For readers who are not Guild members, the Ruby project will be transferring to "real" Rubys the end of September. Michael Ruby has introduced himself and provided a very interesting read on DRY approach to genealogy. I think many of us can relate to the amusing but true definiton of WET! And with Michael's permission, I would love to adopt the sentence " Genealogy as a whole is forever beautifully unfinished."
Peggy Homans Chapman
Hello, everyone. My name is Michael Ruby. I am part of the team that will be inheriting the Ruby One-Name Study on 30 September. I would like to take this opportunity to express gratitude, to introduce myself, and to offer some initial thoughts about the future of the study by way of this blog post’s main body. In it, I wish to offer something that I hope is at least a little bit fresh: a computer science-style argument for the value of approaching genealogy through the one-name study.
I have a feeling that most genealogists will relate to the story, in which I advocate for the principle of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)——Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system. In software development, this is contrasted with WET, which stands for “We Enjoy Typing”.
In genealogy, we tend to value the process of rediscovery. This is important, particularly when we’re retracing work whose citations are untrustworthy, or altogether missing. Genealogy as a whole is forever beautifully unfinished. However, researchers do frequently arrive to small destinations where the outline work is effectively done. There simply are no more documents that can add to the basic framework of a family. A “single, unambiguous, authoritative representation” is possible, and has been made possible by collaboration across time. That representation should live at the home of the one-name study. It should free genealogists to work on tasks that will remain forever undone——working on more difficult proofs, taking family lines deeper into the past, and finding the rich details that fill out the stories of our ancestors’ lives and make them more than a collection of dates.
I am honoured to be able to do that in a project that the Guild of One-Name Studies itself conceived.
Gratitude first
First, I am thankful for the whimsical nature of GOONS, for having selected our little gemstone surname to celebrate their 40th anniversary. If we choose to do Sapphire/Safir in 2024, or Gold in 2029, I promise to return the favour. Second, I am grateful to Paul Howes and the entire RubyONS team. Not only have they achieved an astounding total of 16,309 people, but have built a foundation that (nearly) covers the full geographic spread of Ruby families. This will make future work so much easier. Third, I am astounded at my good fortune for having found the Guild at precisely the right time. One look at the mission statement and one conversation with Paul was all it took to convince me that I really wanted to contribute to this organisation’s work.
DRY genealogy and the Ruby families of the Old Northwest
I recently opened a folder in Indiana to find that I had repeated work that someone else had done over thirty years ago. Two fourth cousins of mine——Mary Lytle and her daughter Sue Yett——had followed the same paths I had, back in the era when all genealogical research moved at the speed of a road trip or post. They, along with my fourth cousins Jay and Ruth Ruby, had come to the same conclusions that I later would. However, before this, Jay and Ruth had already published the opposite conclusions——an incorrect link between our Ruby lineage and another.
Our Samuel Ruby and John Wesley Ruby were English-speaking Methodists. Our brick wall lies circa 1800 in northern Appalachia. Before arriving in Ripley County, Indiana, they had been enumerated in the 1820 Census in Cabell County, Virginia (now West Virginia), having arrived from an unknown part of Pennsylvania. The other Samuel Ruby and John Ruby were German-speaking Lutherans whose line goes from Ripley Township, Montgomery County, Indiana back to Shenandoah County, Virginia, York County, Pennsylvania, and Switzerland. My cousins, in the 1970s, and I, in the 2010s, found that these families, while they shared a common American migration path and a surname, were certainly distinct.
However, their initial incorrect conclusions, as they are viewable in print at the Library of Congress and digitised by FamilySearch, had much greater reach than their negation. So it’s unsurprising, and entirely forgivable, that I found the incorrect version in the RubyONS database when I arrived. I must admit that attempting to fix the record is was part of what motivated me to join up!
My cousins' research did not have the benefit of a central database, the hyperlink, easy update self-publishing, or a genealogical community devoted to sharing results, to having one version for all to use. We do.
I felt, and continue to feel, that if a one-name study exists, it should be held to a very high standard. It has the potential to be the organising nexus for all research related to a name. Surnames, for better or for worse, are how genealogies are sorted in surname-having societies. Despite everything now being digital, we need our virtual alphabetised card catalog sections to organise our work. When they are done well, they can effectively represent what has been done, so that future genealogists’ work can focus on the connections that haven’t been made, and on the details that make stories worth telling. A box in Indiana and an section of HTML on a server each require the same genealogical proof standard, but the HTML has the potential to take collaboration to its limits, to align collectively-done genealogy with the principles of free and open source software, and to keep it DRY.
So it’s vital that we get it right. This project, thanks to the work of this team, is already on the way to being the authoritative home for Ruby research. I believe that 16,000 is only the beginning, and that we can continue to be leader in what a one-name study can achieve, both in the quantity and in the quality of work. All continued help, and all that has been done, is appreciated.
References
DRY vs WET - http://wiki.c2.com/?DontRepeatYourself
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