Background: Gostwick ONS Data Sources

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: [unknown]

A note for context

So far, the Gostwick ONS has been rather non-collaborative and at times down right confrontational. From family fights over photographs from the old wild west, to angry words between myself and cousin Kay over her absolute chaos posted to the web early in the 90s, and a dislike for my suggested errata to her published work of 1985, 'The Goswicks. Kinda like Wikitree at times.

There have been lovely family reunions, and perhaps the only drama was from those working our trees, including me. I take the work too seriously at times.

Those generations are largely gone, and I captured every single bit that I could, way back at those picnics in the 70's, the campgrounds in the 80's, then the internet in the 90's.

abt 1998, Not having researched the Gostwicks of Willington...I wanted to 'hop the pond' and work the trees of England. Mom visited the Willington chapel and brought photographs of Sir John Gostwick's tomb, and the Dovecote. They had a family tree, but it was largely the old one showing the 'middle' of the family.

2000-2010, As someone with a lifelong interest and background in studying of patterns in language, I was led work testing and developing code for the internals of search engines. This was very difficult work and exposed me to approaches in statistics, data gathering, and language morphology that I began to realize had application in my Genealogy. 'Traditional' genealogists seem rather put off at trying to understand algorithmic approaches to research. I find it has been more than successful, and I really want to share my work. My work, however, is the AGGREGATED, CORRELATED data from research. It's NOT, nor will it ever be (from me), similar to the 125pgs of written reading material that was published by my 'cousin-in-law' H.P. Finberg.

2014-2017 My work was mainly done by the end of 2017. This transcription to Wikitree has been a great chance to correct errors and make adjustments. Every citation is quadruple checked by the time it gets saved here. but mistakes happen, so holler if you see one. I have an aggressive chronic disease, Ankylosing Spondylitis, doing its best to fuse L5 to L4 and L6, but juuuust before it does, I move and pieces of bone break off in my spine, leaving sharp edges that hit nerves. Hence, I am 'Crabby Chris'. Is what it is.

If you wish, I would love for YOU to join me, start grabbing my work, and writing historical biographies or whatever it is makes your project happy.

For now, please understand I am someone who dislikes groups, and quickly can turn your conversation into a test case review. So leave me out, please, and instead use my work to honor our ancestors.

~ Chris Gorman, Fall 2021 "Mistakes happen, dont get mad at QA"

My public tree contains every known Gostwick and the like ever found, or referenced by myself, Finberg or Kennemore.

My work contains approaches where:

• Each source was identified with one 'hit' returning a valid result
• Each source was checked for best version found, then scrubbed to ID if it was a secondary or primary source
• Each source was carefully noted so that it was traceable (e.g. Progress of research is noted with each source, such as "Feet of Fines, (all 7 Morph-A surnames complete)"
• Each source was carefully mapped into FTM2017, and pasted URLs duped in text for important stuff (I found two repositories online have changed URL syntax since 2017!)
• Each citation includes two 'chunks' of text in my repository: paraphrase & full
• Every found person is managed and synched with backups. Both TMG and FTM were used, with support waning for TMG, so FTM2017 is used to synch with Ancestry and perform complex queries.
• Complex queries with dates, like test results, are kept as evidence. This lets me quickly take a 'new person' from the 15th century and place them into context, etc.
• After things settled down, two months were spent 'normalizing' place names, allowing me to answer things like: Who was in Cople, ever? Who had property in Hertsfordshire?
• Incomplete:
  • Normalization (also known as 'tokenization') of property descriptions and placenames.
  • Traceability of Property is also not complete (for England)

My work is BOLD, and aims to be COMPLETIST by nature. I would rather not think of it as being 'Lost' when I lose my fight to disease. Traceability is being 'created' from scratch in the ONS space, as I have no permissions to place it properly as profiles.

I will try not to be a jerk, please try not to be close-minded about the value of my work. Thanks! ~Chris