Pre-1500 Work without a Badge

Many thanks for asking. I haven't received any direct help yet from wikitree but to be fair I have been busy with other Project stuff. I have had a bit of help exploring my ancestral lines from other sources, for example the Guild of One Name Studies. All my ancestral lines seem to get a bit fuzzy and speculative once I go back a few hundred years but perhaps this is par for the course (except for 'royal' or 'nobility' lines, which I have no firm evidence of personal descent from). best regards, David.

Many thanks for your kind offer of help. best regards, David

I don't think most people want long DNA analysis to take up space on profiles. It is probably best if a Free Space page was created, and perhaps a brief note and link to the page.

I am also not sure I agree with the analysis on the Haplogroup J-Z235794 page. As I understand it, you only have one person with a documented trail to any of the medieval Montgomerys. I believe WikiTree requires triangulation to three people before any sort of determination can be made. I would think this is especially true considering how many different surnames you are saying derive from a single ancestor. The choice of the ancestors you associate with J-Z235794 is still just a guess based on mutation probabilities and rates. It is not actually known and does not take into account the possibility of non-paternal events. I would not add this DNA data without more documented lines showing they connect to a common ancestor.

Are there any sources other than the personal family tree passed down to you?

林再祥 = Lin Zaixiang

Something to keep in mind is that the name in Chinese is surname first, then given name. This will need to be reversed to work with the Wikitree naming fields.

I would appreciate this greatly!

SJ Baty has mentioned that Google indeed can help get the pronunciations. For our convenience, I have also typed them beside the appropriate characters. (For reference, 林 = Lin2, but this is listed simply as 'Lin.') I have for some of the names inputted the accent dashes above the vowels, which indicate pronunciation without the numbers. In other cases, I was in a bit of a hurry and hadn't had time to put in the accents to replace the numbers. At any rate, if you or someone is able to create the profiles then leave the info above with my editing permissions, I can polish them with the correct format.

I'll need some more time before I can extract all the sibling names from the document. Unfortunately for pre-1500s relatives, the document doesn't list siblings' birth and death years, only their names and birth order. (For example, the entry for Lin Duāngōng 林端公 lists nine sons and lists his son Lin Sīyì 林思义 as the ninth son.) Once I have the sibling names, I could also list them in the description fields of their father if I don't have the permissions to create the profiles themselves.

In addition to this specific Lin family tree, I do have the oral and some written stories from Lin Jiyao, the relative from whom I've received the family tree. He speaks only Chinese, however, and because he lives in China I'm unsure whether he has access to WikiTree. If he does have access, though, I'm unsure that he'd be able to read it since WikiTree doesn't have a Chinese version, to my knowledge. He may be familiar as well with the gravestones of ancestors, as this is a topic we'd discussed when I asked about whether spouses' and daughters' names appeared within the record. If he is familiar with the graves, ought I ask him if he could visit them sometime, photograph them, and send me images?

SJ Baty is also correct that in Chinese tradition, surnames appear first, before given names. Thankfully, all these ancestors I've compiled are of the same surname, Lin (林). So, the difference would be their given names. Since Chinese people do not traditionally have middle names, I've pasted their Chinese characters in the middle name field so that the name formats correctly according to how a Chinese person's name would appear. To ensure that the pronunciation is retained, I also write the given name with the pronunciation cues (whether the numbers or the accent symbols) in the other nicknames section. In cases of spousal information, many spouses in the earliest centuries had only their family names provided and not their given names. For Chinese relatives, these are examples of the naming convention that I've used on WikiTree:

Proper First Name: Zaixiang

Other Nicknames: Zai4xiang2

Middle Name: 林再祥

Current Last Name: Lin

___

Proper First Name: Duāngōng

Middle Name: 林端公

Current Last Name: Lin

__

Sincerely,

Daniel

I would suggest that you start a free-space page where you can write up a profile how you want it to look, and which I can then copy paste into a profile. It may be better to put the Chinese name in the preferred name field, though I sort of like how it looks in the middle name field. I would suggest you upload and attach the PDF file to one of the profiles.

Joe, Daniel has entered his line down to the present, including some generations of the line that is post-1500, so he can work on these, and we can develop the preferred format without the need for copying and pasting pre-1500 products. Daniel, I spent part of my childhood in China and have a Chinese name and an affinity for the issue. I adopted the profile for Mao Zedung (I first learned to spell it Mao Tse-tung to try to figure out how WikiTree could be jerry-rigged to get the surname in the proper position. WikiTree leadership agrees (I think) that as an intended global site, we will have to solve the name issue sooner or later, but it is not a priority. However, with your energy we will have an impetus to spend some time figuring out policy on how to deal with East Asian names, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. I'd recommend that we spend major time hashing out the issues on one or two profiles, ideally relatively recent ones where there is more information available, so that when you enter the older profiles there will be less need for course correction later on.

戴文光

I suggest we just start with Lin-152, Zaixiang 林再祥 Lin.

Glad to read we're getting traction!

Joe, I'm going to repaste below the list I'd sent you before, now including the accent marks. I'm also sticking the given name in front, then the Chinese name as the middle and the family name on the end if that helps. I'm not sure what you mean by .PDF'ing a free-space page, but if there's an article or page I can read on how to do that, I could read it though not sure whether I'll have the time if it takes a while. Actually performing in a concert this weekend!

Jack, one of the issues I've run into is the fact that Chinese people have given names but also sometimes social names and art names. I've found that most often in real life they'll go by the social names and won't use the given name at all. But, the family trees often refer to people by their given name and only sometimes mention their social names and art names. Taking my late mom, for example, she went only by her social name. And people referred to her late father only by his social name. But, her late mother only went by her art name, and relatives I know haven't even mentioned her given name or her social name if she had one. So, in WikiTree's formatting, I'm inclined to note the name by which people most commonly referred to folks but then add in a description field specifying all the known names and which ones were the given, social and art ones. I could certainly try to hash out some better system with the relatives that have clear records of these multiple names. But, I'm unfortunately less familiar with whether this would apply to Korean and Japanese families as well. It might, though, especially given that the lunar calendar age reckoning seems similar across cultures.

Zàixiáng 林再祥 Lin was the earliest ancestor born after 1500, and his profile is online at Lin-252.

Zàixiáng 林再祥 Lin's father was Xiùhéng 林秀衡 Lin, born 1480. He passed away after 1506.

Xiùhéng 林秀衡 Lin's father was Wéncái 林文材 Lin, born 1459. He passed away after 1479.

Wéncái 林文材 Lin's father was Xìngfǔ 林幸甫 Lin, born 1434. He passed away in 1506.

Xìngfǔ 林幸甫 Lin's father was Gōngmào 林公茂 Lin, born 1405. He passed away in 1466.

Gōngmào 林公茂 Lin's father was Jūnyuán 林均元 Lin, born 1369. He passed away in 1433.

Jūnyuán 林均元 Lin's father was Chéngjué 林成爵 Lin, born 1346. He passed away in 1413.

Chéngjué 林成爵 Lin's father was Guāngguì 林光貴 Lin, born 1319. He passed away in 1389.

Guāngguì 林光貴 Lin's father was Dìngfǔ 林定辅 Lin, born 1288. He passed away in 1350.

Dìngfǔ 林定辅 Lin's father was Jìnzuò 林进祚 Lin, born 1262. He passed away in 1333.

Jìnzuò 林进祚 Lin's father was Sīyì 林思义 Lin, born 1228. He passed away in 1305.

Sīyì 林思义 Lin's father was Duāngōng 林端公 Lin, born 1195. He passed away in 1253.

Duāngōng 林端公 Lin was the oldest recorded relative on this family tree.

Best, Daniel（林丹尼）

A major one is the use of Chinese or Roman characters in the LNAB. Purists say that to be global, we should use the character that the individual would have used, whether Chinese, Roman, Cyrillic, Thai, Hindi, Arabic, Greek, etc. Others say that for the site to be useful to the majority of its users, who use Roman letters, the LNAB should be in Roman letters. I put my Chinese name in my profile as a nickname; I had originally had Mao Zedung's in Roman characters, but it has been amended to Chinese characters. Since Wikitree's benefit is that we all work on the same profiles, If we don't get some policies agreed to, the profiles we create will get bounced back and forth from one style to another!

Jack, I agree the LNAB using native language is quite a challenge. In my family's case, since some immigrated to the U.S., they adopted English family names, such as Lin, based on their Chinese family name 林。 Thus, if a Chinese relative has immigrated to the States but adopted Lin as the family name, would that make his daughters Lin or 林? Technically both. There certainly is a difficulty though in making sure the Chinese people under Lin are connected to the Chinese people under 林。 For now, I've been going with the style most readable to me so that I can best explain it to my English-speaking relatives (who can't read the Chinese family's tree). Frankly, if there's any way to back-end code the "Lin" (and even "Lín," the proper pronunciation) to equal "林," that may be the surest solution I see.

Joe, one reason I went with the middle name field was so that when looking at the relatives from WikiTree's family tree view I can see immediately how to pronounce the name. I agree that Mao's profile is difficult to read in places as I too would need to look up the pronunciation to properly read the characters. While the profile does list Máo Zédōng, it's a bit far down and not as readily findable as the "澤東 毛" part displayed from the top.

Enjoying this discussion! I feel like I don't often get to chat with such conscientious people about these issues in translation.

Cheers, Daniel

I can help you. Looking at the free-space page, we will need to find more sources.

Joe

Thank you for your help.

I found more sources. Can you please have a look at his free space https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Albert_de_Namur_Pre-1500_Profile

I also asked some questions.

With kind regards, Carolina.

The page is at https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Space:John_Aylett_Pre-1500_Work&public=1

Ruth --

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Van_Brakel-176 with https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Brakel-7 and then update the last one, as it is an ugly gedcom upload. I found a great resource, a book about this family with a lot of original sources listed and described and you can read it online :). https://issuu.com/boekengilde/docs/twee_zalmen_die_regtop_en_afgewend_

I will need a little time to write the biographies and add/format the sources . So I will work on formatting the biographies and adding the sources in my free space. I will let you know when they are ready. :)

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