The *rner Genealogy Project | Styles and Protocols

These websites were designed to be convenient to use, not to impress professional genealogists or historians. So, some of the protocols used on these websites do not conform to the generally accepted Style Manuals, or to National Genealogical Society (NGS) standards (but only when there is a good reason for doing that). Some of these compromises were made solely to keep the file sizes down, so that people don’t have to wait forever for my pages to download (and so that I don’t have to pay for more web-server space. )

Descendant generations are numbered in superscript (for example, “JOHANN³ ARNER”), beginning with the earliest known immigrant to America for each family line.

Descendants are not individually numbered. There are still too many uncertainties in the early generations of most of these families, and every new connection would require me to manually renumber too many descendants. (This does make it somewhat more difficult to conveniently refer to a specific ancestor; but, unless everybody had downloaded the latest version of the website, different researchers would be using different reference numbers for the same ancestor anyway.) [NOTE: Many of the genealogical file names on these websites consist of mostly numerals. This is just an administrative numbering system, not a genealogical numbering system. Its only purpose is so that groups of family files will sort properly in my file manager program (and also to keep file names as short as possible).]

Children within family groups are not numbered with Roman Numerals. (I’ve never understood the supposed value of this practice anyway. If the children are listed in the correct birth order, the numbering is redundant; and if they’re not, the numbering is wrong. So, what’s the point?) Children within families are always listed in the correct birth order on these websites, if that birth order is known. When it’s not known, that is noted in the text.

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 “John Jacob Orner” means he normally went by the name Jacob.

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 and all tertiary sources are lettered (for example, “married_(F)”).

There are a couple of problems with the source citation for dates and other info extracted from gravestones or cemetery records (“14” or “14a” on the Arner website, “6” on the Orner website, and “9” on the Urner website):

1. I should have given gravestone readings and cemetery record extractions two different citation numbers, but when I first started this project several years ago, I didn’t realize that there were going to be nearly so many of them. This website has grown much larger than I ever expected it to be.

2. Also, sometimes this citation only sources the year and not the entire date, but you can’t tell which is which from reading my webpages. I should have also come up with a way to differentiate between these two conditions when I first started this project, but I just didn’t think of it. Unfortunately, it’s too late to go back and fix it now. Sorry about that.

Each source document has a unique number or letter citation (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 having to scroll through thousands of “ibid’s” just to find the info you’re looking for. Also, if each citation had a unique number, I would now be using 6-digit citation numbers in the Arner/Orner family, which would be totally ridiculous.

Page numbers (or file numbers, license numbers, etc) are given for most 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).

Citations for information found in the “Pennsylvania Archives” series of books are given in the format “PA:[series#]:[volume#]:[page#]”. For example, (PA:3:23:306) means that that information is found on Series Three, Volume 23, page 306.

The most important information to most researchers is the title of the source, so I put that information first in publication source citations, rather than the name of the author(s).

Each surname website has its own “References” page, showing source document citations. When switching between families, make sure that you are referring to the correct “References” page. There is a link at the bottom (or a Note at the top) of every family genealogy page showing which “References” page to use.

Source citations are not hyperlinked, mainly to help keep the size of the files down (but also so that I didn’t have to manually create another 100,000 or so hyperlinks. ) To look up source citations, it is much more convenient for you to open the appropriate “References” page in a separate browser window, or to print out your own hardcopy of it anyway.

These are the only global abbreviations that are used in the family genealogy files on these websites (except for a few that are in direct quotes from other publications):

aka also known as

CSA Confederate States of America

DAR Daughters of the American Revolution (an ancestral organization)

DC District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.)

E.D. Enumeration District (later censuses in large cities only)

FHL Family History Library (in references only)

Ft. Fort (in the name of a church, cemetery or locality only)

Mt. Mount (in the name of a church, cemetery or locality only)

PA Pennsylvania Archives series of books (in citations only)

P.O. Post Office location (given in some censuses, including 1890)

R.D. Rural Delivery route number (given on some draft registration cards)

SN Service Number [or Serial Number] (for U.S. Army, Navy, etc service)

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]

UCC United Church of Christ (formerly the German Reformed Church)

USA United States of America

WPA Works Progress Administration (later Works Projects Administration)

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 couldn’t handle Small Caps in HTML (and I wasn’t about to go back and manually write the HTML code for 50,000 names. ) However, that has turned out to be for the best after all, because the major 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), and most people now get to my website by using Google™, etc.

Technical Protocols:

I made the text in my family genealogy 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 genealogy pages. 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 my websites anyway (but the procedure is different in every browser).

URNER Home Page

Styles and Protocols Last revision: 11 Mar 2007

The *rner Genealogy Project (Arner, Erner, Orner, Urner Families in America)

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