Proposal for naming a ship's voyage landing category

Question

This proposal is for the landing category for a ship's voyage, to be in the format [[Category:Ship Name, Arrived DD Month YYYY]]

eg: [[Category:Pitt, Arrived 14 Feb 1792]]

There is currently no approved standard, so some are named by arrival, some by sailing, and some just by a year. This proposal aims for a consistent approved format. As the majority of ships, especially immigrant ships, are classified by arrival date in immigration indexes, the arrival date is the logical choice.

The "Arrived" date would be for the final arrival port of that country, where there were multiple ports of call, within that country.

Edited to change "a" to "A" in "Arrived" as per category naming standard.

Comments

This format was originally proposed by the Australia Project for voyages to Australia. See the proposal page with discussion here, and the finalized plan page here.

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Thanks Margaret, I've added the "migration" tag. I wonder which other tags could be added to increase the visibility of this post?

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I have added the PGM tag as I think this proposal could impact the Puritan Great Migration Project. As I have said in a separate answer, landing details may not be available for all voyages.

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Michael, that's fine but we are limited to 6 tags, so every project cannot be tagged. Isabelle (France project) created a separate post pointing to this post instead.

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I've posted a separate post pointing Canada Project and Quebecois Project to this post as well.

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To get an idea how many categories we are talking about, check this WikiTree+ report for the categories below Immigrant Ships. 

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This also affects several other subcategories under Ships. Sailings by Decade, Ships by Country, Ships by Name, Slave Ships, Convict Transportation...

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This proposal aims for a consistent approved format. As the majority of ships, especially immigrant ships, are classified by arrival date in immigration indexes, the arrival date is the logical choice.

That might be true of Australia, but not necessarily for other countries/regions.

Could you apply this format only to migration ships that landed down under?

edit: format

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Is the sample date format of 14 Feb 1792 an indication that 3-letter English-language abbreviations would be required for all such categories?

I prefer to spell out the name of the month -- and I think that languages other than English would be appropriate for some categories. (I guess I have an allergy to abbreviations in situations where the full word could be accommodated...)

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Added the Acadia tag as Cindy suggested

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We can't add tags for all projects. I've posted a separate post pointing France, Huguenot, Acadia, and Louisiana Families to this thread. https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/937410/did-you-see-this-proposal-for-naming-migrant-ship-categories

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The 3-letter abbreviation for the month was chosen to be consistent with how the month is shown across WikiTree, in profile details, contributions list, on G2G for questions, answers and comments older than a week.

Answer 1

As it sits now, there is no guidance on how to work any of the ships categories. There are at least five different naming conventions in use now, some of which have no information included with them to explain what the category is for or what it is intended to categorize.

This thread (and the attached space page) are a proposal. For those who are forgetting, a proposal is a plan or suggestion, especially a formal or written one, put forward for consideration or discussion by others. This is done as an extension of Help:Developing New Rules, in which discussions are encouraged to happen.

Help:Category Names also states that "It is very important — and often very difficult! — to follow the naming conventions that have been established by the community." Imagine the process of actually developing those naming conventions - which this post is an attempt to do.

If there are certain considerations that should be taken into account, cases where this proposed structure could become problematic, or you have an idea for an alternative method that could be employed to fix the errors we see now, please discuss them!

At the same time, we should all refrain from the idea that this proposal, or any associated project, is trying to 'impose a requirement', 'force to fit', or would otherwise 'harangue' other members or projects.

Comments

Thanks,  Steve!

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Steve, I'm happy to read that projects will not be forced to comply with this proposal if ultimately adopted. As stated by others, this proposal would not work with and would actually compromise the accuracy of the work of some projects.

Answer 2

Did you make a decision about using the final place in the category?  If you use the Arrived date at the final port, then that final port would also be the place.

Comments

Hi Cindy, thanks for your question. This has been discussed in the Australian context and the decision hasn't been finalised yet. My thoughts are that adding the name of the port brings in a whole other set of complexities, including whether you use the actual name of the port - which may also have changed names over time - or the town / city close by etc. So I'm in favour 'keeping it simple', and adding details such as port of arrival to the content on the category page, especially as we consider what might be most likely to work best for everyone in the global WikiTree context.

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Cindy makes a worthwhile point. Many transoceanic voyages that carried immigrants disembarked passengers at more than one port.

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The Acadian project had many ships, unfortunately, carrying Acadians to France, England, Maryland, South Carolina, Louisiana and perhaps more.  Could you add the Acadian tag to this post so others will see it, please?

Answer 3

This proposed change will affect the categories associated with the William Penn and Early Pennsylvania Settlers Project and the Friends (Quakers) Project, both of which have many profiles categorized as part of the William Penn Fleet. Those categories currently have the departure date, rather than the arrival date as proposed.

Does either Project have a member with access to information on the Penn Fleet to help determine the arrival dates? Can the Category name changes be done by EditBot if the data is provided or are manual changes necessary?

Comments

Of course, EditBot can rename/move profiles to any new category, but, project members would have to place the rename template themselves.

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So manual changes to every category (at least 1500 based on the WikiTree+ report linked above) to add the rename template. Not the answer I hoped for but much better than having to change every profile.

I thought Aleš might have a way to set EditBot to work with a spreadsheet of old and new names. We never know what is possible if we don't ask the questions.

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So true!

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Thanks Debi for your response. Does the database you use for the Penn Fleet only have departure date?

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The Welcome Society of Pennsylvania has a webpage which shows the arrival dates of the Penn Fleet. Some of the dates are exact, some span a range of days, some are unknown, and some say before x month in y year.

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So putting aside the disadvantages of changing existing categories, is it preferable, from the point of view of the Penn project, to work with departure or arrival dates moving forward, or does it vary?

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I can't answer for the Penn Project, Gillian, as I am not a member and don't keep up with their guidelines and discussions.

From the point of view of the Friends (Quakers) Project, I don't think either date has precedence. Both could be used to help find meeting records which potentially exist in many locations. Friends requested and were granted letters to take with them as they moved about. Those letters were then presented at each place they visited.

Answer 4

Looking beyond Australia, we need to think quite carefully before imposing a requirement that the landing details should be consistently used on WikiTree. For earlier times, landing details may not always be available. What fits with the available information for voyages to Australia may not fit with the data available for all other voyages.

Debi has commented on the implications for the Quakers Project and the William Penn and Early Pennsylvania Settlers Project. I suspect the Puritan Great Migration Project will also need to have input before any change is implemented.

Comments

I hesitate between commenting here or on SJ Baty's answer below.  Basically I oppose a "one size fits all" approach to this topic.  Population migrations or Diasporas have been going on since the dawn of history and what is "right" in an Australian context is not necessarily the best way to handle or categorize migrations by ship for 17 - 18th Century migrations from England (Europe) to America or to South Africa or elsewhere.  Why is it necessary to standardize this ?  

Our Huguenot Migration Project has not emphasized the overseas transportation mechanics, mainly because almost-all of our religious refugees were transported aboard ships flying other-nations' flags (since Huguenots were forbidden to leave France by law) but I know many such reports are by departure, not arrival, and the port where the Huguenots disembarked (which is what interests us!) might have had nothing to do with the ships' final destination.  Please limit this to ships arriving in Australia and New Zealand if it must be implemented.

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Hi Michael, does the Quaker project currently use immigrant ship categories, or is it a similar scenario to the one described by Chet? If you use them, how are you naming them?

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An Debi Hoag has said in another answer, for the Quakers Project it is mainly the Penn Fleet, where categories are overseen by a sub-project of the William Penn and early Pennsylvania Settlers Project and departure dates are used. Arrival dates are, I think, not known for all the Penn Fleet ships. Departure dates are.

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Hi Michael, Thanks! Debi gave the url in another post for arrival date. Which database are you accessing for the departure date? Regards Gillian

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Could someone in the William Penn and early Pennsylvania Settlers Project please respond to Gillian on this?

Answer 5

I am not sure there needs to be a set format for ship's sailings for all projects.  While arrival date may work well for Australia when each ship's arrival date was accurately recorded, this wasn't always the case for the Americas.  The William Penn Fleet ship "John and Sarah" arrived sometime during the winter of 1681/1682.

Categories in the Military and War Project are done differently for different countries because how military units are classified varies from country to country.  When there is no "one size fits all" solution, it may be best to just apply the format more narrowly.  In this case, it might make sense that PGM has their own ship category classification system, Penn has theirs, Australia has another, etc.

Comments

Most of the Penn Fleet have arrival dates that would fit into this structure as noted by The Welcome Society. The only two  out of twenty-three that would be harder to fit into the structure would be the John & Sarah and the Adventure.

I am not seeing it in this proposal, which should probably explain this, but the original discussions allowed for the arrival date to be in the formats of a full date, a month and year (if exact date is not known), or the year (if month and day are not known).

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Yes, Steve, thanks. I’m sure there was that flexibility originally, and we definitely need to have options for situations where the exact date of arrival isn’t known

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The proposal page did say to use the month and year if the exact date was unknown. I've amended it so it now says "If the exact day of the month is unknown, the month and year would be used, or just the arrival year if that is all that is known. [[Category:Ship Name, arrived Month YYYY]] or [[Category:Ship Name, arrived YYYY]]."

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PGM has arrived. Well, one of us.

As a proactive goal, PGM does not focus on immigrant ships' categorization at this time, although some project members and others do, from time to time, add such categories when the information is known. Speaking as half of the PGM leader team, we have no current plans to add ship categorization as a stated goal or priority project activity.

Our basic principle that we follow for all things is "what do the sources say?" The bulk of our focus is ensuring that the information on profiles that fall under our scope are well sourced and accurate. If we have a source for a person's presence on a passenger list (pretty rare), we add it.  

We would not be happy with or support compromising accuracy for the sake of consistency.

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The other half of PGM agrees with Jillaine

Answer 6

This is OK for situations where there is a good record of the entire sailing, but reality doesn't always give us good records.

The reality in the areas of genealogy I work in is that there are many immigration ships for which we know only one date (if that). For the "Palatine" ships to Philadelphia (records available 1737-1776), we usually have only an arrival date, so this proposal would work OK. But for ships that sailed from England to New England during the Puritan Great Migration, typically the only recorded date is the date that passengers were enrolled, which is an approximation of the departure date.

Category structures should not create a Procrustean bed into which reality is forced to fit.

One more thing:       It's my understanding that all words in a category name are supposed to begin with an upper-case letter, with the exception of minor words like prepositions (such as "to," "from," "of," and "by") and conjunctions (such as "and" and "or"). Following that principle, I would expect that "Arrived" would begin with an upper-case letter A.

Comments

Yes, the capital letter would need to be engaged.

I don't find this method fits the definition you linked, as it is neither violent nor arbitrary. I get the point though.

If we leave it as status quo, then shipping categories remain arbitrarily named, since users do not always research the proper way to categorize the ships/voyages and use whatever method they find first, find easiest, or what have you.

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Indeed, it's not violent, but it's inherently arbitrary  -- and might be forced. Note the bit on that page that explains the origin of the term:

Origin of Procrustean bed

after Procrustes, the bandit from Greek mythology who stretched or amputated the limbs of travelers to make them conform to the length of his bed.

I don't like the idea that Categorization Project members, Data Doctors, etc., would start haranguing other members to find (or perhaps invent) arrival dates for ship's voyages that don't have recorded arrival dates -- all to conform with a categorization structure that requires every voyage to have an arrival date.

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Ellen, there are bound to be exceptions whenever we have a proposal like this.

Since the post is intended to drive conversation, perhaps you could offer a different solution or a way to handle exceptions when the arrival date of a ship isn't known.

Any ideas?

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I suppose another question is whether categories are being created for ships when the information about the passage is quite vague. Does anyone have an example of a current category or two like that?

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I agree, Gillian. Really, the ships cats, aside from military ones, could be container categories for the voyages categories.

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Sorry to differ Julie but this post isn't worded as an open ended request to drive conversation.  It is a rule change proposal only missing the up and down vote answers.  Ellen's answer to the original question is her "no" vote to the proposal that we standardize ship sailings.

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Hi, SJ!

If someone is struggling with an aspect of the current proposal, and they have an idea on how to improve it, they should definitely be putting it out here now before the proposal is finalized.

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This post is like this because the proposal for Australia, which had been carefully crafted and discussed (for months, I believe) has been frozen because it was different from many existing formats. Australia can't move forward before the general situation has been discussed. The person who posted this question has shown extraordinary, angelic if you will, patience.

The reason there is not a yes and no answer is precisely that the post is to start a discussion on a first draft. It is not a final call on an already agreed upon structure.

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OK, some explicit statements regarding future direction.

This looks like it's probably a good proposal for ships to Australia, although:

• Caveat: I don't work on Australian genealogy, so I know little about the kind of information that's available for categorization of ships to Australia.
• Clarification is needed on what the "arrived" date will be if the ship stopped at multiple ports.
• "Arrived" should start with upper-case A
•  I submit that the date of landing should be formatted like "6 February 1792", not "6 Feb 1792" or "06 Feb 1792."

This proposal is not ready for application globally across WikiTree because in areas that I am familiar with (unlike Austraila) there are many immigration ships for which there are categories, but for which the necessary records to categorize by arrival date don't exist. 

I'm not particularly interested in dropping my other priorities to devote time to formulating proposals for categorizing sailings of immigration ships. In the areas I work, categorization of ships is of very little interest to members, and there don't seem to be problems with the current categories. And in saying that, I don't want to suggest that I don't care -- I've actually created a bunch of ship voyage categories, almost all of which are named by arrival date because that is the only date we know.

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The post title should be changed to: Let's discuss ship voyage naming ideas to standardize our categories or some such because as it is written, that is not clear.

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See this answer from a previous post:

"In the majority of cases, ships (most importantly immigrant ships) are classified and ordered by their date of arrival, not their sailing date. So the structure being proposed is in line with the research that would be happening for all relevant ships through common immigrant ship indexes (i.e., Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild, the National Library of Australia, the National Archives, the Polish Genealogical Society of America, Steamship Historical Society of America, Lloyd’s Register, Olive Tree Genealogy, University of Delaware Library Immigration & Ships Passenger Lists, etc.)."

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Ellen's comment of 14 hours ago reflects my own thinking as well.

Answer 7

Seeing that some ships people only have departure information and some ships only arrival information. Would it be too complicated to have [[Category: Pitt, Departure ~1654]] and [[Category:Le St. Jean Baptiste, Arrived 30 July 1665]] for example.  I suppose your concern is whether for one ship sailing there would be multiple categories. Could we combined and have [[Category: Pitt, Departure 1654, Arrival N/D]]? Perhaps that is too complicated, I'm just spit balling here. For migrations to New France from France we have arrival dates documented in Ship lists.

Comments

It's nice that you offered some ideas, Kyla!!  Thanks for chiming in!

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If I might add another voice from steerage, does Kyla's suggestion above not remedy many of the concerns being raised in this discussion?

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Thanks Kyla!! Definitely the goal is keeping it as simple as we can, while trying to get the best fit for the projects that use these categories. Thanks also for noting that arrival date is most useful from France to New France.

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To my mind, the problem is that there was no standardized way of recording the information. It makes sends to me to have a standardized suggestion, like a template, similar to Kayla's idea, but only the parts that are relevant would be used, depending on the factual information available for each sailing.  

I would also suggest simplifying the dates. Unless a specific ship made multiple trips in the same year, the details don't seem to me to be relevant.  For instance, the Pearl left Rotterdam 30 June 1751 and arrived in Halifax Sept. 24th, 1751, but it only made one journey in 1751. The details could be in the narrative on the category page.  So I can see the result looking something like:

• [[Category: Pearl, Rotterdam to Halifax 1751]]
• [[Category: Pearl, Rotterdam to Halifax 1752]]
• [[Category: Pitt, Departed Rotterdam 1654]] 
• [[Category:Le St. Jean Baptiste, Arrived Quebec 1665]]

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Laurie, I like the simplification you suggest.

But what about the ships that made multiple stops?

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I would use a location category for each location, and a simple category for the ship.  Category: Fancy, Belfast to North America, 1822.

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Kyla, as long as you write that le St-Jean-Baptiste, arr. 30 juillet 1665  

Answer 8

I have a suggestion after looking at the hierarchy laid out on the free-space page. 

The "arrived [date]" category format is intended to be used when that information is available, but it looks like if you go up one level in the hierarchy, there is a layer of categorization that could potentially handle those profiles where the ship doesn't have a record of an arrival date.

Profiles could be categorized in the "Ship name, sailed DD Month YYYY" category or the "Ship Name (yyyy)" category if there's no information about a ship's arrival.

Since I don't typically work with a project that utilizes these categories, I don't have enough experience to understand what the implications of this are, but at a high level it seems like a possible solution.

Comments

This could be a good solution, Julie.

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Definitely would work if the ship was only known to make one immigrant voyage and / or there were a couple of voyages in a close time period and there is no way of knowing which specific voyage the immigrant arrived on.

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The structure is very nice, but it is tailored to the kind of information we might expect to have for 20th century shipping, and often for the 19th century. For the 17th and 18th centuries, where I do much of my work, records are sparse and it's often almost laughable to think that we would know when a particular ship was built or how many sailings it made. For example, Category:Palatine_Ships includes four sailings for  ships named Phoenix, in 1744, 1749, 1750, and 1752.  It's probable that the last three were the same ship, and it's possible that all four of these are same ship, but we don't know. For that time period, the "landing-level" category for a sailing is often going to be the only category that names the ship.  These  categories are typically populated with profiles of people named on a passenger list. Because the topic pf interest is the passengers (this is genealogy, folks!) and not the boat, the "rules" need to make it possible to name a category for a specific sailing using whatever (possibly minimal) information is available for the sailing.

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Ellen, in that category you mentioned, you are already using the arrived date for the landing category, which is the major concern, to get some consistency for the landing category. You can appreciate how hard it is to get consistent naming, in that category, there are 6 sub-categories that use the truncated name of the month, and 6 that use the lower case "a" in arrived.

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I think that 'Ship Name, Year'' is what we suggested in the first place!

As far as naming of the category, IMO it should be lower case 'arrived' if after a comma.

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Margaret: Yes, as I indicated earlier this proposed structure works fine for the "Palatine" immigrant ships that arrived at Philadelphia from 1737 to 1776. We have passenger arrival lists for the non-British passengers aboard those ships (but we seldom know things like the date when they departed Europe), so the categories have to be created based on arrival date. The name format for those Palatine Ship categories isn't consistent because they were created by different people at different times -- not an ideal situation, but hardly a crisis.

However, Palatine Migration is not the only project I'm deeply engaged with, and categorization by arrival date doesn't work nearly that well for the ships of the "Puritan Great Migration" (PGM) or the New Netherland ships. Many (but not all) of the records I've seen for PGM ships are dated lists of the people who enrolled as passengers -- we don't actually know what day the ship departed, much less when it arrived, and we may not be able to tell whether all of the passengers were on the ship when it sailed. And for New Netherland, the information is serendipitous, including letters documenting that a certain person would be departing from the Netherlands for New Netherland on a certain ship, reports of events that occurred at sea on a particular journey, and accounting records regarding the sums due from particular passengers for their passage.

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Hi Ellen, have you, or would you want to create categories for those ships?

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Gillian, the ships are here:https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Great_Migration_Ships

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Thanks Natalie!

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I can see the issue with the voyages under the 'Great Migration Ships' category. Julie's suggestion for when there is no arrival date seems sensible to me.

Answer 9

I think the main issues have become fairly clear so it may be helpful to try and pull threads together.

1. I think nobody is objecting to the Australia Project using landing details for ships’ categorisation for voyages to Australia. In the Australian context, it looks sensible.
2. What some people - including myself - are saying is that for earlier sailings, particularly to the Americas, the info for the sailing will be variable. In some cases both departure and arrival dates will be available. In others, only departure, or only arrival - or an approximate date or a year for one of them. Against this background, there are real doubts in the minds of some people heavily involved in some Projects as to whether a proposal to use landing dates as the basis for categorisation globally across WikiTree is sensible. The same would go for any counter-proposal to use departure dates globally.
3. For some Projects, and some WikiTree members, departure dates can be as useful as landing dates.
4. Outside the Australia Project it may not always be helpful to use the final landing port in the categorisation where there are multiple landing ports.
5. To attempt to identify arrival dates for all sailings for which categories currently exist would be burdensome even where the information exists.

In the light of the responses so far, I am with those who would be uneasy about having a global WT standard that the categorisation ought to be based on landing dates and places.

For earlier migration to the Americas, one obvious possibility would be to use a categorisation of [[Category: ship name, year]] with the year being the year of the voyage, and no attempt to focus on departure or landing details. The year could be a double year - eg 1681-2 - where, for example, a voyage took place over a winter and departure or arrival year were not certain. Projects which wanted greater precision, like the Australia Project, could still opt for that and have landing details as well. What I am floating would be a minimum categorisation guideline.

It is for the WT community to agree whether or not the effort involved in achieving greater standardisation globally would be worthwhile. I pass no judgement on that.

Comments

Michael speaks my mind.

-- Jillaine, co-leader, Puritan Great Migration Project

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So, we do have Ship Name, Year and Ship Name (Year) and Ship Name Year out there. Would you agree that we could choose ONE way to present that information and keep that consistent?

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As far as I am concerned, whatever punctuation fits best with WT standards,. I am no expert on that. (I am assuming your question was just about punctuation.)

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I don't see how we can have a consistent category naming policy without compromising accuracy.  See my comments elsewhere in this thread. 

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I have been holding back on creating categories for recent (19th century) sailings for months, because there was no guideline, I could not figure out how to name them and I did not want to create more work for someone else. When working on Jeanne Moreau's connection, and more recently New York mayors, I created a lot of profiles for 19th century migrants. Categories could be extremely valuable to help figure out the families who travelled together and organise work on them. 

I see no resolution to this issue and consider this a lost opportunity. (I understand how trivial this sounds to the great historic projects, but there it is).

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Natalie, our posts crossed.  I didn't see yours.

I'm fine with consistency as long as it doesn't compromise accuracy.

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After reading all the preceding discussion here, so beautifully organized and summarized by Michael, it seems that there is a solution (and it's even a very simple one) that should meet the needs of all projects, without creating difficulty for any.

I'd like to suggest a standard for how to name individual components of the category name, rather than one that specifies what these components are.  The standard could specify all possible components with the caveat that not all are required, and would also specify spelling/punctuation/whatever for the components.  For example:

ship name, Departed country date, Arrived country date

Bold italic indicates variables, for which date formats, case usage, etc. would be specified.

Blue and magenta phrases are variables, with specification that either or both may be included (at least one is required).

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Michael, to clarify a couple of points, the use of the words "landing category", is to indicate the type of category, ie. a category that is the last in the structure and contains the profiles is referred to as a "landing category". 

Secondly, 

Outside the Australia Project it may not always be helpful to use the final landing port in the categorisation where there are multiple landing ports.

The Australia project is not including the port name, and is using the final arrival port in Australia. This proposal never included the arrival port in the category name.

Answer 10

As a maintainer of categories, I must add that I cannot figure out the current ways very easily. So, when a  new ship category is created by a user and it's a red-link my (or any other categorist's) process is:

1. Open the profile to see if I can figure out which project this belongs to.

2. Go to the project page and search for guidance on the ship categories (sometimes there is guidance, sometimes not)

3. Figure out the parent categories.

4. Edit the category page and hope it's correct.

This process takes time that I would rather spend improving the categories we already have. This, of course, is why more consistency is valuable to me.

I would leave this task to the project leaders/coordinators who are familiar with their specific categories and I believe it's time I placed these red categories within a large [[Category:Ship Maintenance]] Category.

Comments

Could profiles where a sailing is identified, but can't be placed in a specific category due to no standard/consistency be placed under that Ship Maintenance category?

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Yes, I don't see why not.

Here is the category: Ships, Needs Category Maintenance

Answer 11

speaking from my perspective as coordinator on Québécois project, I don't think we could have just ''ship, arrival date''.  For one thing, on the ships we have data for, which is actually fairly extensive, they arrive at a known date in Québec or Tadoussac (some ships could not go to Québec due to size of ship), and we have passenger and crew lists to some extent.  

However, these ships returned to France, very often with passengers, and in many of those cases we know when they left here, not when they arrived at the other end.  There are also the known cases of ships foundering, one in particular, which left here with many families after the conquest of Québec, foundered off the coast of Acadie, only a very few people survived.

There are also ships that leave France from La Rochelle and stop at Dieppe before coming here, they picked up passengers in both locations.  Not all departure dates are known.  Then many stop in the Gaspé peninsula, often at Percé, before going on to Québec.

So it's not really cut-and-dried.  I would love to establish these ship categories, would make it much easier to spot who met on a ship.