MEA CULPA - or your sins will find you out

Long ago (in a land not that far away) I mapped out my original family tree in a newly acquired database ‘Family Tree Legends’ as it happened. When it came to my sister’s family in Australia -and her daughter’s family (my niece) in particular - I inadvertently designated their eldest son (Tristan Michael X) as ‘F (Female). In truth the FTL database would attempt to ‘best-guess’ the sex from the name and (obviously in this case) it best guessed ‘F’ and I did not correct it.

So when I progressed to Genes I uploaded a Gedcom courtesy of FTL, and a year or two later the same to Ancestry. So the error was duplicated in each database.

Much more recently I set up my tree on Tribal Pages (also with a Gedcom upload) and added numerous photos of my own and those provided by family. It was one such (scanned and sent over from Australia) that caused consternation. My sister made contact on Skype and told me the relationship tag on the photo against Tristan’s name showed him to be a ‘sister’; causing much leg pulling, especially as Tristan is a 20 something very machismo Australian male (say no more!) I told her that it was just a mistake and I would put it right. Then the fun started.

It began with a mystery as my own ‘Administrator’ TP version bore no tags, merely naming individuals. So I asked my sister to explain about the tags. She told me she logged in as a family member with the pass-code and clicked on the photo found on her granddaughter’s page, thus the tags –courtesy of TP –automatically added relationships against other family members in the photo.

Now unlike other databases TP does not delineate the sex of a person as (say) Ancestry does with a pink/blue colour & icon so it took me a while to figure out he was down as a female. I proved this by a manual deletion and adding back to his parent’s page as a ‘Son’, then went through the photo process again, and sure enough he was now a ‘brother’. Then the penny dropped and I checked back to FTL and sure enough he was shown with the dreaded ‘F’ designation which I quickly changed. That explained everything. I spent the next half hour manually updating Genes and Ancestry. (Thankfully as a 'living' person his name was not be shown in either).


So considering my original database is now some 10 years old, it is quite staggering that one lone individual escaped notice with the wrong sex designation. Poor chap and now I have some apologising to do. It will take far too long to explain how it all happened so will just say “Sorry; my mistake”

 

Bob, he will probably say "that's OK Mate - no worries"

 

I have come across lots of instances where someone has apparently misread a name, then allocated a gender to go with it. This is often in e.g. trees in Ancestry, but not always; sometimes this has been at census level, where it looks as if the census takers have made the error. I have relative whose name was Culley, and who appears in the census as Cicely (working in a warehouse, which indicated something odd...) A real danger with things like transcriptions of baptismal records where the sex may not be given, but the template for the transcriber asks 'male/female?' E.g. the name Ernley has been read as Emley which 'of course' is a mis-spelling of Emily, so he is put down as female. And after a couple of centuries, modern transcribers may assume that e.g. Christian is solely a boy's name, which wasn't the case in the past

 

Sorry that should of course read 'down as a female' but I guess you worked that out for yourself

 

Thanks Tim as I discovered it too late for my own Edit. As for a 'Spiersism' I did think about resurrecting my old Forum tag, but thought it did not quite qualify...on the other hand why not? I do have a reputation to uphold.

 

touché