In some ways, this is a follow-on from my post in October last year, when I wrote about getting back into systematically collecting information for the study, and about tracking the numbers of PARRY entries within the genealogical company databases. The idea behind doing that is to (eventually!) be able to identify how 'complete' the study is, through some quantifiable measure.
Of course, I will never be able to collect every reference - an exact search for the surname in each of the main genealogical sites currently produces the following total numbers:
Ancestry: 3,211,449
FindMyPast: 1,303,026
My Heritage: 7,725,522
TheGenealogist: 640,550
Family Search: 1,044,594
(and there's 3,965 PARRY related profiles on Wikitree.)
I have spent some time this month looking at how easy it might be to keep track of totals in the various databases but the simple answer, for anyone who likes 'exact' figures, is that it isn't!
Ancestry is the easiest to collect totals from - but the totals for individual databases within each category (eg "All BMD...", "All census...", "All military..." etc) don't always add up to the overall total given for that category to start with. Some databases also seem to 'disappear' when you click through to see them all, as illustrated in the following two smaller sets of results, in which I was searching using an additional exact keyword of "navy", as well as the exact surname:
Imagine trying to identify which databases are 'missing', if you found such differences having collected totals from over seven thousand databases.
The other companies either do not show the individual database totals, or only do so if you click down through various levels for any that contain above a certain number of results.
And, again, the totals obtained by adding the results for individual areas (ie, on FMP, the separate "Australia & New Zealand", "Ireland", "All Britain", and "All US & Canada" totals) does not always add up to the same total as when you search under "The World". Even the total obtained when searching just the two countries, Canada and the United States, separately, isn't the same as when searching for them both together, yet alone the total obtained when searching under the five separate regions of Britain, compared to an "All Britain" search.
I'm sure there are reasons behind why that happens.
But there is clearly little point trying to measure 'completeness' based on such general numbers of entries (although it can be interesting to look at the lists of individual databases available - discovering there are entries in databases such as the "Mayflower Source Records", various Mexican Catholic records, or the "Mariners of the American Revolution", can lead into totally unexpected areas of research.)
And, while it might be fun to produce graphs like this:
or this:
...they're not exactly informative, other than to demonstrate the fairly obvious conclusion that a few databases have large numbers of PARRY entries, while the majority of databases contain a relatively small number of entries (and that the "Wales, Newspapers.com™ Stories and Events Index, 1800's to current" certainly skews the results! ☺)
Such graphs are not very helpful in terms of developing a strategy for progress on the study.
Of more use might be a graph limited to a particular category of results, such as the census results, within the UK and Ireland Collection:
Once again, summarising the number of databases containing the various totals shows how the majority of the databases contain relatively small numbers of results (less than 2501, according to the scale but, in reality, all less than 150 entries), about a third of the databases contain between 2501 - 17501 entries, and only one database (the 1939 Register, where totals for the UK's constituent regions are not given separately), approaches 30,000.
Now, from such figures, it is much easier to plan a 'collection strategy', and to identify which databases will need subdividing further, to make the process more manageable. It will also be possible to measure against the totals expected, to obtain some level of 'completeness'.
I know that many one-namers base their studies around marriage records but, for me, the censuses have always seemed a 'better' choice. They give a snapshot of which PARRYs were alive at a particular moment in time and that provides a framework on which to hang all the other data.
So census details are going to be a focus for progress over this year.
But, since I imagine just working on the censuses, and reciting statistics for how many more census entries I have transcribed each month, will drive me (yet alone any readers) slightly 'nuts', I shall also be working on other topics alongside that. Recalling the list of topics I included in my December post, the first one of these will be the PARRYs at the Battle of Trafalgar.
I have already begun to look at these but will make that a separate post.
I might expand that topic to include other records of PARRYs in the UK's Royal Navy - bearing in mind that the forthcoming Guild Conference will take place in Portsmouth, the site of "one of the Royal Navy’s most historically significant bases".1
Talking of the Guild, last week, I was reading the most recent Guild Journal, in particular the article by Stephen Coker, about Frederick Norman Filby (1915-1995), who was described as the "Architect of the One-Name Study Movement". It really made me aware of how much we, as current one-namers, "stand upon the shoulders of giants", those who accomplished so much, and who laid down the foundations for what we do now.
In three years time, 2029 will see the Guild's 50th anniversary - now that's a good target to aim for, to see some major progress in the study.
Notes & Sources
1 The historical significance of Portsmouth: specific quote from the "Overview of UK Royal Navy Bases" at https://www.defenseadvancement.com/resources/royal-navy-bases/
National Museum of the Royal Navy at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard: https://www.nmrn.org.uk/visit-us/portsmouth-historic-dockyard
