the corresponding name.
   
• Married names may be given for women even though the husband is not included in the tree, when the husband has no children in the descending ancestral line.
   
• For unknown surnames names, an artificial name is used such as FamilyLastFirst where Last is the married name for a wife with unknown birth name. For example, "FamilySmallJane". Unknown is used for first names.
   
• Places in the United States are given as city, county followed by "County", and state. Places outside the US, are generally given as recorded.
   
• "Unknown" is used for birth or death if actual dates not known. Partials such as "6 Dec" for death cannot be used (TNG web software does not recognize such as a date) so such are given as alternatives.
   
• Couples in a Census or documented as living together are evidence supporting marriage even if not explicitly stated.
   
• To provide a feasible limit, this site is limited to ancestors in America and descendants from more recent ancestors. Otherwise the tree would be infinite! Relatives by marriage are included insofar as their information is in a cited source, so that their descendants have a starting point for their research.
   
• These genealogies are maintained in Family Tree Maker 2024 (FTM) and exported to these sites as a GEDCOM file. The sites use The Next Generation (TNG 13) web software for display of the detailed data. The trees here are also exported to Ancestry.com for display only.
   
• TNG uses the ISO-8859-1 character set and data as exported from FTM as a GEDCOM text file in UTF-8 characters. This should provide a consistent English character set. While this also provides other Western European characters (usually diacriticals on the regular alphabet letter), such characters are avoided in fact data because search input from most keyboards does not easily find such characters. Such characters may appear in citations.
   
• Also see Census Records, Cemetery Records, and Evidence Notes.

Citation Conventions:

• Each citation contains all text with family related data. The data itself is an exact transcription or explains the problem. Pro forma, non-family, or duplicate wordage need not be quoted in full. Skipped text is usually marked by "...".
   
• A single source is a a single citation. For example, all of the Census lines for a family are one citation. If related persons are on the same or nearby page, all are included in one citation. This preserves the implied relationships between the persons.
   
• Information is transcribed from the original document if available. If not, then a provided transcription, such as Ancestry.com data displays, are used. Problems or notes are given in square brackets[].
   
• For documents not readily available, such as family documents or documents obtained from other researchers, the image and possibly a text transcription are saved in the Documents area.
   
• For computer sources, text is cut and pasted into citations to save time, but some cleanup may be done for clarity or compactness.
   
• Line breaks in citations will show as line breaks in the TNG web display. They are used for readability, whether they occur in the original document or not. On Ancestry, the text is all one blob since they stopped accepting embedded HTML and ignore line breaks in the text..
   
• Notes on citations currently show after the citation as just more text. However notes on citations are not used, and text in square brackets [] are used in the citation instead.
   
• Media links are not currently used, because  FTM and TNG do not agree on format.