Thanks for sharing your thoughtful resolution.
Cathy
At 12:23 PM 12/03/2007, you wrote:
Thanks, Richard, Cathy and Dawn. I mulled your replies for awhile,
then entered "Cooling" as a father with a "did not marry" tag, left
Davis as the child's surname, left both dates but annotated her
baptism with the register transcription and entered the second
baptism as alt, with again a register transcription. I then
adjusted notes and mulled some more, looking at what I'd done and
seeking to derive general rules for other situations which I have to
work through.
There can be other purposes, but mine is to organize and present
what we'd found and, especially, to give the most help to any later worker.
First priority must be to give all the facts - plus potential facts
with cautions. Data are too hard to come by to waste, and some may
not be there for a later worker to find. Second priority is to
organize presentation to be as useful as possible. Included there
are points like prominence for the earliest baptism, since it's
surrogate for missing birth date, and arranging key data so that a
copy abridged by elimination of notes etc. would still be
useful. Third is to organize notes with great care. It's obvious
that notes should illuminate fact and supply cautions where
appropriate. Less obvious is the need for great clarity and
thorough presentation regarding the compiler's reasoning,
particularly regarding connections made by inference and historical
interpretation. Further, one should identify possible strategies or
sources which one has identified to make further progress. It's a
pity to waste any effort, and a later worker may find practicable
something that isn't at the moment or for the circumstances of the
present compiler.
An aside: As a test, I started to rework what I had for an
ancestor with no parents and an inferred son known only from cryptic
banns lacking the other parish. Reorganized, the notes identified a
strategy for finding ancestors via family naming patterns, and that
pursuing the marriage parish, while certainly desirable, was
of less potential value than finding the assumed son's
birthplace. Seeing such a clear blueprint for further research left
me feeling guilty that I had quit without exhausting easy searches,
so I queried the IGI with a tight window over his probable birth
date. His marriage dropped with the second Sunday after the last
banns as the date, plus birth dates and locations for both - all in
the same parish. Encouraged, I tried the naming pattern scheme and
identified a single family line which fit the criteria, had a
credible location and even a credible candidate. (If that holds up,
it takes the line back another 5 generations, to within a decade of
the 1558 wall.) There are two morals of this. One is that doing
better work may benefit the compiler as well as the reader. The
other is that those features of a genealogy program which encourage
or force good technique in organizing the data benefit genealogy in
multiple ways.
Thanks Again,
kb
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