The example in the original question gave a possible example which explains the confusion over the taxonomy:

How would I represent the fact that a person is “roman-catholic”

RELI roman-catholic
RELI rÃmisch-katholisch
RELI roemisch-katholisch
RELI RK
RELI RC

Very good point. But one that is more complex that it may first appear.

The biggest problem GEDCOM files will have with such specific taxonomy examples is the use of character entities like the à which is might not recognize during the import/exporting process by genealogy software programs.

The issue of standardized values, such as grouping and sorting all Roman Catholics and Mormons together in your database program, makes this even more complex since Catholics may be listed as Catholic, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Assyrian, Chaldean Syrian, Byzantine, and so on. All come under “Catholic” but you’d have to program the computer to recognize each of these as “Catholic” even if they don’t have the word in the tag.

Then there is the issue, as another person brought up, of the ancestor being baptized in one religion, marrying under another religion, converting to a different religion, or changing religions due to marriage or other reasons. If there is only one tag for religion, how do you associate it with the religious changes a person might make in their lifetime?

In GEDCOM, the tag or token is standardized, but the information within the tag isn’t always as standardized. The problem isn’t in the tag but the information the tag holds.

The best recommendation the team came up with, and I agree, is to maintain your own standardized references. If you want to separate Roman Catholics from Eastern Orthodox Catholics in your family tree, label them accordingly. If not, then keep the reference as simple as possible by calling them Catholic.

One interesting note in the discussion was the fact that the:

…Handbook of Religious Denominations in the United States, edition of 1985 from Abingdon Press. It lists over 225 denominations from 22 years ago; who knows how many there are now! Think of how many “non-denominational” churches have sprung since then, each of which would probably insist on being included. And that’s just the United States. I’m sure there would be thousands and thousands if the whole world were included.

Another adds:

…there were over 70,000 Australians who listed their religion as Jedi in the 2001 census.

You can see how this religious thing has gotten totally out of control, making our job as family history researchers and preservers much more difficult.

In his recent picture book Hanukkah at Valley Forge, Stephen Krensky gives a main source for his story of Gen. George Washington learning about that Jewish festival, and that book in turn cites as its main source a rabbi’s sermon from 1955. Then, as I discussed yesterday, the trail goes cold.

But Rabbi David Hollander isn’t the only person who’s talked or written about Washington meeting a Jewish soldier at Valley Forge. The web has captured several other examples-so many, in fact, that it’s possible to triangulate among those versions to find the details they share, which hint at a common source. I think that internal evidence points to an oral tradition that started sometime in the mid-20th century and then spread among rabbis and Jewish writers, details changing along the way.

As J.L. Bell explains, tracking down this kind of information into hard cold facts is very difficult. If it were a current day event, then there would be living witnesses, but researching a past event means digging into written accounts from the time period, as well as photographs and records.

This is a great example of the depth researchers of history go to find out the truth behind the legends. And teaches us more about how we need to be more thorough when researching our own family stories and history.

Bell covers more of this in Seeing Fiction as Fact.

Rather than exchanging photos, music and cellphone numbers, as many of the 100 million members of MySpace.com do, participants in Ms. Wong’s online community share Y-DNA markers and mtDNA Haplogroups.

The neuroscientist is president and chief executive officer of Genetrack Biolabs Inc., one of the country’s largest DNA testing labs. Recently the Vancouver company broadened its focus beyond paternity suits and other legal testing to capitalize on the emerging field of genetic genealogy.

With a swab of the mouth and access to Genetrack’s site DNAancestryproject.com, clients can trace their lineage for possible connections to famous figures of the past, such as Marie Antoinette, whose DNA has been preserved in a locket of her hair.

The farther back in time, the wider the family connections. For example, researchers have found that one in five men in the northwest of Ireland carry the DNA of the great Irish king Niall Noigiallach, who ruled in the early 5th century. And they estimate that 2 per cent of New York’s European males today also share the royal chromosome.

Turning back the clock to prehistoric times, the website lets participants track the migratory paths their distant ancestors took out of Africa and even connect with people of related groups today.

Amazing. We spend time researching our family history through our blogs and genealogy discussion groups, but imagine a social networking group whose sole purpose to to connect you with your DNA relatives.

The idea behind Genetrack and DNAancestryproject.com is to help those researching their family history through their DNA find common ground and make connections beyond the gene pool. According to the company president, Ms. Wong: “Everybody in the project is connected to everyone else.” Which makes this social networking project even more amazing and wide spread.

Genetrack’s DNA testing kit has been sold online, but just recently started appearing in a few retail sale in stores in Canada, the US, and other places in the world. According to Genetrack, it is most popular for the 47-54 year old age group, but many young people are starting to get into digging into their past. I’d love to walk into a store and buy a DNA testing kit, wouldn’t you?

What makes this new social networking trend fascinating is the new relationships that could form because of this. The concept of “family” has been changing for a long time in the United States and elsewhere as we move farther apart from our blood relatives and turn friends into “family members”.

DNA social networking groups could reverse that trend, turning strangers into blood relatives, allowing us to meet up with family members long separated by time and distance.

In my own family history research, I’ve been able to make connections with long lost family members through genealogy research and resources online, meeting in person family descendants from the 17th and 18th century. I’ve only recently started exploring my own DNA history and expect to make contact with family members separated even farther back.

Each person I connect with brings with them some history and information about their family’s lives as well as their own that helps me fill in the missing puzzle pieces of my own. Answers from the past often help answer questions in the present.

DNA social networking is destined to become a powerful Web 2.0 type force on the web. Would you participate? How would you use such a social networking service? How would it benefit you?

Some of the most valuable online resources to history researchers still do not offer feeds, such as the US National Archives or most pages and resources on Ancestry.com, which limits access, use, and makes it difficult to keep track of new events, activities, resources, and news.

Feed technology has been around for several years and is one of the fastest growing methods of communication and sharing on the web. If your site doesn’t offer feeds, you are losing readers.

For those who monitor the many websites and blogs most family history and genealogy researchers do, visiting each site individually is a nightmare and time waster. Feeds are XML files from a website or blog containing the latest new information on the site in chronological order. These are read through many different feed readers such as Firefox’s Sage Feed Reader, Google Reader, or one of the many web-based feed readers.

Site and blog feeds feature the most recent posts by title, excerpt or full content, allowing your eye to skim across a single page to find out which websites you monitor have new information. Click on the title or link and it will take you directly to the newly updated information to get the full story, if you want.

While many family history and genealogy sites and blogs still have a long way to go visually and structurally, adding feeds is one of the best things you can do to help spread the word about what you have to offer.

If your website host, software, or blogging program does not offer feeds, you can create and add your own through one of the many feed creation services online.

For more information, see:

• Don’t You Know What a Feed Is Yet? Get To Know Your Feeds!
• Benefits and Uses of Website Feeds
• Understanding, Using, and Customizing WordPress Blog Feeds
• Adding RSS Feeds to WordPress
• The Birth of RSS
• Blogging Tips – Hundreds of Resources for Finding Content for Your Blog
• Customizing RSS Feed Links for WordPress.com and WordPress Sidebar Widgets
• Create RSS Feeds on Any Web Page
• Using Your Feeds for Story Ideas
• Beauty is Only Skin Deep: Designing Blogs For Feeds, Search Engines and Audience
• WordPress Plugins for Feeds
• Yahoo! Pipes: Better Feed Mixer
• Monitoring Your Blog’s Topics and Industry
• Creating Custom Feeds For Sites Without Feeds
• Truths and Consequences of Blogs That Stand Out

The first silver ever extracted from coarser materials by Europeans in the New World appears to have been a desperate, last ditch effort involving not American, but Spanish metals, say archaeologists.

The strange tale, entwined with Christopher Columbus’ questionable approach to attracting European investors to back his expeditions, has been uncovered at the site of the abandoned colony of La Isabela, on Hispaniola in the Caribbean.

The mystery started with the discovery of a leaden slag heap high in the layers of debris — indicating that it was one of the last things the colonists created before leaving what was the first European town in the Americas in 1498.

It seems that when Columbus couldn’t find the wealth he needed to bring back proof of his successful and expensive voyage and discovery of the new world, he made some up.

The lead contained a small amount of silver and they smelted it down to produce what little they could find. The isotopic signature of the metal found came from Spain, not the Caribbean, the researchers found. So the treasure they brought back to Spain came from Spain.

According to one of the researchers, “Columbus led them all on.” Though the deception didn’t last long. “In 1496 Columbus was shipped back to Spain in chains and his colonies were left to fend for themselves.”

Columbus has been hailed for centuries as the great discoverer of the new world, and I and many children grew up with dreams of what it must have been like to sail off into the unknown, awaiting that moment when we’d slip off the edge of the world to our death, or prove the theories right, that the earth was indeed round. And what mysteries and adventures would we meet along the way?

In some areas of the world, Columbus has been granted near sainthood with the fame and legend around his mythology.

Today, we’re finding a lot of our long-held, historical myths aren’t really true.

In other news from the Discovery Channel, a new documentary aired about the finding of the “tomb of Jesus”, offering proof and evidence, they say, that this is indeed the spot where Christ was buried.

The only thing is that the evidence sounds more like proof that Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code, was based upon truth, not fiction.

New scientific evidence, including DNA analysis conducted at one of the world’s foremost molecular genetics laboratories, as well as studies by leading scholars, suggests a 2,000-year-old Jerusalem tomb could have once held the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.

The findings also suggest that Jesus and Mary Magdalene might have produced a son named Judah.

The DNA findings, alongside statistical conclusions made about the artifacts — originally excavated in 1980 — open a potentially significant chapter in Biblical archaeological history.

Significant chapter? While those names were very common during that time period and people were buried like that for several hundred years, if somehow it is proven that this is the family of Jesus and where they were buried, whether or not Jesus rose from the dead or not, it certainly changes the history of the world according to Christians. Not because they have found the “real tomb”. The Christian world would be rocked to find a married and childbearing Jesus. Either way, it will be a new tourist spot for visitors to Jerusalem, bringing in more tourist dollars.

True or not, discoveries like this and the assumptions made about them continually question the past we thought we knew and believed in.

What Myths Lurk in Your Family Tree?

There are a lot of myths in my family tree. I bet there are in yours. For several generations we believed that the West family was descended from British royalty and that we could go to England and claim the unclaimed inheritance of our ancestors…if we wanted to, but no one ever did. I have since learned that we are not related to that family in any way.

Yet, ask my aunt and she’ll tell you that her hands look the way they do because she is a descendant of royalty and has “royal hands”, whatever that means. She taught all her children to honor their hands because they, too, had royal hands.

Another recently uncovered West mystery is that my grandfather Howard West Sr. was abandoned by his mother when he was a little baby and that he never saw his mother again. It’s true that he was indeed abandoned and taken in by a Catholic orphanage in Portland, Oregon, but he was six years old. And we have censor records showing him living with him mother as a teenager, as well as information to prove that he had contact with her on a regular basis up until her death in 1930.

We also recently discovered that a myth about Elizabeth Knapp in the Knapp family was also untrue. The story was that she was discovered in the burning wreckage of a wagon train crossing the West attacked by Indians, the sole survivor. The James Brothers, notorious bank robbers, rescued her and turned her over to a friend to raise. Tracing her family history, she might have been on a wagon train, and may have been the sole survivor of a massacre, we haven’t been able to determine that. But if Jesse and Frank James participated, they were not even 10 years old at the time, making it a little difficult to believe. The dates don’t match no matter how much we fidget with them.

What myths do you have in your family tree? What stories have you always believed but then found were untrue as you dug deep into the truth of your family’s stories?

Is there cancer in you family’s medical pedigree? And if so, how are you going to find it? From death certificates? Obituaries? Perhaps they will help, but death certificates were established as public health documents, not for the enlightenment of genealogists, so don’t get your hopes too high! It may take some real detective work, but it’s certainly worth the try. So let’s get out your family pedigree chart and see how we succeed. Let’s begin with the most recent generations.

We know that cancer is a problem today in all the developed countries around the world. Thanks to the National Health Institute (NIH) and the American Cancer Society (ACS) we can study the statistics, see the trends, and decide where to focus our efforts. If you know of any cancers in the youngest generation, enter them now. If there was a cancer death, be sure to record the date, of course, but also keep a record of any “incidental” cancer cases — those which might have contributed to death or just be an incidental finding. As one out of every four deaths in the United States is from cancer, the odds are pretty strong that it won’t be long before you’ve noted some cases. If you do, be sure to note the estimated date of ONSET, or at least when it was first suspected or diagnosed.

Part of my recent research into our family tree involved tracking why people died, but while it occured to me, the process of tracking down illnesses that didn’t kill people immediately, like some cancers, would be harder information to find.

As is typical with such illnesses, Dr. Knights recommends getting information from living relatives. But this only gets you as far as the last two to four generations. No one is alive who remembers what happened to great-great-great grandmother.

Death certificates only list the cause of death, and sometimes they just didn’t know. It would list heart failure, but maybe it was a cancer or disease that caused the heart to give out.

Dr. Knights gives examples of the most common forms of cancer historically in the United States, but who knows what was really going on in the early 1800s to our ancestors.

A surprising statistic he offered was about children:

It may surprise you to learn that in children, cancer is the second leading cause of death between ages 1-14 in the U.S., with accidents causing the most fatalities. The diseases affecting children are much different than those in adults; lymphocytic and other leukemias are the most common, followed by tumors of the nervous system, lymphomas, soft-tissue lesions and tumors of the kidneys.

If this statistic is true, maybe the death of so many young in our past wasn’t just related to accidents and disease.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

So gather what medical information you can today to create a record for your descendants.

Most online database websites provide a field for selecting the date range of a search, or the age range of an individual in a particular record. An age range is, in fact, a date range because you are estimating the period of years in which a birth took place. Regardless of the nature of the date estimate or the breadth of years you choose to search, careful analysis should go into the choice.

When searching for an individual take into account what date information you have and where it came from. Can it be considered accurate? What did a record state? Some individuals regularly lied about age, not necessarily with any consistency as to the error. Some records did not require an accurate age, perhaps just an indication the individual was over the age of twenty-one.

A successful search could also depend upon the date when the record was made. This is true of wills. The date of probate is more significant and may have been years after the date of death.

Many family history and genealogy programs will help you estimate the age and various events in the list of your ancestor, but a lot of the estimating comes from guessing. The more informed your guess, the closer to the truth you might be.

When you record a “guess” or “estimate” in the research information of your ancestor, make sure you label it as such. The next generation of family history researchers might think your guess is a fact and be led astray by the mistake. Be clear on what is a known and verified fact and what is a guess or estimate in your research records.

As part of my exploration of the 1700s and 1800s, trying to learn more about the lifestyle of my family in the United States at that time, how they lived, why they moved around, and the news and politics of the time, I’m finding more wonderful websites and blogs like Bell’s which open up a new world for me.

Bell helps us not only understand how they lived and the news and politics of the time, but why. Here are some recent highlights:

• The Revolution in Boys’ Hair covers the issue of hair fashion trends among children and adults.
• George Washington Sat Here? about the chair in Washington’s headquarters for resting his hindquarters in going on the auction block.
• Shaving Heads and Faces for a Living is another hair piece on barbers and wig makers.
• What Wigs Said About Professions is another is his wonderful ongoing series on wigs and hair from the past.
• Dr. G’s Twelfth Night Plumb Cake shares stories and food from the Twelfth Night celebrations.
• Skimmington ride leads to death in 1764 about how justice was served, or not, in the early days of America.
• Farewell Ceremony features a description of General George Washington bidding farewell to his officer corp at the end of the Revolutionary War.
• Washington’s Asymmetric Generals is a wonderful look at some of our war heroes who came to their post disabled, disfigured, or physically impaired and imperfect, which would get them booted out of today’s military.

Enjoy the step back in time that Bell’s Boston 1775 offers and get a new perspective on what life was like during the early years of the United States.

The conversation was a reminder of how important it is to document our trail through addresses. If for some reason my personal history didn’t survive the years, for a future family historian researching my life, knowledge of my relatively brief stay in that house would be helpful in locating several important vital records, and in separating my Smith family from the countless other Smiths in the area. Because I didn’t live there during a census year, that knowledge would have to come from other sources.

Knowing your ancestor’s address can be an important key to locating other records. Let’s take a closer look at where to find addresses and how they can be used.

The article continues with great tips and resources for putting together a “chronology of addresses” for your ancestor’s lives, helping to fill in the blanks on your family’s history.

If your ancestor had an untimely end, check for details in the local coroner’s records. Dating back some 900 years, the coroner’s system traces its beginnings to medieval England. Death was serious business in merry old England. Strict and complex rules governed death, its circumstances, and the handling of corpses. The coroner imposed hefty fines on community residents who side-stepped the rules regarding dead persons.

It was particularly bothersome when strangers to a community turned up dead in their midst. The responsibilities and potential financial consequences for those who discovered stray dead people could be so great that villagers sometimes dragged a dead body to a nearby village and left the unfortunate soul on someone else’s doorstep.

The coroner’s position evolved over the years from fine collector to its current primary responsibility, which is investigating suspicious, violent, sudden, or unattended deaths.