SCEYA - Tips on data entry

Genealogical Methods

Data Entry

Here are some rules for data entry into all kinds of genealogical software. This page gives the basics. Later it will be extended to deal with specific areas of data entry, like place names (toponyms), personal names (anthroponyms), dates, mixing languages, citing sources, etc.

These rules make the assumption that:

Other researchers may want to repeat or reexamine your research.
Your computer software may be upgraded with new features that you want to take advantage of.
You may decide to use another genealogical software package in the future.

The golden rules of data entry:

Be accurate - record what is in the record. Keep misspellings and add notes about your inferred more-standardized spelling of an item.
Be consistent - always enter the same item the same way. This means that at any time in the future a computer program can process all those records into another form easily.
Be expansive - put in labels that would help you or others to interpret the data. Where a word may have a number of different points of application. It is important to add your inferred type of that term (e.g. add the word [Parish], [Registration District] or [Census District] to your record). It is always easy to eliminate extra data by a global search and replace, but in reverse, it is almost impossible to automatically add-in extra data after the data has been recorded.
Be concise - use the correct terms. This is especially important when dealing with places and with the way documents are indexed. If you are working with material from another time period or from a culture other than your own, record what you see, then note separately and obviously your interpretation of the data.
Be complete - record the source of your information with sufficient clarity that another person could find the same document or location from your description. This should include where you found that document (if it was not in a book available in a large number of libraries).
Be critical - examine each source, check the time and distance between the author of the document and the event whose details are being described. Is this evidence copied from another source or is it based on hearsay? - as are the details of many death certificates.
Avoid abbreviations - keep the values the same as they are recorded. If an abbreviation was used in the original record, present the original transcript, and then clearly note that you have interpreted it as "....". The use of abbreviations in reported output (if you need them) should be a function of your reporting software, not of your data recording software. Remember that abbreviations change over time and that they can have a different meaning to persons from another culture.
Identify your additions or inferences - clearly identify what you have added or inferred. This particularly true where a place is known to have changed its name over time. It is better to include a note [now known as ....] or [at <date> known as ....]. Where personal names are concerned be careful about your assumption about married names and nicknames.
Specify the culture of the data - it will be much easier to apply different rules for processing of some data if the computer has some keys that identify where the data originated. [The original value as recorded may not be consistent enough to always give this separation for later automatic processing.]