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Re: Standards...

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On 28/04/2020 13:00, Ian Goddard wrote:

> The forensic science half deals with two standards of proof: beyond
> reasonable doubt for criminal cases and balance of probabilities in
> civil cases.  When I started out in family history I went on a course so
> naturally I asked the lecturer which of these applied.  The question was
> never answered.  

You're talking about English law here.  Some jurisdictions have an 
intermediate standard of proof.  The United States is one, and it is 
described as "clear, convincing and satisfactory evidence".  I'm neither 
a lawyer nor an American, and it may that the way this is interpreted in 
US law is not what I would want in genealogy, but as a phrase it is 
closer to what I'm aiming for as a genealogist than the two English 
standards of proof.  Of course it would be nice if everything were 
"beyond reasonable doubt", but that's a difficult level to attain.  Good 
genealogy requires critical thinking, which results in lots of 
reasonable doubts.

> In fact scientific method demands that I should look for material
> which has the potential to contradict the hypothesis.
I would say that a good genealogical method does too.  For example, if I 
know roughly where and when an individual was born, and I find a baptism 
record in the appropriate parish and time window, I would not normally 
consider that "clear, convincing and satisfactory evidence" until I've 
checked to see whether there are any other suitable baptisms in a 
neighbouring parish or just outside the expected time window, have 
checked to see whether there are burials records or death registrations 
which might be for that child, and have checked records such as censuses 
and the parents given in baptisms in later decades to see if there was a 
second individual with an equally good claim to the baptism.  If some of 
these records don't exist, which in earlier times is quite likely, I 
don't necessarily let that stop me from accepting the record, but where 
they exist and are readily accessible, I would want to check them first.

> The IT half of my career has led me to make little use of genealogical
> packages.  ISTM that the lure of a recognised data structure, the tree,
> has inveigled developers into using this as the basis of their data
> store.  As the family tree is a statement of an hypothesis, and one that
> might have to be replaced, using it as the framework on which to store
> the evidence requires too much prejudgement and might make changes of
> mind needlessly difficult.  I prefer a mixure of RDBMS and spreadsheets
> as a means (not ideal but not enough to prod me into developing
> something better) for organising data into timelines.

I completely agree with this.  It's long been an ambition of mine to 
write a good genealogy application which treats evidence and your 
analysis of it as the primary entities, and trees as views of that data 
which can be generated in a variety of ways depending on what you want 
to visualise.  That might be the consequences of a hypothesis for which 
there is little evidence, or even be something counterfactual, such as 
what you understand another researcher to have believed but now know to 
be false.  It's a big project and not one I have time to get into 
seriously at the moment, but I'd like to think it might happen, assuming 
no-one else does something similar first.

Richard

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Thread

Standards... Eagle@bellsouth.net (J. Hugh Sullivan) - 2020-04-27 20:06 +0000
  Re: Standards... Ian Goddard <ianng@austonley.org.uk> - 2020-04-28 13:00 +0100
    Re: Standards... Richard Smith <richard@ex-parrot.com> - 2020-04-29 13:52 +0100
    Re: Standards... Eagle@bellsouth.net (J. Hugh Sullivan) - 2020-04-29 12:56 +0000
      Re: Standards... Ian Goddard <ianng@austonley.org.uk> - 2020-04-29 15:28 +0100

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