How can a Canadian Emigrant immigrate to America?

Question

Lewis Edward Sanderson emigrated to Mason County, Washington with his wife and child. Again I stumbled over the notion of some that the United States of America is America. Not Canada, not Mexico, not Brazil or Argentina, only the USA. I wouldn't have been so confounded over this obvious bias to the categories if I could have found the subcategory for Washington.

Really, how can we use "America" if it is not a political entity. I know of no citizens of America, no coinage of America, not even a President of America. WIKI Tree needs to be clear -- unless we give up the idea of being a world wide tree.

Answer 1

The immigration / emigration category structure is being discussed right now in the categorization project group, so the names will change.

Comments

How does one get a category created? I've no idea how to create the category "Canadian immigrants to Washington, USA".

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It looks like it was created today. (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Canadian_Immigrants_to_Washington)

In general, if you want to create a category, you start with the profile you want to categorize.

When editing the profile, add [[Category: Whatever, Whatever]] to the profile and save.

The category will show up in red on the page. Click on the red link, and it will take you to an edit page.

On the edit page you want to add a parent category (for example, if you were creating [[Category: Texas]] you would add [[Category: United States]] as the parent category), and you also want to add a description to the category. Then click save to create the category.

Answer 2

I can think of two questions that need to be asked in creating any categories:  (1)  What genealogical purpose is served by placing people with this particular characteristic in a group?  and (2) if every person with this characteristic was placed in a group, would the group be too large to be of any value?

My wife's ancestry includes a number of people who moved from Canada to the USA.  Despite the requirement of passports to cross the border since 9-11, a lot of people still cross.  Some stay.  I think it would be a totally huge category, and I can't imagine the value of clicking on the category link to look at the names of the profiles in the category!

Comments

Even if there is no value to clicking on a category and viewing it, there could still be value in using it for computer aided search. Even using basic text search category names guarantee specific pieces of text associated with relevant profiles.

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OK, I may not be technologically competent to address this, but if the objective is to facilitate a computer-aided search of emigration from Canada to the USA, would that particular purpose not be served just as well by the sentence in the biographical narrative,  "In 1924 John Smith emigrated from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada to Vancouver, Washington, USA" compared to [[Category:  Emigration:  British Columbia, Canada to Washington, USA]]?  And if the category is there, then there MUST be something in the narrative with a source which confirms the fact that the category testifies to.  Otherwise, the category should be removed.  

The functional purpose of categories is to group profiles.  It seems to me that it is a misuse of categories to employ them to simply identify categories, when no purpose is served by grouping them.

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I would consider being able to generate a list of profiles that share one or more things in common simply a more advanced form of grouping. Categories are from a technical sense a form of search.

I agree they should all be confirmed in the narrative, but searching for a sentence such as:

In 1924 John Smith emigrated from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada to Vancouver, Washington, USA

would only work if everyone agreed that that exact format was how we would write that sentence. Category names by nature are all written the same. Better tools could be developed would be more grouping like (unions and intersections) but we don't have them yet.

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As Greg said, you could search each biography to find phrases to match your query, but it would only work if everyone used the same wording. Plus it would take a lot more processing power.

Currently WikiTree dumps a file that shows which categories are on which profiles. That makes it easy to search through all profiles to see which profile has X category, or X category and Y category, or X, Y, and Z categories. The ability to combine categories to create lists makes large categories not a problem. Let's say we want to get a list of all Farmers in California who died from lung cancer. All three categories would probably be too large for someone to consider useful, but put together they create something useful. (How is it useful? Maybe you heard a story from your grandma about her cousin who was a farmer in CA and died because he was a heavy smoker. Now you have a list of potential leads.)

Categories also provide structure. So if I want to get a list of all people who live in Long Beach, CA, I can view the category. But what if I want a list of everyone who lived in California? Viewing the category for California isn't going to provide me with everyone in California, because some are in subcategories (like Long Beach). But a program can go, I want everyone in the category California and everyone who is in a subcategory of California.

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this is interesting - and I think fate is just why my family ended u the way they were in this instance - those Métis in the Red River Settlement were spread out some after the fur trading companies battled it out and combined - Canada became a country and the line between US and Canada was drawn and under their feet my family was left south of that line where the law was that as Native/First Nations they were not allowed to own land and instead would be herded onto one of the reservations - where many of my cousins were - So my Grandma instead married a white man and they got homesteads NOW if they had been a smidge north of North Dakota when that line was drawn - they may have not went for the "pass for white" decision and would have stayed Métis and got land by applying for scrip and our family would not have lost that heritage - so that is how the big life changing thing happened to my grandparents - line drawn