This section of the site aims to explain how the naming conventions and codes for family members have been created, and how we set up categories and name images so that you can search more successfully. These attributes are used throughout the site. They are listed in no particular order.
Family Lines
Rowland and Elizabeth had 9 children, 8 of whom went on to marry and have children of their own. We use the names of these children to represent the “family lines” and from this we have grouped the stories, photos, and other hostorical elements into these lines. Of course there are always stories or photos that may include multiple family lines. What we do is “tag” the items and articles in question and this makes it much easier to search for information. This should also mean that articles with multiple tags can then easily show up in either search.
We also have a convention of colour coding for these family lines – it is not used widely but we have used it to colour code our badges at the reunions, and in some articles we might include a colour banner.
- Thomas – AA
- Samuel – AB
- Jonathan – AC
- Mary – AD
- James – AE
- Eliza – AF
- Susanna – AG
- Ann – AH
Unique code for family members
Several numbering systems have been used by genealogists to identify family members in genealogy charts and family trees. In the “black book” (The Hassall Family), the author used an alphabetical system. This is very useful for identifying at a glance what family line someone is in, and what generation level they are. We use the same codes on this website as “tags” so that we can easily link to items about the same person or family.
Wikipedia provides lots of information about the different systems in use – we have chosen an alphabetical rather than a numbering code, as follows.
First generation
- You have to pick the first person around whom the family tree is built – we picked Rowland as he was the first to arrive in Australia. He is assigned the single letter “A”.
- His spouse, our great-X-grandmother Elizabeth, is assigned his letter plus “S1” for first spouse. That becomes “AS1”. While this is not used much in the family trees, it is very helpful for us to tag and search for people.
Second Generation
- Any children of the main family member are then assigned their parent’s code PLUS each child in the family are assigned A, then B and so on. In the colour coded example for Family Lines above we can see the codes that each child gets. The ninth child Elizabeth who dies very young would be “AI” – she is not listed above as she created no family line.
Other generations
- The following generations continue in the same manner. You can tell the generation by how many letters are in the code.
- Adopted children are assigned in the same way.
- Twins are assigned different codes, the older getting the higher letter of the alphabet.
- Where the main family member marries again and has more children, the new children continue the alpha assignments without reference to the spouse number.
- In parts of our tree, cousins have married each other. Technically this would allow them to get two codes, one from each of their parent’s family lines. In the Family Trees section we have mostly picked the code of the oldest person, or even the code of the person who carries the Hassall name.
Image names
When we take photos on our phones or digital cameras, all the images have a generic name like IMG-01234 and so on which makes it very difficult to search. It is also hard to replace updated photos down the track as well as these numbers are quite meaningless. Now you can add meta data to an image, like the title and place, and the systems automatically add a date stamp, but this is usually overlooked.
Search engines like Google (but beware, this changes all the time) will look at the file name of an image to help with searching and sorting. So if possible, before uploading an image, rename it with information like the person;s name, the date and place of the photo, and who is in it. This info can be separated with hyphens. It seems nowadays search engines prefer hyphens rather than underscores, but that is not a major problem.
For example, a picture of an old letter written by Marianne Hassall to her sister Kate might be named “letter-denbigh-1853-marianne-kate-newbaby.img”. You might even use their genealogy codes instead: “letter-denbigh-1842-aac-aab-baby.img”