How do I find the formats for NGS Quarterly, TAG, and NEHGR?

[Dora Smith]

Where would I find the required formats for articles submitted to the NGS
Quarterly, TAG, and NEHGR?

And do these organizations provide standards for genealogical reports, that
some people and some genealogical software developers think they must obey?

I'm checking on a rumor that these organizations have forbidden including
multiple spouses and stepchildren in ancestor reports that report children
of the direct ancestors, and any inclusion of foster children and adopted
children in any sort of a genealogical report.

Supporting the existence of such rules is the fact that alot of people
appear to ahve been taught that genealogy must be done that way, and the
rest of us have to do it that way as well.

I need to see the rules themselves, and find out who to complain to.

I have e-mailed the NGS, and the research and customer support offices at
NEHGS, and the edtiors of TAG. The American Genealogical Society is
apparently too prestigious to have contact people or e-mail addresses. The
people I contacted might respond or they might not.

--
Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, TX
tiggernut24@yahoo.com

[the_verminator@comcast.ne]

Dora Smith wrote:

Where would I find the required formats for articles submitted to the NGS
Quarterly, TAG, and NEHGR?

And do these organizations provide standards for genealogical reports, that
some people and some genealogical software developers think they must obey?

I'm checking on a rumor that these organizations have forbidden including
multiple spouses and stepchildren in ancestor reports that report children
of the direct ancestors, and any inclusion of foster children and adopted
children in any sort of a genealogical report.

Supporting the existence of such rules is the fact that alot of people
appear to ahve been taught that genealogy must be done that way, and the
rest of us have to do it that way as well.

I need to see the rules themselves, and find out who to complain to.

I have e-mailed the NGS, and the research and customer support offices at
NEHGS, and the edtiors of TAG. The American Genealogical Society is
apparently too prestigious to have contact people or e-mail addresses. The
people I contacted might respond or they might not.

We've gone over this before-remember??

Stepchildren, foster children, adopted children, multiple spouses,
etc.may be part of family history but have little to do with
genealogical relationships (i.e. parent/child relarionship) of an
ancestral nature.

As for the periodicals you mention, they have a perfect right to set
whatever standards and formats they wish. Your only choice is to abide
by them if you want to publish in their journals... otherwise look
elsewhere to publish - or start you own journal and set your own
standards.

The Verminator

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On Fri, 01 Dec 2006 03:27:49 GMT, "Dora Smith" <villandra@austin.rr.com>
declaimed the following in soc.genealogy.computing:

Where would I find the required formats for articles submitted to the NGS
Quarterly, TAG, and NEHGR?

Try any genealogy program that claims to produce those as standard

reports... (Especially when the options are set to the default
standards, not some custom variation).

Ah, but that's right -- you had a bit of a spat with the makers of
these programs a few months ago because the standard journal reports
would not perform what you wanted from them.

NGS uses the "Modified Register" (aka, "Record") format.
http://www.saintclair.org/numbers (hmmm, one of the regulars)

NEHGR uses the "Register" format
http://www.newenglandancestors.org/publ ... _style.asp
isn't too informative, but does mention:

Henry B. Hoff, ed., Genealogical Writing for the 21st Century (Boston:
New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2002).

Check the library for a copy...


TAG is a variant of Register, as I recall.

These are typically descent reports from a single ancestor.


I don't know if the organizations take "reverse register" reports,
but if they do, they will be likely be using ahnentafel numbers for
individuals (starting individual is #1, father is (individual # times 2)
and mother is (individual # times 2, plus 1)... and these numbers are
used in the register children continuation markers -- so only the direct
descent to the starting individual will be numbered.

These are concerned with blood lines, and other spouses of ancestors
of the starting individual in a reverse register are not reported.

And do these organizations provide standards for genealogical reports, that
some people and some genealogical software developers think they must obey?

They define the standards for reports submitted to their journals

and libraries. Most other genealogical organizations have accepted those
formats as de facto standards. Everyone going to their publications
thereby knows what the data indicates and how to move from section to
section.

I'm checking on a rumor that these organizations have forbidden including
multiple spouses and stepchildren in ancestor reports that report children
of the direct ancestors, and any inclusion of foster children and adopted
children in any sort of a genealogical report.

For the purposes of those societies, that is probably not a "rumor"

but the definition of what they are interested in. People doing formal
GENEALOGY are concerned with BLOOD-LINE. Adoptions and etc. are NOT of
interest except as a /separate/ line submitted separately.
--
bieber.genealogy Dennis Lee Bieber
HTTP://home.earthlink.net/~bieber.genealogy/

[Austin W. Spencer]

Dora Smith wrote:

Where would I find the required formats for articles submitted to the NGS
Quarterly, TAG, and NEHGR?

This topic is basically covered by Dennis. TAG is closer to NEHGR in
that it assigns roman numerals to all children and Arabic numerals only
to those children that are carried forward. Most of the better state
and regional journals use a style similar to TAG, as does _The
Genealogist_, published biannually by the American Society of
Genealogists.

And do these organizations provide standards for genealogical reports, that
some people and some genealogical software developers think they must obey?

No. The journals and the organizations that publish them (TAG is the
only fully independent journal there is) do not govern software
reporting. In the current state of the art, only the software
developers can do that.

I'm checking on a rumor that these organizations have forbidden including
multiple spouses and stepchildren in ancestor reports that report children
of the direct ancestors, and any inclusion of foster children and adopted
children in any sort of a genealogical report.

Supporting the existence of such rules is the fact that alot of people
appear to ahve been taught that genealogy must be done that way, and the
rest of us have to do it that way as well.

I need to see the rules themselves, and find out who to complain to.

Perhaps our best guide to accommodating these family patterns in
writing is Madilyn Coen Crane, "Numbering Your Genealogy -- Special
Cases: Surname Changes, Step Relationships, and Adoptions," NGSQ 83
(1995): 85-95. Crane, in turn, builds upon Joan Ferris Curran,
"Numbering Your Genealogy: Sound and Simple Systems," NGSQ 79 (1991):
181-93. Several of their suggestions were incorporated into the _BCG
Genealogical Standards Manual_, 2000 ed.

I have e-mailed the NGS, and the research and customer support offices at
NEHGS, and the edtiors of TAG. The American Genealogical Society is
apparently too prestigious to have contact people or e-mail addresses. The
people I contacted might respond or they might not.

--
Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, TX
tiggernut24@yahoo.com

What do you know -- NGSQ has published articles that *advise*
researchers on how to accommodate step relationships! If you have
problems getting your program to report on them, it cannot be because
NGS doesn't support such reporting. And, as I mentioned, NGS is in no
position to mandate software features anyhow. The problem must be
either that your program won't allow it or that you don't understand
your program.

In principle, it is not hard to devise a form that lists all the
children that an ancestor had by multiple spouses (or other liaisons,
for that matter). It is not even hard, with the right programming
skills, to devise a form that links an unrelated "child" to a family
structure by a sort of fictive-kinship. PAF, for example, allows
Adoptive parents, though I have not looked into whether Adoptive
children appear on PAF printouts. Nevertheless, I can believe that most
programs are not designed to report on adoptive children and step
relationships. I can also believe that even those programs that can
report on those relationships cannot follow Crane's recommendations to
exact tolerance.

But your problem is not with NGS, nor with NEHGS, nor with the editors
of TAG, nor with "The American Genealogical Society," whatever that is.
(If you happened to mean the American Society of Genealogists, your
problem is not with them, either. But then, the current editors of TAG
and most of the other top journals *are* FASGs.) Your problem is with
the software developers whose reports do not include the information
you want to include.

The same phenomenon works in reverse: What the journals print is not
determined by what you and I can get into our reports. Good journal
articles describe the research process as well as the results. They use
footnotes to cite their sources down to the page or entry date. They
derive information from primary sources, and they often expose errors
and falsehoods that are printed elsewhere. They do not rehearse
information that is widely available and accepted (unless, of course,
there is reason to challenge it); and they make permanent contributions
to the field, regardless of the family structure(s) involved. If all
this is more than you and I can expect from our rough charts, it also
shows that a comprehensive printout does not for scholarship make. A
report worthy of NGSQ, TAG, or NEHGR is a task for a writer, not a
machine, and this ought to explain why queries about formats for those
journals lead to writing guides instead of database tools.

Austin W. Spencer

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

On 2 Dec 2006 01:29:17 -0800, "Austin W. Spencer"
<AustinWSpencer@cox.net> declaimed the following in
soc.genealogy.computing:

In principle, it is not hard to devise a form that lists all the
children that an ancestor had by multiple spouses (or other liaisons,
for that matter). It is not even hard, with the right programming
skills, to devise a form that links an unrelated "child" to a family
structure by a sort of fictive-kinship. PAF, for example, allows
Adoptive parents, though I have not looked into whether Adoptive
children appear on PAF printouts. Nevertheless, I can believe that most
programs are not designed to report on adoptive children and step
relationships. I can also believe that even those programs that can
report on those relationships cannot follow Crane's recommendations to
exact tolerance.

If I recall the earlier threads (including a week on the TMG mailing

list), the prime complaint was that a "reverse register" (to use UFT
terms) -- starting with a current individual and going back through that
individuals ancestors -- would not jump sideways to include children or
parents of secondary marriages. Which seems a bit logical to me. That,
say, my grandfather divorced and married again doesn't make the
ancestors of the second wife MY ancestors. I would expect the marriage
itself to be reported in the narration, but it would not trigger a
continuation (what type of Ahnentafel number would it get? ((2^N) + 1)'
vs ((2^N) + 1) (the ' is significant). Would a third marriage get a " ?
And the markers carry through to those "ancestors"?

I don't know of any program whose "register" (or other that starts
with an ancestor and progresses to all descendants) would exclude the
other marriages.

UFT's old "Family Journal" -- being a compilation of "(modified)
Register" reports for each end-line ancestor, with duplicate removal and
cross-reference linking -- would list everyone, but again it is ancestor
to descendant, not descendant to ancestor. {And I've had a long running
complaint, myself, about how TMG handles duplicate removal and
cross-reference linking; UFT did multipass computations so it could link
forward and backwards, TMG only does backwards linking, meaning one gets
surname changes}.
--
bieber.genealogy Dennis Lee Bieber
HTTP://home.earthlink.net/~bieber.genealogy/

[Austin W. Spencer]

Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

On 2 Dec 2006 01:29:17 -0800, "Austin W. Spencer"
AustinWSpencer@cox.net> declaimed the following in
soc.genealogy.computing:



In principle, it is not hard to devise a form that lists all the
children that an ancestor had by multiple spouses (or other liaisons,
for that matter). It is not even hard, with the right programming
skills, to devise a form that links an unrelated "child" to a family
structure by a sort of fictive-kinship. PAF, for example, allows
Adoptive parents, though I have not looked into whether Adoptive
children appear on PAF printouts. Nevertheless, I can believe that most
programs are not designed to report on adoptive children and step
relationships. I can also believe that even those programs that can
report on those relationships cannot follow Crane's recommendations to
exact tolerance.

If I recall the earlier threads (including a week on the TMG mailing
list), the prime complaint was that a "reverse register" (to use UFT
terms) -- starting with a current individual and going back through that
individuals ancestors -- would not jump sideways to include children or
parents of secondary marriages. Which seems a bit logical to me. That,
say, my grandfather divorced and married again doesn't make the
ancestors of the second wife MY ancestors. I would expect the marriage
itself to be reported in the narration, but it would not trigger a
continuation (what type of Ahnentafel number would it get? ((2^N) + 1)'
vs ((2^N) + 1) (the ' is significant). Would a third marriage get a " ?
And the markers carry through to those "ancestors"?

There's no serious obstacle to presenting the children of multiple
marriages in an ahnentafel report the way it is regularly done in the
journals. The difference is that we have to reference the person by the
ahnentafel number rather than an arbitrary reference number like 1.

Let's say we ordered a report that included your ancestor no. 292 and
say his name is John Smith. The report would list his marriages in
sequence, and his wives' parents right after their names, but *only the
parents we trace further* would get ahnentafel numbers. In this case,
they would be 586 and 587. As for the children, they would all get a
single list with separate parent-identification heads for each marriage
and a continuous series of Roman numerals, like this:

Chldren of 292. John Smith and Sarah White are:
i. John Smith Jr.
ii. Thomas Smith
Children of 292. John Smith and 293. Mary Turner are:
128 iii. Edward Smith

To this extent, I see no reason why children of multiple spouses and
the children of each could not be integrated into a standard
ahnentafel-based report.

The real fun begins with Dora's indefinite use of "stepchildren," which
implies a harder set of problems. Dora does not seem to distinguish
between those multiple marriages that produced half-siblings and those
that produced step-siblings only. By step-siblings only, I mean
children of one of the "extra" spouses who would not ordinarily be
named in a family summary of either of the numbered ancestors -- for
example, any children Sarah White may have had children *before* her
marriage to 292. John Smith. That complicates things if Dora wants her
report both to follow the ahnentafel and to put all step relationships
on the same generational footing.

Multiple sets of half-siblings complicate things even more. Suppose
that 293. Mary Turner, too, had children before her marriage to 292.
John Smith. How are we supposed to order the family groups? In reality,
since Sarah and Mary (and John too) are likely to be having children
over the same timespan in these circumstances, there is no arrangement
that is going to put the family groups together *and* make intuitive
chronological sense.

I don't know of any program whose "register" (or other that starts
with an ancestor and progresses to all descendants) would exclude the
other marriages.

Nor do I; but that's the Register. We're contemplating Register-like
features that could appear in the Ahnentafel as well, and Dora has
reported that she generally finds them (some of them, anyway) in PAF.
It's the other *children* that seem to get her goat. I do not blame her
for that, but I do wish she hadn't taken it out on the wrong people.

UFT's old "Family Journal" -- being a compilation of "(modified)
Register" reports for each end-line ancestor, with duplicate removal and
cross-reference linking -- would list everyone, but again it is ancestor
to descendant, not descendant to ancestor. {And I've had a long running
complaint, myself, about how TMG handles duplicate removal and
cross-reference linking; UFT did multipass computations so it could link
forward and backwards, TMG only does backwards linking, meaning one gets
surname changes}.
--
bieber.genealogy Dennis Lee Bieber
HTTP://home.earthlink.net/~bieber.genealogy/

I have nothing to say to this. I suppose I just have to take your word
for it.

Austin W. Spencer

[singhals]

Austin W. Spencer wrote:

[snip]

Multiple sets of half-siblings complicate things even more. Suppose
that 293. Mary Turner, too, had children before her marriage to 292.
John Smith. How are we supposed to order the family groups? In reality,
since Sarah and Mary (and John too) are likely to be having children
over the same timespan in these circumstances, there is no arrangement
that is going to put the family groups together *and* make intuitive
chronological sense.

ALL too true. I have a spot in my personal genealogy where
a woman marries 3 times (at least, 3 I've found) with issue
all three times; her third husband is on his third wife with
issue all three times; his first wife was a widow with a
child. Try explaning THAT using names sometime (g).

Cheryl