Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

About 4 years ago, I selected @MyHeritage as my platform to record my genealogical information. I liked MyHeritage best for several reasons.

1. Their customers and datasets were less USA-centric than Ancestry’s, and that fit right into my Eastern European origins.
2. Their free Family Tree Builder program that runs on your desktop and syncs smoothly with your online trees at MyHeritage.
3. The whole new method of family tree building that only the online family trees support, which is them sending to you the information that’s likely relevant to your research.

Record Matches and Smart Matches

With regards to point #3 above, MyHeritage from time to time compares your online tree with its vast database of ever-increasing records as well as with all the other family trees at MyHeritage. These result in what MyHeritage calls Record Matches and Smart Matches.

A week may go by and I’ll receive 100 of these hints, another two weeks and I’ll receive 300 more, and the week after there’s 200 more hints waiting for me. Since I’m the type of person who likes to keep his in-box clean, I always make it a priority to go through review and process these matches as soon as possible, usually in the next day or two. Processing includes reviewing the match, accepting or rejecting it as to whether it is for the correct person, and deciding what data if any to update my information with, and then copying over the source information and saving.

Well, 4 days ago, I was again sent a new set of matches to process. But instead of it being a few hundred, it turned out to be exactly 3,000 matches for 878 people.

That’s not a bad thing. That’s an extremely good thing. But I knew there would be a lot of work to go through and validate and process them all.

I thought it would be worthwhile to document how I did this and throw in some of the timesaving tips I used.

3,000 Matches for 878 People

I did not think I’d write this article 4 days ago. So I did not take any screenshots of my initial set of matches. As I write this, I am now down to 1,912 matches for 612 people. To see them, choose “Matches by people” from the “Discoveries” tab:

This now gives me the list shown below:  (click on the image for a larger version)

I can scroll down through all 612 people. Just taking 3 seconds to read what’s written for each person would then require 30 minutes to get to the bottom.

So how can I review and process 3,000 matches reasonably quickly? After 3 1/2 days, I got a good system going. I have two sessions a day of 90 minutes each, one in the morning, and one in the evening. During each session, I can process on average about 150 matches. So now after 7 sessions, I’ve done 1,088 matches and have 1,912 to go.

At this rate, it should take me in total about 10 days to process all 3,000 matches, and it will have taken me about 30 hours of my time to do so.

1950 Census!

In case you were wondering, yes, my latest batch of 3,000 matches includes three records from the 1950 Census. So MyHeritage is starting to make these available!

Matches By Source

If you go to the “Discoveries” tab and select “Matches by source”, then you’ll get this list:

The sources with the largest number of matches is shown first

When I first starting using MyHeritage, I used to prefer using this Matches by Source list. The reason was that you handle each type of source in its own manner, so I used to think it was more efficient to go through each source type one by one. You’d get into a nice rhythm. I’d like to first clear off the sources at the bottom that each had just 1, 2 or 3 matches. I’d then do BillionGraves and BMD (birth, marriage and death) records next because they give good information. Then I’d take a deep breath and do the obituaries because they take some time and may add new people to your tree. Finally, I’d tackle the leftovers which usually include Public Records, online trees and other databases, and they often had the largest number of matches in them.

But recently I realized that this method was not optimal. For one thing, I decided it was better to do all the matches for one Person together rather than all the matches for a Source. The reason was that sometimes, MyHeritage finds records that pertain to a different person with the same or a similar name. It is not too much work to compare all the records found for a person and identify which are correct and which are not. You’ll be able to pick out the ones who have different names, dates, places and other information, evaluate which are for the person in question, and then decide which of the conflicting information that remains is correct. Whereas going source by source means you have to make the decision as to whether the record refers to the correct person every single time.

So Matches by people is the way to go. This can then be enhanced by…

Sorting by Relation

Up above, you’ll see my Matches by People were sorted in MyHeritage’s default manner which they call “Value”. This is MyHeritage’s judgement as to what items of new information the records for the person might add. I guess they thought that most people would not have enough time to go through all their matches, so they provide this order so that you’d be able to first look at the records that might help you the most.

But I found a better order that I liked much better. For the Matches by People, click on the “Sort by:” dropdown and there are several options:

Select the last one:  Relation

If you have multiple trees (I have 3), then also select one of your trees that you want to work on.

Now you will get your list of Matches by People, with those most closely related to the main person in the tree listed first:

My list starts here with my 2nd cousin once removed’s husband, but that’s only because I’ve already done 1088 of my matches who were closer than that.

The reason why I find this order so nice is that it seems to keep family groups together. Rather than jumping around from one person to another, you’ll now often work on one section of your family tree at a time. There will be a number of siblings and their cousins who will all come up together. You’ll be able to evaluate their matches easier because you’ll be referencing their parents, the places they lived and other information about their family one after another.

Using a Profile

Here’s a trick to help manage a glitch at MyHeritage:

Look at my first match in my Matches by People shown above.  The button says “Review 123 matches”. There are a lot of matches for this person because he has matches from the Authors of Scholarly Articles database, and he happened to write about 150 articles that are in the database. It would be nice if MyHeritage allowed us to accept all 123 at once, but they don’t.

But there’s a glitch that makes this worse. I click on that match and it brings up a window saying “No pending matches” when there should be matches.

This sort of problem happens every so often, and MyHeritage support has not been able to find the reason and fix it yet. I’ll keep bugging them. But I have a reasonable workaround.

What I do then is click on the orange “View (person name) in tree” link, and then in the left information panel, I click on “Profile” to bring up his profile.

In his profile, it shows all his record matches 5 at a time. First the ones that I have confirmed, and then the ones that I have not yet confirmed.

Here he has 168 records and it shows records 1 to 5. The green checkmark indicates that I’ve confirmed the record is for this person. I use the “>” link on the right to go to the next group of 5 and I continue until I reach the first unconfirmed record with a red question mark. Here it starts at record 47.

You can verify each of these one-by-one by:

1. Click on the record in the profile. This brings up a Review Match window.
2. In the Review Match window, check the information and either reject it, or click on the “Confirm Match” button in the Review Match window.
3. If you’ve confirmed, then select which information you want to copy over from the match and click on the “Save to tree” button.
4. Click in the person information on the left on “View profile” to go back to the person’s profile.
5. And now the annoying part: Click the “>” link over and over again to get back to the next unconfirmed record to repeat this process.

That step 5 is a killer if I’ve got record numbers 46 to 168 to confirm, then that’s as few as 4 mouse clicks for steps 1 to 4 for each record. But it’s between 8 and 33 mouse clicks for step 5 adding on average 20 mouse clicks for each match.

So here’s a neat trick to do instead.

1. Right click on the name of the record in the profile and select “Open link in new tab”.
   
2. Do this for about the next 30 records. It will take 1 mouse click per record and 1 extra click every 5 records to press the “>” to advance 5 records. This really can be done quite quickly. You will end up with slightly more than 30 tabs onpen at the top of your browser.

   

3. Now click on a tab. I usually start on the right. It opens the Review Match window.
4. In the Review Match window, check the information and either reject it, or click on the “Confirm Match” button in the Review Match window.
5. If you’ve confirmed, then select which information you want to copy over from the match and click on the “Save to tree” button.
6. Now go up to the tab, click on “x” to close the tab, and the next Review Match window will appear, and you can go back to Step 4 and continue until you’ve done all the tabs you opened.

I find that procedure takes about 5 minutes to verify 30 or so straightforward records, so it is quite efficient.

I only found I needed to do this because of the glitch in the records not appearing on the matches page. But even so, sometimes I find it convenient to validate matches directly from a profile and this method works nicely when there are more than 2 or 3 records in the profile to review.

Matches – Wow!

Once I finish this set of 3,000 matches, I will have over the past 4 years evaluated 29,000 record and smart matches for 3,800 people. Of those, I will have accepted about 23,000 and rejected 6,000.

I think that’s pretty good, that I’ve considered 79% of MyHeritage’s suggestions to be correct.

There is no way that during my lifetime, I ever could have found 29,000 records for my family members on my own. Here with MyHeritage, they just give these matches to me, and I’m able to evaluate 3,000 mostly-relevant records in only about 10 days.

We couldn’t do this a decade ago. It’s fantastic.

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Followup:  May 10, 2022:  I successfully followed my schedule and it did take 2 sessions of about 90 minutes a day for 10 days to finish the 3000 matches.

As it turns out, there are 6 matches left over that I cannot complete. There are left there because of the glitch I mention in the article.

When I click on the orange “Review” button for any of these 3 sources, it gives me the incorrect “No pending matches” window. The same happens when I view these by person. What’s a bit different for these 6 people is if I go to their profile, they don’t have any pending matches.

This has happened before to me and MyHeritage has not been able to resolve the problem yet. After a few weeks or months, it seems the system realizes that these are not valid pending matches and they vanish over time. A bit aggravating for someone who likes to have a clean plate, but no big deal.

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Followup:  May 13, 2022:  Today I woke up to 206 matches for 154 people. That’s a more manageable number of matches to evaluate. Since I know it takes me about an hour to do 100, I should be able to finish them off today and keep my “inbox” as clean as possible.  I am never unhappy to get them, whether a few or lots.

Among that family materials I’ve been going through was a photocopied Memorial Book for the town of Mezhiritch in the Ukraine. My mother received this pile of paper from her cousin many years ago. The Memorial Book was printed in Israel in 1955 and it is 442 pages.. So I have it on about 250 sheets of paper.

This document  is written almost entirely in Hebrew. I can read and pronounce Hebrew, but my vocabulary is so small that I cannot speak or understand it.

This particular book is listed in the JewishGen Yizkor book collection and the Table of Contents is translated, but that is all.

So obviously, I have to get the document translated. I don’t mind paying a reasonable fee to a service if they could do a good job of it. But I wondered if I could do it myself without too much work on my part.

Translating the Hardcopy Directly

I had heard over the past year that Google Translate on your phone does a pretty good job of translating words in a picture.  You can use it when you are on the road to translate street signs and other items like menus when you are in another country, although you do need Internet to do so.

I decided to pick a page from my book to try it out. The Hebrew is small and as is typical for Hebrew literature, does not include the nikkud (vowels). There are two columns on each page and sections with headings. There are photos with captions under the photos. And there the names of people, which is what all genealogists are looking for. Here’s a typical page. (Click on the images for a larger version):

I place the document in my Shotbox which gives lots of light, and lets me rest my camera directly on top so that there will be no camera shake.

Then on my phone, in Google translate, I click on the the little camera icon.

This immediately takes me to an app called Google Lens which does the translation in place on the image it sees. I then click “Share” which allows me to save the result and I send it to my cloud service: OneDrive.

How good is the translation? Well let’s see. This is what Google Lens saved for me to OneDrive.

Here’s an expansion of the text in top right paragraph on the page:

and the caption below the picture is this:

It’s interesting how this looks like one of those messages a criminal would create from newspaper clippings, with different sized fonts mixed together, but the fact that it gives you the translation in the correct place in the document is very appealing. It also shows you what it missed and/or couldn’t be translated. You get the general drift of what is being said, but when you read it, it doesn’t really make much sense, especially the caption below the picture. This translation to me is a fail.

Scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Is that the best I can do?

To answer that question, I’ll have to compare this translation to other translations. There are a number of things I can try.

First I’ll scan the 250 pages onto my computer with my new Canon ES-580W sheet feed scanner. I got it a few weeks ago when after 5 years of good use, my Canon DS-860 started giving me small colored squares on my scans. The Canon support people deemed it a chip problem that required either repair or replacement. I’m not one to repair technology that is 5 years old.

My new scanner comes with Epson Scan Smart software that includes an ability to do OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in 29 different languages including Hebrew and save the image as a searchable PDF file.

When a searchable PDF is viewed, many viewers allow you to select the text and copy it. In my case I can now select the text and paste it. For the top right paragraph and the line below the caption on my test page, I get this:

כנוכר נמצאה העיירה על ארמת סטצקי, וכל תושביה, כיהורים כגויים, שלמו לו ,,טשינשיי, הייגו רמי חכירה. גביית דמי החכירה הופקדה כנהוג בירי יהודים, שמזה מאות בשנים נורעו כחוכרים ומוכסגים וכנושא לפרקים שלמ,נt ונכבדים בדברי ימי היהורים, שבהם השתקפו יחסיו הטובים, ולעתים קרובות יותר הרעים והאכזריים, של ,,הפריץ" כלפ~ נתיגיו היהוריים בכלל וכלפי ה,,מושקה"ס שלו בפרט. חוכרי המס האחרונים היו ח י י ם " ב ר ו ך ~ ח י י מ ע נ י ס " , שהיה גובה מסים וממלא שרותי קשר ביו הארמיו ובין התושבים היהוריים. אחריו תפש את מקומו מ ש ה ב ר ו ב ש ט י י ו, שטיפל בגביית המס, ואילו בקנית היבולימ ומכירתם עסקו אפ ר י ם ז י נ מ ר ו ב ן ‘ צ י ו ן ש ט ר ג ש י ס . אחרי מותו הפתאומי של מ ש ה ב ר ו ב ש ט י י י ו מילאה את מקומו אשתו פאגי, שאף היא תלתה ונפלה למשכב כעבור זמן קצר

תעשיית ארגזים (קופרני1( . הנגרים בתמונה (מימיו) ׃ נתו שטרגשיס, משה פול~;יק, בריר פרומו

This Hebrew rendition obviously is not perfect. Parts of several lines include words that have spaces between the letters of the word. But lets see how this does.

If I simply paste the above Hebrew text online into Google translate, it gives:

As a foreigner, the town was located on the Statsky estate, and all its inhabitants, as priests as Gentiles, paid him, Chinshey, Higo Rami Lease. The collection of the rent was entrusted to the firing of Jews, who for centuries had been shaken as tenants and mercenaries and as a subject for whole chapters, and honored in the annals of the Jews, which reflected the good, and often more evil and cruel, attitude of the "perpetrator" His s in particular. The last taxpayers were Haim "Baruch ~ Haim Menis", who was a tax collector and a liaison for bio-armies and the Jewish residents. After him, he took his place from the Rabbi, who took care of the collection of the tax, while the purchase of the hibulim and their sale were done by Ephraim. . After the sudden death of Moshe Bar-Shti Tiyu, he was replaced by his wife Faggi, who also hung up and fell asleep shortly afterwards.

Crate industry (Copernicus 1) . The Carpenters in the Picture (from his time) ׃ Natu Stergashis, Moshe Pol ~; Yak, Barir Promo

This is a bit better than the translation that my phone’s Google translate gave. The caption now gives what must be names of the people in the picture.

Maybe the problem is because the Hebrew text is so small and 200 dpi is not enough resolution for the OCR to determine the Hebrew letters correctly. If I increase the scanner’s resolution setting to 600 dpi, then the Hebrew comes out as this:

כנזכר נמצאה העיירה על אדמת סטצקי, וכל תושביה, כיהודים כגויים, שלמו לו ~,טשינשיי~ היינו דמי חכירה. גביית דמי החכירה הופקדה כנהוג בידי יהודים, שמזה מאות בשגים נודעו כחוכרים ומוכסנים וכנושא לפרקים שלמים ונכבדים בדברי ימי היהודים, שבהם השתקפו יחסיו הטובים, ולעתים קרובות יותר הרעים והאכזריים, של ,,הפריץיי כלפי נתיניו היהודיים בכלל וכלפי ה,,מושקה"ס שלו בפרט. חוכרי המס האחרונים היו ח י י ם ~ ב ר ו ך i ~ח י י מ ע נ י ס יי , שהיה גובה מסים וממלא שרותי קשר בין הארמון ובין התושבים היהודיים. אחריו תפש את מקומו מ ש ה ב ר ו ב ש ט י ‘י ן , שטיפל בגביית המס, ואילו בקנית היבולים ומכירתם עסקו אפ ר י ם ז י נ מ ן ו ב ן ~ צ י ו ן ש ט ר נ ש י ס . אחרי מותו הפתאומי של מ ש ה ב ר ו ב ש ט י י י ן מילאה את מקומו אשתו ~אני, שאף היא חלתה ונפלה למשכב כעבור זמן קצר

תעשיית ארגזים .. (קופרטן) . הנגרים בתמונה (מינ~ן) ׃ נתן שטרנשיס, משה פולישוק, ברוך פרומן

It is a bit different. The words still have spaces. The Google translation for this comes out as:

As mentioned, the town was found on Statzky land, and all its inhabitants, as Jews as Gentiles, paid him ~, Chinshi ~ we were rent. The collection of the rent was entrusted to Jews, who for hundreds of years had been known as tenants and tax collectors and as a subject for entire and distinguished chapters in the annals of the Jews, which reflected the good, and often more bad and cruel, relations of "Fritzi" to his Jewish subjects in general The last taxpayers were Chaim ~ Baruch i ~ Chaim Menasi, who was a tax collector and a liaison between the palace and the Jewish residents. Tin, who handled the collection of the tax, while buying and selling the crops, Ephraim Zinman and Ben-Zion Shtran Shis were engaged. After the sudden death of Moshe Bar In his place, his wife ~ I, who also fell ill and fell asleep shortly afterwards, took his place.

Crate industry .. (Copertan). The Carpenters in the Picture (Min ~ n) ׃ Natan Sternshis, Moshe Polishuk, Baruch Froman

As another comparison, I’ll also paste the 600 dpi Hebrew into Microsoft Bing Translator, which gives this:

As mentioned, the town was found on Statzky land, and all its residents, as Jews as gentiles, paid him #, Tashinshei, we were lease fees. The collection of leasing fees was entrusted as is customary by Jews, who for centuries in the past were known as leaseholders and coverers, and as the subject of entire and distinguished chapters in the history of the Jews, in which his good, and more often bad and cruel, relations of the Fritzei were reflected towards his Jewish subjects in general and towards his musk, in particular. The last tax leaseholders were H.Y.I. ~ B.R. and I~Y.Y. by N.Y. Yi, who would collect taxes and fill liaison services between the palace and the Jewish residents. He subsequently took his place from S.H. B. and B. T. Y.Y.N., who handled the tax collection, while in buying the crops and selling them, they dealt with Af R.I.M. N.N. and in N~ Zhi and N. Y. Y.N. After the sudden death of M. H. B. R. and B. T. Y.Y. Y.N., his wife filled in for him , I, who also fell ill and fell ill a short time later.

Crate industry. (Cooperten) . The carpenters pictured (Minn.) ׃ Nathan Sternshis, Moshe Polishuk, Baruch Froman

The translation is somewhat similar. Bing’s translator couldn’t interpret those single letters. But the names in the captions actually match with just Natan/Nathan being the one discrepancy.

How about another respected free translator called Yandex. Here’s what it gives:

As mentioned, the town was found on Stetsky land, and all its inhabitants, as Jews as Gentiles,paid him, Tchinshay, we were leasehold fees. The collection of leasehold fees was entrusted as custom by Jews, who for hundreds of years became known as leaseholders and hoarders, and as the subject of whole and distinguished chapters in the words of the Jews, in which the good, and more often the bad and cruel, relations of,the Pritzi towards his Jewish subjects in general and to his, and his,Moschka, in particular. He was a tax collector and a liaison between the palace and Jewish residents. After that , he took his place as a tax collector, while buying and selling the crops dealt with the business of buying and selling them . After the sudden death of M. H. B., his wife, I, also fell ill and fell ill a short time later.

Crate industry .. (Kupartan). The Carpenters in the picture: Nathan Sternshis, Moshe Polishuk, Baruch Froman

Quite similar, but some significant differences.

There are meta-search engines available that combine search results from other search engines. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a meta-translation tool that did the same?

Other Options

Google Translate can translate documents. However, when I pass my PDF file to it, it gives me this message:

I tried out a few 3rd party programs to translate a PDF file with limited success, so I wont go into the details. One would have wanted $980 to translate my 250 page PDF file. No thanks.

Back to Google Translate on My Phone

I really did like the way my phone’s version of Google Translate positions the translation correctly on the page. But the translation I first did above was not good enough.

So what would happen if instead of using my camera to photograph the page, I used a screen capture of the page that was digitized. I can set up my PDF reader to display the page as I scanned it and use a snipping tool (I use Snagit) to capture an image of it. Then I save the capture as a jpeg file and download it to my phone’s pictures. Once it’s on my phone, I can again use Google Translate’s camera option. It gives this:

One last idea. How about scanning directly to a 600 bpi image instead of to a PDF file? Then I can download this image file to my phone’s pictures and use Google Translate’s camera options on my phone. Here’s what that gives:

Conclusion

Google Translate on a phone has its camera icon, and does its own Optical Character Recognition on the picture when you use it. It adds the translations right onto the image which I think is a very nice feature.

Automated translation is still a work in progress. No tools are perfect yet. The translation algorithms are not perfect. OCR is not perfect. And if the characters rendered from the OCR are not all correct, then the translation cannot be.

But perfection need not be the goal here. If we can get a feeling for what is being said, and the names of people are mostly correct, then we can find the important parts of the document that are relevant to our research.

Any text we find with crucial information that we need to understand fully, we can get translated more accurately. There are lots of genealogy groups on Facebook and elsewhere where helpful people are willing to translate small sections of text for you.

If I had only a PDF file, I settled on this procedure to translate my book:  

1. Open the PDF and screen capture each page to jpeg.
2. Copy the screen captures to OneDrive and download to my phone.
3. Use Google Translate with each page on my phone.
4. Copy the translated page images back to OneDrive.
5. Create a searchable PDF file from the translated page images. You will need a PDF editor for this. I use PDF-XChange Editor.

This might sound like an involved procedure, but all steps are simple – just repetitive for each page. After I got the procedure down, it only took about 2 hours to do this for all 250 pages in 5 sessions. I took a break every 50 pages which I used to read through the translations and see what information was relevant to me.

If you have the book as a physical hardcopy, you may want to scan it twice. Once to make a PDF in its original language, and a second time to scan it to 600 dpi jpeg images, one image per page. With the jpeg images, you can then follow steps 2 through 5 above.

Final result: One original PDF in searchable Hebrew, and one passably translated PDF in searchable English.

If anyone has any suggestions as to how I can further improve the translation quality and/or the the procedure I use, I’m all ears.

I’d like to bring up the topic of having witnesses in your genealogy data, and then how these should be represented in GEDCOM, the standard for transferring genealogical data.

What is a Witness?

A Witness is a person who sees an event.

Often genealogical documents include signatures of witnesses, typically on birth, marriage, or death records.

For FAN analysis (Friends, Associates, Neighbours), a witness may refer to  some or even all the people who are at an event.

For example for a marriage, you can list some or all the people who attended the wedding ceremony. For a death, you can list all the people who attended the funeral. You may want to indicate the role they played, e.g. best man, bridesmaid, ring bearer, master of ceremonies, pallbearer, etc.

Events in a genealogical sense tend to be personal or family events. But there’s no reason why people cannot be witnesses at other events, e.g. a coronation, an earthquake, a concert, or whatever. These events are associated with a place rather than with a person or family.

There is no standard way for genealogical software to handle witnesses. Each program chooses its own way to represent them, and may allow you to add them from people and/or families and/or places and/or sources, and some programs may not support witnesses at all.

Displaying Witness Information in a Program

The way a program displays witness information is also unique to each program.

I think the correct way is to display each witness in two places:

1. Where the event is listed, so that all witnesses can be listed together, and
2. Where the person who is the witness is listed, so that all events that (s)he is a witness for can be listed by date in their profile.

In Behold, the event that is the birth of Edward Smith might look like:

Edward Smith
   Birth in Essex, England, Thu 3 Aug 1780
      Source: Smith Bible S13-8
      Witness. Godmother. Anna Chordray XXX-1
      Witness. Midwife. Elizabeth Conyer XXX-3
      Witness. Saw birth. Rachel Moore SMI-4

and the reference from the person who is the witness might be this::

Anna Chordray
   Witness Birth of Edward Smith SMI-3, Thu 3 Aug 1780 in Essex, England, role Godmother

Transferring Witness information via GEDCOM

The trouble is that there currently is no standard way to specify witness information in GEDCOM.

Why not?

Well, there used to be a way. Go far back to the year 1993 when GEDCOM 5.3 was produced. It did have a WITN tag in its specification which looked like this:

    n  @XREF:EVEN@ EVEN
         +1 <<CHANGE_DATE>>                                         {0:M}
         +1 <EVENT_TAG>                                                   {1:1} 
            +2 TYPE <EVENT_DESCRIPTOR>                     {0:1}
            +2 DATE <DATE_VALUE>                                   {0:1}
            +2 <PLACE_STRUCTURE>>                               {0:1}
            +2 PERI <TIME_PERIOD>                                   {0:M}
            +2 RELI <RELIGIOUS_AFFILIATION>                 {0:1}
            +2 <<MULTI_MEDIA_LINK>>                              {0:M}
            +2 <<TEXT_STRUCTURE>>                               {0:1}
            +2 <<SOUR_STRUCTURE>>                             {0:M}
            +2 <<NOTE_STRUCTURE>>                             {0:M}
            +2 <ROLE_TAG>                                                {0:M}
               +3 TYPE <ROLE_DESCRIPTOR>                   {0:1}
               +3 <<INDIVIDUAL>>                                        {0:1}
               +3 ASSO @XREF:INDI@                                {0:M}
                  +4 TYPE <ASSOCIATION_DESCRIPTOR>  {1:1}
               +3 <RELATIONSHIP_ROLE_TAG>
                             [ NULL | @XREF:INDI@ ]                  {0:M}
                  +4 TYPE <ROLE_DESCRIPTOR>                {0:1}
                  +4 <<INDIVIDUAL>>                                     {0:1}

ROLE_TAG:=                                                {Size=1:20}       
   [ BUYR | CHIL | FATH | GODP | HDOH | HDOG | HEIR | HFAT | HMOT | USB |    INFT | LEGA | MEMBER| MOTH | OFFI | PARE | PHUS | PWIF | RECO | EL | ROLE | SELR | TXPY | WFAT | WIFE | WITN | WMOT | INDI ]  
    A tag that indicates the role of the individuals mentioned in a source event record.  If the above list does not include the role being cited, use the ROLE_TAG followed by a ROLE_DESCRIPTOR to define the role. (See appendix A for the definition of these tags and Appendix B for additional ROLEs which have been proposed as GEDCOM tags).  Names of individuals mentioned in the event but their role was not mentioned, should be identified by using the INDI role tag.  Any associations between others of known roles and this individual can be shown by using the ASSOciation pointer.

In GEDCOM Version 5.3, events were top level records. WITN was one of many ROLE_TAGs that were under an event. They seem to have been designed so as to be able to include every person who had anything at all to do with the event, and that is what is wanted.

However, I presume the GEDCOM designers thought this was too complicated and in 1995 for the GEDCOM 5.4 draft, they removed the whole kit and caboodle, demoting events to become the substructures: <INDIVIDUAL_EVENT_STRUCTURE> and <FAMILY_EVENT_STRUCTURE>.  In doing so, WITN got deleted along with the other ROLE_TAGs as no-one realized at the time the importance of that tag to connect events to people.

Don’t mix up a Witness with an Association

The above GEDCOM 5.3 Event specification included an ASSO (Association) tag and the last line shown says this:

Any associations between others of known roles and this individual can be shown by using the ASSOciation pointer.

However, this was a 5.3 confusion of what an ASSOciation is.

ASSO and WITN are two different things.

• An Association is a connection between two people
• A Witness is a connection between one person and an event.

The most common example of an Association is when one person is a Godparent of another, but it can also be used to state that a person is known to be a cousin when the exact relationship is unknown, or any other connection such as the person’s doctor or lawyer or someone’s best friend or neighbour. 

Association was correctly implemented in GEDCOM version 5.4 and later and is placed under an Individual (not an event) and connects to another individual. But somehow, the GEDCOM team did not realize that WITN was needed as well.

Developers Need Witness Information in GEDCOM.

In 1999, the GEDCOM 5.5.1 draft was released. That is the version of GEDCOM still used by almost all genealogy programs today. It still has no WITN tag in it.

What some developers did when they realized that they wanted to save their witness information, was to add their own user-defined tag and they called it _WITN, that is WITN with an underscore preceding it. They included that tag with their own proprietary method of saving their witness info to the GEDCOM file.

The problem with this?  This is an extension to GEDCOM and other programs would not know how to read this unless the developer added custom to do so.

The other problem with this? Each program writing witness information to GEDCOM might do so in their own propriety way, because there is no standard for them to follow.

So a WITN information specification needs to be added back into GEDCOM. If the GEDCOM standards developers thought about it for a while, they would see the need. And they’d see that it is not too difficult to implement.

It should be added into the EVENT_DETAIL structure as::

n WITN @<XREF:INDI>@                                           {0:M}
       +1 TYPE <ROLE_DESCRIPTOR>                        {0:1}    
       +1 <<NOTE_STRUCTURE>>                               {0:M}
       +1 <<SOURCE_CITATION>>                               {0:M}

That’s all that would be need to satisfy most developers, myself included.