Heluna Ellasdatter - deleted suffix "princess of Norway"

Correction "Blæja" ... i am paying attention :)

Yes, I'll lock the name fields when you're ready. Let me know.

I think it is ready to lock up, the About section also.

Locked the name. The About can't be locked without locking the whole profile. I don't want to do that. Locking a profile is an extreme step, in my opinion, because it undermines the ability of users to contribute.

Take a closer look, -you can individually lock About Me as well, but in the About Me tab under edit profile

Really? Last time I ask they told me I couldn't do that. Last time I trust curators to know ;)

Anyway, I still don't want to lock the About Me. To me, a lock means that there is no chance anyone can contribute something better or that any contribution has to be vetted. It makes sense to lock names and dates, but things like Occupation and particularly the About should be as open as possible.

Even so, Bjørn if you want to take over and do it a different way, I wouldn't have any objection. It's important that this be an MP but not important who the curator is.

The name is too long and contains too many superfluous elements.

I have the same concern, but I'd rather have that discussion here in the open than in an edit war.

Agree, - a name shout NOT contain text that should be in he About Me or as a curator note instead. Secondly: I never lock anything unless there is an ongoing edit war.

Fair enough, but I do it differently.

To me a lock means I've looked at it. It's "good enough" for now. If someone wants to change it there should be a discussion.

Personally, I prefer the shortest name possible so it will display nicely in Tree View. However, it sometimes seems that everyone on Geni has different aesthetic preferences and half of them think their way is the only way. I'm not interested in being a format Nazi. If it's not actually incorrect, it's good enough.

In this case, Alex has taken the lead in the research and discussion, and he's done 90 percent of the work. I think his preferences counts for something.

Discuss the options. Find something people can agree on, and I'll change it. My suggestion (above) was Blaeja / Heluna.

"Blaeja / Heluna" is searchable on the net, it's good enough for me.

The reason i went away from "Blaeja / Heluna" was that it implies an equal amount of value to both names. Yesterday's "lesson" by Justin gave me the impression that in Blaeja we may very well have a true fragment of this woman preserved for over a thousand years, as opposed to Heluna which seems to be just a random name attached to her hundreds of years later.

I actually did worry about the length of the display name but when i checked it in Tree view it displayed just fine for me. As i am viewing with a 14" Laptop screen i assume that most other people would have no trouble seeing it.
I wanted it to be immediately obvious to a casual viewer that this woman was a daughter of Ella without inventing a patronymic for her, at the same time i wanted to include Heluna in the display name to ensure there be no confusion from people unaware of the background.

I try to build profiles with the assumption that the next person to view them will make zero effort to understand the context and just start merging/adding profiles immediately.

... With my own ancestors i do this using the About but in the popular areas of the historical tree i dont trust other users to even be looking at the About.

I think that i have clean up enough sh*t historical profiles that i have earned the right to have that opinion :)

As for locking About sections i actually have the complete opposite opinion to you Justin.

With an unprotected About i can edit/delete/add whatever i want without any interaction with anyone.

I think locking the About forces people to actually collaborate via Discussions (my preference) or Messaging. This way at a minimum a Curator has to be involved in the editing process which i think is a positive. I thought it worked quite well for Ragnar's About, with the exception that Ragnar's About still contains some typo errors which is causing the links at the end not to function correctly, also merges since the cleanup have tacked on rubbish to the bottom of the About which has yet to be "cleaned" away.

Alex, you might end up changing my mind about locking the About section of profiles, but it won't happen today.

1. Ragnar is a unique situation. I don't want to base my opinion on an extreme case.

2. One of the most frequent complaints I hear from users is that profiles on Geni are locked so that they cannot contribute. Balance that against the fact that the loudest critics are often those who want to make wild, unsubstantiated changes.

3. It seems that no two curators have exactly the same sense of when and what to lock. Some seem to lock everything. Others seems to lock nothing. I have a strong person personal ethic in favor of keeping Geni as open as possible.

I lock only when primary sources are involved, and in this case there are no primary sources, and hardly any secondary ones. Most sources are written decades later and are untrustworthy, therefor they should not be included in our genealogy.

And if you incist in having these non-sourced characters in our common tree, you need to cut our lines back to them where the primary sources stop and we go into wishful thinking.

I'm getting tired of all these lines back to fictional characters like Ragnar and his band of followers. It makes our trees and Geni look ludicrous and my fellow genealogists are shunning Geni while these lines are shown as real.

We need to to better than this!!!

When life gives you lemons hopefully you have enough sugar in the cupboard to make lemonade.

Cut all the suspect links, delete all the fantasy profiles. I guarantee within a week someone will have put them all back and even started a Discussion "Jebus is my 23rd Great Grandfather!".

Make the profiles as correct as possible and lock them up tight is my attitude, when someone comes along with a better source then let them discuss it with all who are interested and then the Curator(s) edit the profile to match.

I agree that Ragnar isn't the best example to hold up as he is such a shadow but i purely meant to remind you of the way that many parties _collaborated_ in the Discussion about him before you then edited his About to match the result of the Discussion.

Perhaps i am biased because i "won" that time.

I also favour locking profiles up because i feel the Curators are spread too thinly to actually "curate" the MPs. If i get a notification on my home page that someone has edited one of "my" profiles i will go and check the Revisions to see what has been changed. I don't think any of you would be surprised by what i sometimes find done to very well researched and sources profiles by people who think they know better (i am sure some people think the same of me!)

Alex, I think our common culture is still emerging.

I tried to stay in the "middle of the pack" or slightly on the conservative side when it comes to locking. I automatically lock names, sex, a living status on my MPs. If I notice that dates are supported by primary sources, I'll also lock those. Otherwise I try to leave MPs as open as possible.

The reason I've been persuaded to consistently lock the name, sex, and living status is that too many times someone has changed the identity of a profile or tried to make it private by turning it to Living.

I think you have a good point that curators are spread too thin. Most days the news items scroll off my screen within an hour or two.

Usually the first indication I have that someone has messed something up is when I get a message about it, and then it's often hours worth of work to do the cleanup -- and often it's the same problems that I've cleaned up every week for years. It will be much better when we have relationship locking.

It's discouraging that there isn't more user involvement, which is why I appreciate your contributions so much even when we disagree.

Thank you Justin, i do appreciate how ready you are to assist and educate not just me but everyone that asks the same obvious question for the n-th time. The other curators also, obviously we cannot all agree on everything all the time.

Jason Scott Wills, you should delete the comma as well, it serves zero purpose (and looks very odd) once you have deleted the second half of the name.

I really do not get it this time, you named her N.N

If she was the daughter of Ælla, then her last name was "Ællasdotter"
Otherwise, you can just cut her of from that father, because he wasn't her father, do you understand this simple principle?

Either she was the daughter of him, or she wasn't, if the lines still do show him as the father, then, her last name are very given, capisce?

And what was wrong with "Blæju Ællasdotter"?

Anglo Saxons didn't use patronomics.

Anglo Saxons didn't use patronomics. No but her husbands tribe did, so she belong to that later category, if she would have had any runes written of her, it would have been stated her name first followed by daughter of X = her fathers name. According to me, what you have done gives the logical consequence that her fathers name was unknown, thus either you change her fathers first name to NN, or put back the daughters surname as I suggested.

"What you have done" I didn't make her NN Alex did. I just cleaned up the display name.

The profile is already a series of compromises. There are better things to argue about than whose guess is better. I'm content with Jason's edit. Let's move on.

As long as I see N.N. in her name field I'm not satisfied, but of course, there's always something that could be better to argue about but not in this case that concerns just that profile, and that was what I thought this thread was about, not something else.

I'd be okay with changing her name to Blæja even though i think that strictly speaking it would be the wrong thing to do.

We think she had 3 names, the name she was born with, the name her husband gave her and the name the saga writes gave her. I set the profile to NN because we only know the second and third names. I can see an argument that the first name we know her by is Blæja.

I strongly disagree about "Ællasdotter" as explained at the start of this thread... even if she went to live in Denmark would not Ragnar's family have spoken Norse rather than Danish? Ællasdóttir?

The first rule of genealogy is "don't make up data". The idea that she might have had the name Ællasdotter or Ællasdóttir is an inference from what we know about Scandinavian custom.

It is also counter to the genealogical tradition of using the earliest known name (the "birth name"). Essentially we'd be making an argument that after her marriage she acquired a patronymic from her father's name. Yuck. I can't think of a more muddled way of doing it.

The Anglo-Saxons, in places, sometimes used the suffix "-ing" attached to the fathers name, for a son, but there's no evidence of any form of patronymic for daughters.

Ha! Justin Durand already covered this nicely. Late to the thread, I was.