Should redundancies in Biographies be removed?

Question

It seems redundant to repeat listed birth, marriage and death data in the biography.  Should redundant biographies be cleaned up?

Comments

I've thought about that too. My reason for putting such in from transcriptions from sources is the extra info such as witnesses and who officiated, and to copy/paste quick and dirty.

---

I agree. Transcriptions give so much more than just dates.I try to use them all the time.

---

some people like to list birth, marriage and death dates at the top, and then do a full narrative bio, which of course would need the dates being repeated.  When you are looking at a profile, searching to find out if this is the right one for instance, and already know certain facts about who you are looking for, like died before x date, then you can tell at a glance if the profile is likely to be the right one, if death date listed is after your date.

Answer 1

Yes - if you mean the same data is listed multiple times in the biography.

No - if you're referring to someone's birth being listed in the bio as well as in the data up the top.

Including BDM information as part of the biography allows people to give much more interesting detail about the event, and where the information came from (e.g. that they were born in a hut on the edge of this village or just before a ship reached port in this country, they were married in this church or at their uncle's home, that the location of birth was inferred from this information, etc.).

It also helps to highlight problems between the data dates and the biography dates that might have happened in a merge.

Comments

An additional reason for listing BDM in the bio is to allow the appropriate source to be linked to the data with, perhaps, an inline citation.

Answer 2

As Kathleen already pointed out, having the extra information in the biography allows for more context to be added, information that cannot be captured in the pre-defined fields.  That being said, if a biography provides no further information at all about the BDM, then I would consider removing it or even better, sourcing it appropriately then entering all of the extra details.

Answer 3

I have seen several profiles that list their children in the notes or biography along with their birthdates. My Heavens!, Is it not just as easy to create profiles for the children?

Comments

I list children in the notes or biography for several reasons. I may not have a source or reliable source for that information. The children may have lived with them but I wonder if they were really theirs. If you are not sure if my John Smith is the right one, the names, however little I know, might help us work it out. In every case, I hope to be able to add a profile for each one.

---

I repeat the birth and death dates to be able to < ref > the source. Even if I find the source later....

When I’m working on a profile I will often list the children with dates in the Research Notes, as this is a guide for me to go back and create profiles for the kids. There are also cases where a source pertinent to a child, such as marriage or death, also has information to cite for the parents (e.g., mother maiden name).

---

Well, actually, it really isn't just as easy to create profiles as to write a few names, and I do the latter while I'm still gathering information about the family. It also helps me create the children's profiles if I have already created the references on the parents' pages.

But children are a massively important part of a person's life, so I think biographies are incomplete without them. The biography is what I read to learn about someone's life - the list of names at the top just functions as a navigation aid, for me.

Also when I'm using e.g. 'children present in a household during a census' as evidence of identity, then it helps to have not just their names but any deaths noted on the same page.

---

I agree with the various replies above and do the same, list the children in the biographies.  This helps tremendously when there is doubt about the marriage date or death of the person, and it is much faster than creating individual wiki tree persons for each.  I'm also unsure if we really do want thousands of "Anonymous Baby" wiki tree records laying around for each one that died at birth.  Same with baptized children that died before getting married who had another with the same name a few years later; might just confuse people trying to find the right one to match as an ancestor of their line.

---

I totally agree with Dave that they need inclusion in bio, when you have families with 15 children, and they don't all live to marry, or don't marry (becoming nuns/priests for instance), it can be a massive job to create the profiles.  And since our watchlist is actually limited to 5,000, we reach the limit very fast.

I've also done it when dealing with families that have namesakes they can be confused with.  I had two families where the husband and wife both had identical names, were married within 8 years of each other and living not too distantly.  Anybody coming along wanting to attach a child to them needs to be able to tell which couple is the right one.

---

I have read all of the comments in the chain. I am afraid I do not agree. By not attaching them to their parents as separate profiles, we are effectively eliminating them from the concept of a one family tree. We are also eliminating them from a name search and as good as our intentions are, how many of them will still be dangling in the bio after we are gone. I have read lots of biography's and rarely are the children given any mention at all. Is this practice good genealogical standard?

---

The intent for me is to be able to fill in the thousands of ancestors I do know about and I'm 100% confident and sourced.  I do not consider a single PRDH family record to be proof.  If I end up just searching for the birth date of someone and end up on his PRDH family tree, I may take the 2 minutes required to quickly retype the name and birth year of the childs if it helps someone, but I won't have the time to fill in the 30+ minutes per profile to seek out the proper online-viewable-without-an-account birth/marriage/death records for each of the childs and end up spending 3+ hours when all I wanted was to fill in the birth date. Now, if you don't include those children in the bio, the person finding that ancestor will have even less information to work with.  So... while it may be PREFERABLE to fill in individual records for those childs that did end up marrying, it may be a good TEMPORARY measure to include the childs in the bio.  As for childs that did not marry and died at a young age (say 2 weeks old), I'm thinking that unless you have definitive birth date and death, its probably better to keep them in their dad's bio than having someone link them up as their ancestors and being incorrectly tied in to the global tree.

---

name searches are actually another reason for putting the babies who didn't live past a certain age in bio only, when I see a family having multiple children named with the same name because they died and it's a ''family name'', your search engine is going to die trying.  Try a search on Joseph Brunelle for an example.

---

I do add the children to WikiTree once they are sourced. I still prefer to leave them on the parents profile as well. During times where all census records are not available, it is helpful to be able to see at a glance where they were living during various years. It also helps me problem solve, at times, when I'm looking for family members that live near each other.