Sourcing challenges: gender

Probably the most recurring challenge that I've come across so far in my inputs has been gender sourcing.  When relying on family histories or other secondary sources (more on this in later posts), many times the history consists of listings of generations and persons within those generations, with names, dates of birth, death, and marriage, and occasionally additional notes on achievements or things that are known about the individuals.  Rarely, if ever, is gender explicitly identified in such sources.

That means that likely, assumptions are being made about the gender of the individuals, usually based on a couple of factors:  name (and typical naming conventions), name of spouse (if known), and surnames of children (if given).  However, there's a small challenge - FTM 2014 automatically creates a gender fact, and will populate it either based on the gender of the stated spouse, or, alternatively, populate it with unknown.

Since the goal of the Genealogy Project is to have all facts sourced, this creates a bit of a conundrum.  The approach that I've taken to date is simply to source the initial gender fact with the first source used for the individual.  From a rating perspective, the gender fact will typically get rated with "zero" stars, which essentially means that the fact is implied or assumed.  I've not documented the assumption rationale for every single gender fact - in most cases, this is simply based on the person's name and typical naming conventions, and quite frankly, this is probably one of the less significant assumptions made.

So, most individuals within the file are identified as male or female.  Occasionally, a person will be "unknown", but usually very little else is known about the individual (for example, nothing is known about the spouse or children) and the individual has an ambiguous name - "Willie" to use an example that actually comes from the file.  It is worth noting that sometimes names can be misleading - there's a female "Frank" in the Genealogy Project.

Even when more is known about an individual, gender is rarely explicitly stated except in birth records or census records.  Histories usually have language that refers to "he" or "she", which obviously assists in the determination, but this still ends up getting a "zero" from a source evaluation standpoint.