Mightier Acorns

Last month, I spelled out the troubles I was having collecting an initial pile of census data for the Callan Name Study. When dimple commented with the wise suggestion to ask the app developer community at WikiTree, I said: “It will take me a few weeks to find time to look into that, so if anyone else wants to talk to them, feel free to point them at this post!”

She took me up on that: G2G: This member needs some geek help

And if you check out the selected answer from Arno, you will see that he offered a solution that was outside of my grasp, but gave him a couple of afternoons of fun. He ran his solution across the whole set of U.S. Census records from 1790-1950 and the two Irish Censuses (1901 and 1911). I added the whole table to my Callan Name Study spreadsheet.

Number Talk

If you open that spreadsheet, you should see four tabs (or sheets) along the bottom:

• Collaboration form (we’ll come back to that)
• Callan ONS individuals – the “final product” we’re working toward
• FamilySearch records – the data Arno collected for us
• Louth c. 1910 – the data I manually collected from the 1901 and 1911 Ireland Census (probably going away now)

The FamilySearch records tab contains 44,155 lines, each representing a record (with a link to that record on FamilySearch in the “Record URL” column). If the record was attached to a FamilySearch person profile, that link is in the “FS Person URL” column – there are 23,978 lines in that column! When I de-duplicated that list, I had 13,300 individual profiles!

It took me several months to manually pull out the records from the Ireland Censuses, and I only collected 642 individuals. Arno’s technique found 3,040 records. Even if you assumed that everyone overlapped between 1901 and 1911 (and they definitely did NOT), that would be 1,520 individuals from those two census years collected in an afternoon!

What Next?

Now that I have this spreadsheet to work from, the goal is to take the collection of records and organize it. If I have to go through 45 thousand lines by myself, I will do that, but I will be asking for help from the WikiTree community.

Many hands make light work.

That means that I need to work through a few lines of the list and design an outline with some clear instructions. I don’t know what that will look like, but:

• Each Record URL needs a FS Person URL (even if that means creating a new FS Person profile).
• Each FS Person profile needs to be matched to someone in the Individuals tab.
• Each person in the Individuals tab needs to be matched to a WikiTree profile (even if that means creating a new WT profile).
• The people in the Individuals tab need to be organized into families (identified under the OCA, or “Oldest Common Ancestor”, we can connect them to).

There are probably some solutions that will be better than doing these steps manually, but I haven’t figured them out yet. For now, I plan to press forward and start asking for help in earnest once I know what specifics to ask for. (It’s more fun for people to help if it’s easy to understand how they’re helping.)

If you decide to dive in and start helping, you won’t have editor access to my spreadsheet, but you can add someone to the ONS sheet using this “Add a person” form.

Thanks again to everyone who took a moment to help move this project forward! I’ll keep y’all posted!