This sounds a little over my head. I find things like Visitations more on my skill level. However, if someone or several people were to establish a database such as you describe, I would be eating it up with a spoon. I am not a scholar or Ph.D. I do however, take every opportunity to better my self education. I have dabbled in Greek and Latin and Hebrew references because the King James Bible is terribly inaccurate in many places and it has also been very helpful to understand the historical background of early Christians and the Jews of the time. I have plodded along faithfully through Josephus.
This actually does carry over into genealogy, because many Medieval trees go back to Roman Emperors and Egyptian Dynasties, for instance. I am not content to know names and dates, I want to know they history too. It is pure escapism on my part.
Back to the subject; I need more amateur sources, personally. I do realize that there are people on this list who make my small efforts look like elephant paintings. Just humor me.
Wanda Thacker
Hickory <
[email protected]> wrote: I have also long wished for a really good late Roman Empire, post-
empire Germanic Kingdon, Merovingian genealogical website that would
not only provide properly documented information on provable
genealogical connections (distinguishing carefully between primary and
secondary sources and noting which is which), but which would also
provide enough biographical detail from primary sources to act as a
simple prosography of the subset of individuals being covered by the
period concerned. It would not only be a plus for serious genealogical
study, but also would have applications across a wide range of
historical research fields.
Any really good study for the period concerned would not only require
a need for a good understanding of medieval Latin (and, to a rather
lesser extent, the Greek of the early Byzantine period and very
occasionally with reference to Arabic sources), but would require a
thorough familiarity with the paleographical history of the period
concerned, as well as a knowledge of numismatics, art history, and
early medieval legal systems (canon law, Roman civil law both pre-
Justinian and post-Justinian, and the common law of the various
Germanic tribes which invaded the late Roman Empire). There are
excellent scholars at work in each of the fields I have mentioned,
but, unfortunately, no consortium of scholars that I know of at work,
which means it will be an indefinite number of years yet before it
will even become possible to clearly identify for this period which
genealogical questions are capable of being answered and which are
not. Basically, the biggest weakness one encounters (and this, in the
course of my own career, I have found applies to all areas of
scholarship) is that so few scholars are good at collaboration and, in
spite of elaborate bibliographies, rarely actually do in-depth study
of the work of any wide range of scholars in languages other than
their own, a fact which often reduces one to either keep on
perpetuating the myths of past scholarship, which often seem to take
on lives of their own, or to perpetually keep on re-inventing the
wheel, which, being more difficult, is rather less often done.
One needn't have a Ph.D. in any of the fields outlined above to
produce scholarship of a high quality. All that would really be needed
would be a first class coordinator of a web group with a clearly
defined purpose (e.g., rigorously documented Merovingian era
genealogy) who would provide a format for determining the areas of
expertise and possible biases affecting the research being done and of
which no one is completely free of. Also, there would be a need to
distinguish between contributors whose contributions would remain
anonymous to all except the site coordinator and other website users,
making it impossible for the non-contributors to comment serious
scholarship into useless obscurity as so often happens elsewhere.
Among contributors, there would be a need for an anonymous editing
ability of each other's work (and, more importantly, a group-wide
ability to judge whether the proposed editing was justified), but also
there would need to be an easily accessible archive of edited portions
of text and an easily verifiable means of determining who was
responsible for what. Finally, courtesy should be rigorously enforced.
The more scholarly a person becomes, the more a person very often
becomes intolerant of views other than his/her own. If intolerance
were to erupt into bad manners, as is so often seen at all levels and
in all venues of the world of research, there should also be a means
of cutting a person off from group participation.
I've noticed recently that Google seems to have on offer many, if not
all, of the web resources I have mentioned above. Perhaps you might
consider setting up a more narrowly focused research group along the
lines I suggested to tackle the issues you have mentioned. If you did,
I would be happy to participate, and would gladly contribute what I
could when I could, which would not be that much, but could, on
occasion be useful.
Hikaru
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