New page for New Netherland Settlers project [closed]

Question

I've made a distinction between immigrants & immigrant ancestors in other discussions, but I don't think I conveyed what I meant/envisioned, but now I've created what I was thinking of:

The freespace page http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:New_Netherland_Immigrant_Ancestor_-_Jan_Joosten

When I say "the immigrant ancestor," I mean just one person ... such as Jan Joosten (in WikiTree, Van_Meteren-8) .

My concept is that the subcategory "New Netherland Immigrants from Amsterdam" would include those who left from Amsterdam to settle New Netherland (everyone who took ship, and I suppose chldren born during the voyage).  Other "New Netherland Immigrants from ..." subcategories could be created for other ports of embarkation within the parameters of the project. These subcategories will cover everyone who should be under this project but wasn't born in New Netherland.

Then, if all of the New Netherland Settlers had a freespace page for their immigrant ancestor along the lines of http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:New_Netherland_Immigrant_Ancestor_-_Jan_Joosten , then the New Netherland Settlers project page could include a list of those pages or refer to the Category:New Netherland Immigrant Ancestors (no, I haven't done that category yet - I'm about to make another g2g post on that, but I also wanted get feedback on the concept/page before I actually created the category).

I think this would provide an intuitive, clean way to track profiles designated under our project as Project Protected as well as information about the Dutch (non)use of surnames/the use of WikiTree IDs.

I'll be offline till this evening, but I look forward to your feedback (also, I'll respond to any trusted list requests then; please provide feedback on when/if these pages should be open too).

Thanks!

Answer 1

Liz, I don't understand why you'd have a separate profile (in the SPACE: namespace) for the emigrating ancestor AND their normal profile. (If we did this for Puritan Great Migration, we'd have 30,000 "duplicate" profiles via the Space: area.) 

Why not just categorize the existing regular profile page as a New Netherland Settler, and incorporate migration-related information into the narrative? Here's an example for a PGM profile:

Obadiah Holmes

 

Note, he's also associated with a separate project, Monmouth (NJ) Patentees.

Comments

it's more a family page than a profile page for him. feedback so far seems to be I'm off track. oh well.

So... how does PGM track/list agreed-upon LNAB and  identified lowest-numbered profiles, the coordination needed to get there, and the profiles protected under the project?

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We're "lucky" in the case of the Puritan Great Migration because there is a very recent series of books written (mostly) by Robert Charles Anderson (in some volumes, he's the first of say, three authors). This is the Great Migration series-- the first volume of which was published in 1995; the most recent I think just last year. His books cover 1620-1635. The Puritan Great Migration went longer than that, but we're starting there.

We've been using his conventions-- for both spelling (putting alternates in Other Last Name or Other First Name) and facts (including relationships). Almost every fact he includes is cited. So when there is disputed information, we go with what Anderson went with until there is more recent research done that reveals otherwise.

In the absence of such a road map, we'd follow wiki policy-- use the spelling most frequently used by the person in their time period, as demonstrated on contemporaneous records. That's not always easy for the folks from the 1600s in particular (and back) because the spelling of names was FAR more fluid than it later became. A given individual in their own life time, or even from one record to the next in a given year could have different spellings. I see it ALL the time in colonial New England records. In such cases, you pick one -- hopefully one spelling is used more than any other -- and hope you're right.

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Liz, I have typically used the male head of household to record the family information. At least in the time period I'm working on when families were legally ruled by a male. See that profile link I provided above for how I do that.

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thanks again for the suggestions. I did look at the profile you'd referenced, but what I did for the space page for Jan Joosten was geared toward all his descendants, not just his immediate family.  My way of thinking about things is often a bit off from conventional thinking. The page helps me immensely, but if now one else finds it beneficial, I'll just keep that one for my reference and drop the idea for a category with a page for the immigrant ancestor of the families who settled New Netherland.  Not sure how to address all the project's needs now though -

Project participants... any ideas?

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Jillaine - your post jogged my memory... I think someone had e-mailed me about a society that would provide us with something similar to what you described when I was first floating the idea for this project. or maybe it was about the Penn project, or maybe I dreamed it - I sure can't find the reference now. But I'll keep looking now that I (sorta) remember it! Cheers, Liz

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Woo-hoo!  Found it:

http://www.hollandsociety.com/surnames.html

Kari Lemons had sent it -Thanks Kari!  And thanks for the jog Jillaine!

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Liz, Thank God we all think differently. Life would be boring if we all thought the same way.

I re-examined your Jan Joosten page, this time trying to bring what I call "beginner's mind" to it-- i.e., as if I know nothing. I still think a bunch of it can be handled through his profile page, including the link to his descendants. What feels like it would be messy to include on the profile page is all the tech work associated with him-- the merging of duplicates, the finding of the appropriate LNAB, the discussion of the impact that all the spelling variations are having on trying to merge the dupes, yada yada. 

You might consider using a G2G post for that stuff, linked to his profile page. What I find helpful about that approach is that people can respond; you can use the multiple answers for tackling specific types of challenges, and you have a history of what led you as a group to make the decisions you made, all linked to the original profile. I've done variations of that with some of the PGM people who were particularly thorny (i.e., where there was a LOT of disputed information about parents, spouses, children, blah blah). Let's see if I can find an example... (play Jeopardy music here)

Oh, here's a good, problematic one: 

William Bassett

 

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ooh - I like that approach... especially the "paper trail" on how it got there (I can' remember why I went upstairs half the time!)  Thanks!

One of the project members very kindly started my education about Dutch "naming" conventions and it's continuing. I'd originally thought just a single page on the subject, but then had the idea for space pages and doing it by family.  Maybe I'll revisit the original idea after the criteria gets set.

thanks again for all the help! (and the William Bassett link - I'd forgotten too about how cool timelines/chronologies can be in a profile!)