Establishing some conventions for (re)building the Cherokee Tree

Where should clan identification be placed?

Should we put hyphens between transliterated syllables, or not?

Agree in general but some concerns about the woman names. Men are easier, isn’t it always true, that ? :)

Letty “Hatchet Gray” might be a good example to work through. She had a married last name, she is not known to be Cherokee, it is possible she had native ancestry ? So would the proposal work?

Quibble: I use N.N. to make it clear it’s an abbreviation. And I try (don’t always succeed) to use description of relationships in the Display Name field.

In other words

First name = N.N.
Display name = 1st wife of that guy

The ethnicity field might be good for detailed clan & tribe

Regarding Letty, I would leave it without a Cherokee or non-Cherokee specification. I'm just at this moment trying to find a better way to nuance Kathryn's "nonexistent" or our "fictitious" label with what I think Kathryn is meaning when she says a person was nonexistent--she means on the officially-sanctioned Cherokee tree. What's your idea about the best way to address that? Of course, most of these people were "existent" in that someone occupied the place of a parent, but she is specifically trying to clean up the Cherokee designations in the tree.

I've never used the Ethnicity field because it's on a different tab (Personal). I wonder if we might persuade Mike to move it, or a similar category onto the Basics tab?

Just an interjection from one of the "easy" men..... I had used the Suffix line for the clan affiliation on the Shawnee. That is what we agreed on as I recall. Looks decent when it is displayed.

A lot of what we’ve achieved on the medieval tree is relevant.

- If the tree is entirely bogus (90% of the Moytoy tree for example) find the cut points to disconnect from the world family tree, fictional in the suffix, maybe re direct to the historic person. As that tree will be isolated at its end points no one will be able to add to the world family tree

- if the person existed but was not known to have the parents claimed for them, links within profile to the not - parents, add to spurious pedigrees Project, relationship lock to NN parents. Would it then be necessary to put their not - ethnicity in the name?

Let's try it out and see. I've only been working on the very early (pre-1800) profiles so far, and most of them I've just had to cut loose at the top, since most of the ones who were historical people (like the Emissaries to London) did not have known parents, partners or children, so they are really not going to be connected to the World Family Tree (or the Cherokee portion of it) since the connections are not known. They will be free-floating historical profiles without family ties.

Once we get down to more documentable ancestors, I don't know if the designation about whether someone is Cherokee or not is useful or not--at least until the point where tribal membership became something that was arbitrated according to tribal enrollment policies. That's really something I believe the Cherokee members of our group need to decide (I'm not Cherokee). I don't think Geni needs to be in the business of determining blood quantum for individual ancestors (since that gets politically loaded at certain points), but if descendants have that knowledge, they are welcome to enter it into the About field (in my opinion).

I notice that many of the historic Cherokee profiles have the clan designation entered into the Occupation field. That's not a bad place for it since it's on the Basics page near the top. Llyod Doss, the only reason I don't like it on the suffix line is that we also use that for titles, so it can get cluttered pretty easily. I'd like to determine a standard place to enter the clan info on the Basics page.

Mike Stangel, any suggestions? Could we create an optional field that could be opened or closed (like the Baptism is) on the Basics page that was general enough to designate "Community, tribe, or kin group" or something like that, which could be used in many different cultural contexts to designate ethnic or local or clan ties? If so, we could designate, for example, "Cherokee--Bird Clan (a ni tsi s qua)" or "Cherokee: Eastern Band, Bird clan" or "Cherokee: United Keetoowah Band".... I can see many uses for this field outside of tribal use, in other contexts. It could be used to designate subcultural communities in many different countries based upon ethnicity or religion or geography.

Here’s an example from my own tree

Abigail Roark

Since her maiden name is unknown I think it’s clearer to fill that in as unknown.

(I have to clean up the old note contributions)

I think this would be a good fit for the promised but not-yet-delivered feature of allowing users to add arbitrary name/value pairs, kinda like we do on events; for example, my birthweight and godparents on my birth event (see https://scontent-sjc3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/29597741_101560034553... ). I suggested this feature for our South African users who want to put a DVN identifier on their profiles.

I had always liked that idea, Mike. Maybe a trick is making it prominent and easy to use, from tree view. I just edited "Cherokee Indian" out of occupation & name fields for somehow great aunt Abigail Roark.

Hmmm ... Mike Stangel ... where would one add the arbitrary name/value pairs? In the process of adding them, could there be a 'tick-box' to indicate they should be displayed on the main profile page (maybe limited to a maximum of 2 or 3 'custom' fields to appear on the main profile page, all others on a ? (new tab?).

It'd be nice to have an optional list of 'custom field names' which others have used ... or maybe, at least, the custom fields used in the immediate family (to make it easy to propagate consistency along a branch).

I don’t know anything about how Geni is set up, but I think it’s important to have the tribe/nation name prominently displayed for individuals who were/are members of that tribe. That is very helpful to people who are searching for Native ancestors, especially if there’s a way to require documentation to go along with the field or to vet the information.