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Archiver > CUSTODIAN > 2002-09 > 1032588452


From: "Harold Badham" <>
Subject: [CUST] References
Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2002 07:07:32 +0100


Stephen Benham asks about the use of references

The approach I use for recording One Name Study information is to allocate the same family reference to the 'children' of a marriage with the off springs of each of these 'children' being given a different family reference. Should a person marry twice then the children of this second marriage get a different family reference. The marriages are 'linked' through the personal reference of the common spouse.

Whenever the information relates to births/baptisms the family reference links to the parents marriage or if the marriage has not been found then the family reference is linked to the first known birth/baptism when the family reference is first allocated.

As information could be available from any county a sytem of references based on county, parish & date has been generated.

Personal references are of the form Hef BishFr 1675a where Hef is the Chapman county code in this case Herefordshire, BishFr is a shortened form of the parish in this case Bishops Frome & 1675 is the year of birth or baptism. The final letter is necessary to differentiate when there is more than one birth/baptism in any year.

Family references have a similar format being either of the form M Hef BishFr 1670a or B Hef BishFr 1670a, where M indicates the reference relates to the parents marriage while B indicates that the reference relates to the first baptism found for that family. (the presence of a 'B' reference indicates that no marriage has been found for the parents)

Should a marriage be found after a family reference based on a baptism has been allocated then it is necessary to change all the relevant references to give the correct family group.

Recently limited information has been received from abroad, in this case a suitable country abbreviation replaces the county code while an abbreviation for the area replaces the parish abbreviation

( In all cases the parish abbreviation has a maximum of 6 letters to ensure references are printed in full on the standard output forms)

Harold Badham


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