Illegitimate births

Question

I started using the Category tag Illegitimate years ago, recently I see that it's being deprecated. What should I use instead? Will anything be auto-replaced by the robot?

Answer 1

Categories are meant to group people together.  A category for 'Illegitimate' could contain millions of profiles, so is not recommended.

Comments

Some of us are interested in Italian foundlings and would like to track them in the aggregate to see what we can learn about them (local naming conventions alone could prove useful for finding ancestral origins). Would this category also get trashed at some point if it were implemented? I understand that Wikitree is probably trying to achieve a higher level of organization but those of us who were already using the platform created categories because they're useful to us. It's kind of infuriating to find my work deleted. I thought that couldn't happen here but robots do it regularly.

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Then, perhaps the Italy Project could/should have a category for Italy, foundlings rather than the broader (and genealogically meaningless for any real use based on Ros's statement) "illegitimate".
Regionalising something such as "foundlings" for the purpose of tracking naming, etc, would be useful in a way the "illegitimate" category is not.

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Justin, the edit bot does only what it's told to do, so if at all, you should be mad at the Categorization Project, not at the edit bot.

While I'm only officially leading the location categories for Italy Project, I also try to take care for other Italian categories. I don't think a category "Italy, foundlings" will be any different than a worldwide "illegitimate" or "foundlings" category. There will be many profiles in it, and then? What is the advantage in grouping them? If surnames should be compared, then a category or WikiTree+ might not be the easiest way of doing it. Then I would suggest a spreadsheet that can be sorted by surname, date and location and can do graphics. As much as I know, getting a spreadsheet from WikiTree+ is quite complicated.

As much as I remember discussion in the Italy Project, surnames of foundlings differ quite a lot by region, so a full "Italy, foundlings" category would not really be useful. Maybe a solution could be to make a subcategory "foundlings" for a One Place Study? See answer of Danielle. That would be okay for the team leaders of Italy Project.

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Yes, of course the robots only do what they're programmed to do, but I'm not one of those programming them, and when you are, I believe it is your responsibility to reach out to stakeholders, not leave it to us to scramble when you've destroyed our research tools, humble as they are. When you take action on profiles I work with, to meet an aesthetic, and make no effort to tell me about it so I can weigh in with how to achieve your goals without ditching mine, it feels like I'm dealing with an uncaring automaton.

To answer your question, "Italy, foundlings" would be a useful category for the same reason I was tracking these births as "Illegitimate." They are full of research challenges. Those of us who are looking for the birthplace of a foundling ancestor would benefit from seeing other profiles from the same region or with the same surname given at birth. Some ten percent of the births in Italy in the past were foundlings or had one unknown parent. The aggregate of profiles, with useful labels, can be a powerhouse of data. We can learn things about our ancestors' practices that will affect an unknown number of researchers.

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Justin, I think you're mixing up two different concepts. Illegitimate is not the same as "father unknown".

Illegitimacy was a label applied to children whose parents were not lawful or religiously married according the code of laws of the time and place of their birth (because there was a previous legal marriage and no divorce allowed, or in settlements with no priest available, many cases and reasons), and it had consequences in their lives. It was widely regarded as demeaning, at least in western cultures, and people suffered and felt ashamed because of that.

I personally would hate to see an "illegitimate" cat or sticker on my mom's profile, because it was a stupid code of laws that put that label on her, not her or her parents. Useless and unnecessary.

I do put a Research Note on the profiles I manage when I'm sure the parents were never married for whatever reason, so future researchers will not waste their time looking for it.    

Children of single women of father unknown was just one subset of them, and these mothers would often make up a husband and a widowhood to protect themselves and their children.

If you need to locate this kind of profiles for some reason, you can try Suggestion 419 or 420 in WT+ and keep the word "illegitimate" for your personal spreadsheets.

Answer 2

hi Justin, you have a One Place Study for Corleone, and all these profiles you mention would fall under it.  You could do a subcategory for your OPS named ''Corleone One Place Study, Foundlings'' which would group your profiles together for your study.

Comments

I think that would be the best solution .

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It doesn't meet my needs because not all the foundlings I discover were born in Corleone. See my above comment on why foundlings outside Corleone are of interest.

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Then I would suggest to use a personal category, as Italy Project leaders agreed that an "Italy, foundlings" or "Italy, illegitimate" category would contain too many profiles as well.

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Put the Corleone ones in your OPS, and any others into a personal category, until such time as you figure out what else you can do with them.  That way you can track them easily.

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Justin,
Another suggestion, as you mentioned that others would study illegitimate births as well: you could lead a free space project, this would contain a free spage page, for example named "Space: Italy, Illegitimate Births Project" and a category with the exact same name. You could still do subcategories for regions and/or OPS and linking them to each other. But then you would need to write on the project page what you are trying to achieve with the project and how others can contribute. If you do so, I would try to contribute and Italy Project leaders would be fine with it as well. If you think that's not what you need, then I would also suggest subcategories for OPS and/or personal categories.

You could easily start with personal categories and do a project later. Edit Bot can rename or merge categories, which I can set up any time for you, but it can not split categories, that would be a task that needs to be done manually.

Edit: typo.

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A free space project could work, but these have also been modified in the past without notice, so it's really the same as having the category tag. My big problem is not how to organize the work I do---that's in my professional skill set---it's that people with self-appointed responsibilities take it upon themselves to delete what I set up.

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Putting Illegitimate births into a subcategory for a city doesn't help those of us interested in tracking such births. It should be obvious, but these kinds of births occur everywhere.

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Justin, that is the whole point of the deletion of the Illegitimate category.  They happen all over the planet, so as a category to group profiles, it's basically useless as these children have nothing else in common for the most part.  Only very narrow location categories for such can shed light on things in an area, and even then, I wonder what such actually demonstrates.

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Your explanation doesn't make sense. The "bakers" category have only a profession in common; the "Cleveland" category are just people who've lived in the same city. If you don't understand the value of a category I made and use, maybe A) don't touch it and B) ask me if you want to know its value.

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Bakers have associations, and contacts with each other, often children will marry people whose parents are in the same trade, lots of examples of this.  Location categories are self-explanatory, this is where they were born, married, died etc.  They possibly met and married somebody from the same place.  Illegitimate children do not have this common factor, they don't tend to hang out together, unless they were in the same orphanage and even then, one has to know that fact.

Answer 3

One question: what do you do with kids born "llegitimate" (or pre-wedding, or out-of-wedlock) and legitimized later via marriage of the parents, sometimes as adults? It was all too common in Italy.

Comments

It's a bio item.  This is certainly not restricted to Italy, seen a fair number of such cases here.  No reason to categorize them as ''illegitimate''.

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I think the question of Cristina was meant for Justin. He was writing about "illegitimate", but in one Facebook post about foundlings. While foundlings are illegitimate, not all illegitimate are foundlings. So l also would like to know if that would be differentiated? I think that might have quite a huge impact on the amount of profiles we are talking about.

Edit: I lost track of what was written where. Foundlings were mentioned here as well, just not in both opening posts.

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I agree with you Danielle. I usually add it in the bio or in research notes if the parents were never legally/religiously married and why not, specially if they were registered with the mother's last name and later changed to the father's.

Honoring the "then and there" spirit of WT, stamp "illegitimate" on someone's profile feels a bit insulting. People were very ashamed of this fact for the most part.