Does this profile meet the GPS?

One thought I had to make a simple, time stamped Record of "peer review validation" was for a Geni member to make a discussion on the profile

"this profile meets the GPS"

(or similar)

That's easier & faster than moving in and out of projects and stays with the profile as a "quality" mark.

While use of the GPS abbreviation may be appropriate in the context of this project, I think a different abbreviation is needed in a profile citation -- because of the confusion between Global Positioning System and Genealogical Proof Standard.

Perhaps 'GPStd' or 'GenPS' or ... ?? (if not spelled out completely).

Templates should perhaps just spelled it out completely, since folks won't be typing it anyway.

This profile contains some nice information but it doesn't show any signs of applying the GPS process. Ample primary sources should be available for this period but it quotes and cites primarily secondary sources.

Imagine Wikipedia for a second. It wouldn't just drop in a biography from another source. It would write a new biography, citing other sources as available (including primary sources like birth, marriage, death, census, cemetery).

Our ideal GPS write up might contain citations to this article (Portrait and biographical record of Christian County, Illinois) where no primary sources are available but it wouldn't be entirely composed of verbatim repetition. The article is a source, not GPS.

The particular issue with only using sources like Portrait and biographical record of Christian County, Illinois is that these were typically vanity publications, with information taken from interviews with the subject or immediate family. Any biographical sketch like this could have misunderstandings and distortions.

I’m wondering whether we need to distinguish between a biography and the genealogical proof.

I usually quote from published biographies under a biography section (because I enjoy reading them) and build or copy / paste from a compilation a family section.

But I make a separate section called “disputed ancestry” or “origins” or “spouse confusion” (etc) for genealogical arguments, and somewhat to my dismay, this ends up being original writing.

Justin,

Copies of the 1860, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930 census are attached in the sources tab. Why aren't they primary sources? It's true that the death and marriage records are transcriptions from the LDS database as they didn't make the originals available. But they, and the Find-a-Grave link do support the data on the profile. I also add the Familysearch match to help with further research. Not contentious, just curious, as I'm not sure what else (on the internet) could be found to support the existance of this person. There are no current disputes about this person.

I attach the historical bios I find because they actually turn an empty suit into a person. If someone found this profile looking for an ancestor it actually has something interesting. But I don't have time to reinvent the wheel and write a new bio. Besides, they are often written by someone who knew the person, making them far more relevant than anything I could ever write.

Obviously, as a person who consistently adds as much documentation as I can find, I'm all for documentation. I'm hoping more will start doing some basic documentation. I think the GPS is great, but the real reason I document is to settle disputes before they start.

It's not the lack of attached sources I'm pointing to. It's the vacuum between the sources that their use. The sources aren't integrated.

For example, you might say "He grew up in City X" [cite censuses]. Early in his career he was recorded as a Something." [cite censuses]. He married Woman A on Date, Place [cite marriage record]. And so on.

That would be the GPS part of the write up.

My style preference, which is not the one in the world, is to introduce the profile with an orientation statement of two or three sentences. Name (date range) was an Occupation in Place. Lots of variations here. The main idea is to give readers the elevator speech.

(And even before that, if there is a caution I like to put it in italics at the very beginning. ("He was not the son of John & Mary Smith.") The top sourcing on many Geni profiles makes me nuts.)

After in the orientation, in a perfect world, I like to follow with a genealogy section that outlines or describes family relationships and the proof or lack of proof, then a biography. Maybe with different sections, or maybe not, depending on the amount of information. Then close with a Sources header.

I also always quote biographical articles, but under their own heading, after the family and biography data I've written or compiled, just before the Sources.

Perhaps on its own discussion post an example profile that meets the GPS protocol, and explain why.

Very quickly I say at the moment no, because not all the sources are matched. But only 2 open and 10 closed is good, very good.

So in general it is. And it is also published on paper. If it would be reviewed by GPS licensed review board it would pass the test. It has the value to be published in an academical paper. Maybe a rewrite and organisation the sources in another way, And if possible remove all the middleman sources. Do not say familysearch has the source and I trust that source unless you have a GPS licensed statement that what familysearch is saying is correct.

Sorry if I sound this hard, but I have spoken with someone that gone to the process of getting it approved so it counts as a hard evidence.

But still it is from me it is a 9/10

Dan Cornett Maybe we should make an app for GPS peer review and only the app can add a GPS star ofcourse not a Position star, that is could be to bigbrother I really don't want to know were all my living and death relatives are at this moment. Ofcourse misuse of the GPS reviewing app would should be montitored and should be removed by a group of superusers.

Thanks to Jeroen and Justin. Now this is framed in a way I can understand it. What is being proposed, as I now understand it is a new way (for GENi) to record this data. I have no objection to that, as long as it is something that ordinary users and curators can figure out. There is always a balance here. Also, there's no way, in my lifetime, that I have time to go back and redo all those profiles! ;)

> there's no way, in my lifetime, that I have time to go back and redo all those profiles! ;)

Me either. I look at my years of work and think it is impossible I could live long enough to finish what I've started. Fact of life.

That's why I like Geni so much. Little by little, working together, we are getting somewhere.

Jeroen, maybe one small clarification to what you say.

There are different types of citations to FamilySearch. They are very different in quality.

There are the citations to a profile. Those are generally no better and no worse than what we might see in Geni or the other collaborative sites.

Then there are citations to sources. Those are excellent, because they link to the actual source for free. Sometimes the source is an extract. In that case we want to get to the original source behind the extract if we can, but if we can't then the extract is pretty good by itself. At least it's better than linking to something like a biographical article for the same info.

Jessie, I would say this idea is not necessarily about a different way to present research findings; no way I'm redoing all my bios!

But it's saying the profile meets the criteria.

I just had a thought.

What about a form filled in (check list) and added to profile as document ?

There might be a way a blank can be auto attached by Geni to all profiles. Member fills it in and process is kicked off.

Private User the main problem I see in the profile is that in the birth section your sources are only secondary sources and in the biography you state unequivocally that he is born in Tazewell County, September 8, 1850. There are no primary source to justify such a claim for certain since there are no evidence. In my opinion this is not according to the guidelines in the GPS. But it is also a flaw in the Geni software where there are no possibility to grade the reliability of the source, which is a big lack in the sourcing part of the system.

To me a perfect profile should have primary sources to every information both in the fact section and in the biography.

It seems a lot of effort to write anything according to this standard.
May be there should be levels of detail depending on some criteria?

I see a problem with writing anything in the about section that is duplicated in other fields when a profile has an update. It will take more time to update the profile and some information could become inconsistent.

It would help very much if you could use fields to refer to information that is in the profile and generate a bio from that (like a mail-merge).
You would need a generate button to generate an up- to-date bio from that, may be even save it as pdf.

Remi Trygve Pedersen just my point if there are primary sources use the primary sources or bluff your way into it. Because the people that are reviewing it will very likely have the rights to check the primary sources. And placing it on Geni does not help. You could undo the flaws in the text part and use the database to underline the story.

Justin Durand indeed English is no my first language, but normally you can work with those extracts and in those extracts mistakes are made. Some are clear so you can see in the profiles on the different website who has used the extracts and who did really check the source. BTW the sources are free. But still some companies try to get money by not linking for free. Or some archives ask money to access the sources.

Jessie you only use the royal way if you are the first to research a person and trying to prove the facts. No way all the profiles needs to be backuped with orginal sources. And maybe it is for Geni a new way to work, but for the paper world is a very old way of doing so. And the more you are working with orginal sources the more you learn from the best. And the longer you do it the royal way the more you know when to skip the middle man. More words does not make a profile better. And I'm pleased to hear that my words helped you. You would be amazed how little prove is needed for the simple profiles, it are the one with no or very little of sources that are the hardest to prove. And I guess the GPS methode is overkill for the one with a lot of sources. Unless you have a sea of time.

In my ideal profile the sourcing is “behind the scenes” including genealogical disputes, and the overview is descriptive of the person’s life, accuracy not the question as that’s covered by the source data.

I would prefer not to but I really need the family listing also.

Then the bottom section would be links for further reading - historical context, published works, asides, etc.

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So for me a GGPS validation would be denoted by a blue Geni star.

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Comments on source quality can be made on the source document. For instance perhaps the only birth date found so far is the tombstone image, which is secondary quality as noted (hearsay) usually. Annotate that in the facts citation for the source.

Perhaps the only marriage record found so far is a not particularly trustworthy collection from submitted pedigrees. Comment on the uploaded document.

These notes can go into the quibbles / for further research on a profile proposed for GGPS.

The criteria is “reasonably exhaustive search” and genealogy is endless, plus new records / insights may be found.

I think the GGPS would need a simple number system and then a “passing number” for acceptance.

Jeroen, no argument from me about the potential unreliability of extracts. My point was something subtler -- we should cite the source we used, the source we have, not wait for access to the source we want to have.

However, I do think we might disagree in another area. Maybe. You said "No way all the profiles needs to be backuped with orginal sources."

I don't follow your train of thought here, but I think we do in fact need to bring in all the good citations to original sources, even if that work has been done elsewhere.

Lawyers and academics have a neat little trick for doing this. If someone else has cited an original source you can cite them, then add "citing" and their citation.

For example, Early New England Families, citing Arabella Passenger List. (but expanded into full citations for both, of course)

> Comments on source quality can be made on the source document.

Maybe. Some people might find that easier to navigate / ignore.

But in academic writing you always comment on issues about the reliability of a source in conjunction with citing that source. Anything else would be deceptive.

We want to make this doable for everyone. I think it's possible to be accurate and also simple (and less typing).

I found “behind the scenes” sourcing doesn't work effectively here at this present time. Some Geni users and curators don't bother to check the source/image tabs for possible documentation. I've found adding abstracts of sources and linking to the documents in the about section works best. Right now, I put my primary documentation at the top of the page, right in people's faces. I know some people don't like that. I would be happy to move them down the page further if we can get the majority of us to agree on a standard temple for the overview section. Most of the biographies I see on Geni are copy and paste from other websites, and for me, are less valuable than a good quality source. Copy and paste unformatted google book links that don't tell me the name of the book or what it is sourcing are not very helpful either.

I think an original biography covering the basic facts, any issues such as conflicting evidence, things of interest etc, built from the sources that have been attached to a profile would be the way to go. For that, we really need <ref> tags added to Geni's wikitext formatting options. Similar to what Wikitree does.

<ref> tags!

That would be a godsend. We need them to do this type of work. They should be easy to implement. I can't think why Geni hasn't done it. It's one of the reasons I prefer to source on Wikitree, then bring over the abbreviated version to Geni. Not the workflow we want to be creating.

Is a biography criteria for a GGPS designation?

This might be the place to say I have just a tiny bit of grief about the idea of a GGPS designation. Not that I don't think it would serve a useful purpose, but the idea that a profile can achieve a kind of quality designation for process seems just a little off base to me.

On a project like Early New England Families, the editors can assure they have truly exhausted every avenue, identified every reasonable ambiguity, checked every available document.

Yet even with the relatively limited number of profiles there, it is a full time job. New information emerges. The data must be updated across every profile where it would apply.,

How can we hope to achieve that in a crowd-sourced genealogy?

There will always be more work. We can't really ever be sure we have made a "reasonably exhaustive search" except in a handful of cases. And if the available record set expands, then the exhaustive search will no longer be exhaustive.

> Is a biography criteria ?

I think Yes. And No.

Not explcitly.

But, if you are going to treat every source as part of identifying and contextualizing the GPS work, how does that not result in a biography?

Imagine this very abbreviated narrative:

John Smith (c1760/76-1836) was an early settler in Lee County, Virginia. Family tradition says he was a blacksmith [citation]. His date of birth cannot be firmly established but can be estimated from his age on the 1820 and 1830 censuses of Lee County [citation]. On the 1850 census his children reported variously that their father was born in England or Virginia [citations]. He might have been old enough to have served in the Revolutionary War but there is nothing that would identify him as a specific soldier by that name. He apparently married Catherine Johnson about 1809, perhaps in or near Sullivan County, Tennesee [Goodspeed, drawing on unpublished interviews]. His apparent age suggests the possibility of an earlier marriage but no other wife and children have been discovered. He might have been the John Smith who appears on the 1810 census in Wythe County, Virginia [citation] but there is insufficient evidence to make a firm determination. The first undoubted record of him is an deed dated 3 Nov. 1811, when he purchased 40 acres in Lee County from Robert Miller [citation]. Thereafter, he appears on local county tax lists until 1835, when his widow Catherine is named in his place [citation]. He appears on the 1820 census of Lee County at Turkey Hill [citation], near the families of his wife's sisters' husbands Henry Jones, Robert Johnson, and William Carter. In 1830 he seems to have been still at the same place [citation]. He made his will on 11 Nov. 1835 [citation] and it was probated 5 March 1836 [citation]. His will names his wife Catherine, sons John, Robert, and William, and daughter Mary Jones.In it, he disposes of 60 acres of land and various household items. There are no surviving deeds that show when or how he acquired the additional 20 acres, nor do the annual tax lists indicate an increase in his wealth in a particular year. His widow and children sold out the following year and moved to St. Louis, Missouri [citation]

If you read this little paragraph, you'll see how biography and sourcing are interwoven. You can see the "reasonably exhaustive search" and the way the blanks are handled. Extra sections could be added below to talk about research issues such as why he might be the John Smith on the 1810 census, ideas about his Revolutionary War service, and so on.

Is this biography? Not biography? Dunno. To me it's just a fairly typical write up of the GPS for an average guy who isn't well documented in the sources.

Re: Is a biography criteria for a GGPS designation?

Could be if we want it to be.

The GGPS can be built into a biographical format.

I hate to say it but Justin’s format put me to sleep.:)

I consider myself a compiler on my work in the historic tree, and I do think it important to distinguish between that tree & my “direct lines.”

As a compiler I want to point members to the good studies, cite the citations if you like, and present the information legibly. So that drives the formats I use: building from bottom up. If the facts are there, to me, weaving them into a narrative, for the sake of narrative, is taking me away from the work of assembling known facts.

In the example above I would use the biography section for an anecdote; my point in that section is to illuminate character.

But that can totally be a person’s individual choice. How exactly the information is presented is less important than the process is followed, to my mind.

This is the format used by the Early New England Families Project:

"The format used for the Early New England Families Study Project is similar to that used in the Great Migration Study Project. Information is grouped by categories, although not all categories will necessarily be used in every sketch."

NAME of Featured Individual

MIGRATIONS/RESIDENCES: Where they came from and where they moved to.

PARENTAGE/FAMILY: What is known about their family, if anything, including cross-references to Great Migration immigrants and other families treated in the Early New England Families Study Project.

BIRTH/BAPTISM: Place and date of birth and/or baptism of Featured Individual.

DEATH/BURIAL: Place and date of death and/or burial of Featured Individual.

MARRIED: Place and date of marriage of Featured Individual.

BRIDE/GROOM: Name of bride or groom.

PARENTAGE/FAMILY: What is known about their family, if anything, including their arrival in New England, if relevant, and cross references to Great Migration immigrants and other families treated in the Early New England Families Study Project.

BIRTH/BAPTISM: Place and date of birth and/or baptism of Bride/Groom.

DEATH/BURIAL: Place and date of death and/or burial of Bride/Groom (repeat for multiple marriages)

LAND/PROPERTY: Summary of land grants, purchases, sales.

COMMUNITY: Summary of community involvement and offices held.

CHURCH: Summary of church membership and related events.

MILITARY: Summary of military involvement and offices held.

COURT: Summary of civil and criminal court actions, offices held.

OCCUPATION: Description of occupation.

PERSONAL: Personal stories by or about this family.

ESTATE: Probate records, deeds of gift, and other records concerning the settlement of the Featured Individual’s estate.

CHILDREN of: The Featured Individual and [first] spouse.

i. Name of child, dates/places of birth, marriage, death; name and parentage of spouse, dates/places of birth, marriage, death of spouse. Other marriages of child and/or spouse.(repeat for children of other spouses)

RESOURCES: Pertinent published or archival resources for this family.

COMMENTARY: Editorial comments on problems, suggestions for further research, and/or clarification of confusing issues.

Source: Alicia Crane Williams, Early New England Families (2015), Vol. 1, pp. ix-x.