Styles and Protocols
Descendant generations are numbered in superscript (for example, “JOSEPH3 ERNER”), beginning with the earliest known immigrant to America for each family line. The only purpose for these numbers is to make it easier to navigate through pages that have multiple generations on them; they may not agree with the generation numbers used by descendants of those families.
When a person’s commonly used call-name was not their first name (and their call-name is known), that name is underlined; for example “Johannes Joseph Erner” means he normally went by the name Joseph.
A question mark before a name, date, etc means that there is a question as to the correctness of the information, or that there is a question as to whether that person belongs to one of these families. A question mark after a name, date, etc means that there is just a question whether that’s the correct spelling, usually because the original record is difficult to read.
Source citations are shown in subscript:
Primary sources and a few normally reliable secondary sources are numbered (for example, “married(3)”).
Most secondary sources are lettered (for example, “married(F)”).
There is one problem with the citation for dates extracted from gravestones or cemetery records, in that sometimes this citation only sources the year and not the entire date, but you can’t tell which is which from reading my pages. This is my fault, for not coming up with a way to distinguish between the two conditions when I first started this project, but it’s too late to go back and fix it now. Sorry about that.
Each source document has a unique number or letter (within each surname group), and that same number or letter is shown in every citation to it. That keeps you from having to download a huge file, and then scroll through dozens of “ibid’s” just to find the info you’re looking for. Also, if each citation had a unique number, I would soon be having to use 4-digit citation numbers, which would be pretty ridiculous.
Page numbers (or file numbers, license numbers, etc) are given for all Civil Marriage, Deed, Will, etc Books. However, page numbers within other source documents (such as church books) are not normally given. Virtually all of these primary source documents were originally recorded in chronological order anyway, and most of the rest are indexed, so giving page numbers would be redundant (and would make the files take longer to download).
The most important information to most researchers is the title of the source, so that information is given first in publication source citations, rather than the name of the author(s).
Citations are not hyperlinked, mainly to help keep the size of the files down. To look up citations, it is more convenient to open the “References” page in a separate browser window, or to print out your own hardcopy of it anyway.
These are the only global abbreviations used in the genealogical files on these
websites (except for a few in direct quotes from other publications):
aka also known as
FHL Family History Library (in references only)
Mt. Mount (in the name of a church, cemetery or locality only)
SSDI Social Security Death Index
SSN Social Security Number
St. Saint (in the name of a church, cemetery or locality only)
[The word “Street” is never abbreviated]
USA United States of America
WWI World War I
WWII World War II
However, many other abbreviations are used in the Source Extract files only (see here).
Showing proper names in All Caps (all capital letters) is generally considered to be a less desirable formatting style. All of the proper names were in Small Caps in my original documents; but, when I started converting my files to HTML format, I found out that my program can’t handle Small Caps in HTML (and I wasn’t about to go back and manually write the HTML code for 10,000 names J ). However, that has turned out to be for the best after all, because many Internet Search Engines don’t work properly on names coded to display in Small Caps (they read the first letter and the rest of the name as two separate words).
Technical
Protocols:
I made the text in my genealogical pages fairly large, for the benefit of people with less sharp monitors, and for those using WebTV on a regular television screen. But it does mean that less information is shown onscreen, and that you have to scroll more to read an entire page. All of the pages on these websites will display best if you maximize your browser window to full-screen. If you are viewing them on an older, smaller monitor, it will also help to temporarily hide any other panes, such as “Favorites”, etc.
If it’s not a problem on your monitor, there are ways to force your browser to show these pages in a smaller font size. That doesn’t seem to hurt the display of the family pages (in fact, I will probably reformat my pages to a smaller font size myself in a couple of years, as more and more people upgrade their computer equipment). However, it really messes up the display of the Source Extract pages and other supporting pages for some reason (or at least it does in my browser).
On the other hand, I made the text in my supporting pages (census extracts, etc) fairly small, to show as much information onscreen as possible, because most people will just be scanning through them looking for a specific name, instead of reading the whole file. If you have trouble reading them, you can also force your browser to show these pages in a larger font size, but that will definitely mess up the display of these pages, because the info in them is in tabbed columns, not in tables. The best option is to import the info that you need into a program on your own computer instead, so that you can enlarge the text and also reset the tabs. (You also need to do this if you want to print out this info on paper. If you try to print out any of these pages directly from your browser, any info that you have to scroll to the right to see onscreen won’t print on paper.)
My genealogical files direct your browser to not underline hyperlinks, because, when proper names are also hyperlinks, that would interfere with the underlining of call-names. However, if you find this style bothersome, there are also ways to force your browser to underline the hyperlinks on these websites anyway (but the procedure is different in every browser).
Styles and Protocols Last revision: 02 Jan 2007
Allendorf to America: Erner and Related Families in America.
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Erner (see Copyright
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