7 replies to this topic

[strathglass]

How come there is an emigration fact but no migration fact?

How in general are you supposed to record the destination for someone who migrated? There is no field for that in the emigration fact.

Are you supposed to add a ResidedAt fact? That is ugly when you don't know the emigration date since the two facts would not necessarily appear together.

[KFN]

Emigrate means to leave one's country to live in another. Immigrate is to come into another country to live permanently. Migrate is to move, like birds in the winter.
 

Therefore I think you would be looking for Immigrate not Migrate!

[Nettie]

There is a immigration and emigration fact. 

This was a quandary for me years ago and I looked at means of the words and 

then have used both of them or versions of.  

Immigration means "the action of coming to live permanently in a foreign country."

or "patterns of immigration from the Indian sub-continent to Britain"

• "or the place at an airport or country's border where government officials check the documents of people entering that country."

   

   

  Emigrate definition is -" to leave one's place of residence or country to live elsewhere." 

   

  Migration is the movement of either people or animals from one area to another. 

  Migration can be used for the journey from one place to another or for the act of movement. ...

   

  The neatness of using RootsMagic since version 1[ which was Family Origins] is that we can create our own. Could not do that with other software back in the late 1999's.

   

  So...  

   

  I  added a new one for myself called & using the Description line to add more detailed information to the sentence. 

  migrate         sentence is 

  [person] migrated from <[Place:details]> about [Date] <[Desc]>. sentence becomes this "He migrated from in Goshen, Orange County, New York about/ in 1783 to Washington County, Virginia now known as Smyth Co., VA with parents"
• ,    or  moved family           sentence is 

  [Couple] from [Desc] [Date] [PlaceDetails] [Place:plain].
• ,    or moved single            sentence is [Person] from [Desc] [Date] [PlaceDetails] [Place:plain]. 

    sentence becomes "

  William emigrated in 1810 from Scott County, Virginia"
•  

   

       You probably noticed two different ways of writing the sentence. 

       In the help file of RootsMagic, [F1 or Help [F1] ] there is a well documented/written information on how to create a sentence

            and the language to make it work.

    Thanks,  Bruce Buzee for being creative doing this for us. 

Another Clue.  I created an Excel Spreadsheet with all the Fact Type list with the sentences created in RM just to see if each would work for me.  So when I added a new one to my RM, I added it in this sheet with date I did it,  to keep track of a new name of Fact.  Yes, I have changed RM's Fact sentence to fit my needs better.  There are conversations in the forums around 2005 about this topic. 

 

Nettie

[strathglass]

Thanks All - I meant to use IMMIGRATE, but was writing here and searching RM for MIGRATE ...oops!  

 

 

Nettie - the spreadsheet is a good idea!

[Vyger]

How come there is an emigration fact but no migration fact?

How in general are you supposed to record the destination for someone who migrated? There is no field for that in the emigration fact.

Are you supposed to add a ResidedAt fact? That is ugly when you don't know the emigration date since the two facts would not necessarily appear together.

 

I used the Emigration and Immigration facts extensively to record departure and arrival geographies but....

 

Then I noticed that Ancestry use the Departure and Arrival facts, not being a fan of Ancestry this perplexed me with having some intent to use Treeshare and wanting to avoid duplication.

 

However Ancestry is 90% correct in this assumption as Emigration is a permanent state so the 10 year old child who travels to another Country lives his life there and returns to his home land late in life and dies there has not by definition emigrated. I also know people who would say they 'emigrated' several times but it didn't work out, they didn't. What they did was Departed one Country with an Arrival in another Country with the intention of the move being permanent, so they intended to emigrate, but the trips just turned into extended visits.

 

Bottom line is I backed away from noting passenger list information as Emigrations and aligned with Ancestry fact types, thankfully I could do this easily with SQL leaving only those which were permanent emigrations.

[KFN]

Vyger,

 

My agreement with your conclusion is 50/50.  Yes technically Emigration/Immigration is a “permanent” state, so you could be correct on that account.  However, historically once someone spends everything they have to move to a new country they rarely go back even for a visit.  It was not until the 1900s that people could more likely return for visits.  
 

So I believe that unless the move was designated as a visit, most people really thought that they were leaving for good because they probably sold everything they had to make the move and should be designated as Emigration/Immigration.  I have friends that moved to the USA, lived there for 40 years as citizens, then returned to Norway at retirement.  They would not be Arrived/Departed.  
 

Also as an a side, GEDCOM support Immigration/Emigration,  my twisted thoughts about Ancestry.com is that they did not use Immigration/Emigration because either the programmers did not know the difference or they were afraid that their user base would be confused!

 

But I do see you point about “moving globally, is not always permanent”!

[Vyger]

KFN,

 

I also agree on the pre 1900 probability being high as regards true Emigration although I do know exceptions.

 

I adopted the Departure/Arrival model not because I wanted to align with Ancestry although it does make that less problematic but because I considered it a more factual representation of events. I do have to say that the majority of my Departure/Arrival facts are simply based on passenger lists and really they represent nothing more than travel. I know I am citing a 20th Century example but my own parents "Emigrated" lived and worked in Canada but returned 3 years later so it was just an extended stay, factually that is the same for your friends from Norway. I only chimed in as a matter of fact, I have seen research where each crossing of the Atlantic is recorded as an Emigration, factually we know one can't have multiple Emigration facts.

 

The last example I will cite is an ancestor on my wifes side who spent 12 years in the middle east, married in Turkey, returned to England and a few years later travelled to Argintina where he spent another 7 years. His final move was to Canada where he lived out the rest of his life and is buried, I don't know how others would record it but technically he Emigrated to Canada with quite a few extended stops along the way

[KFN]

Vyger said:

The last example I will cite is an ancestor on my wifes side who spent 12 years in the middle east, married in Turkey, returned to England and a few years later travelled to Argintina where he spent another 7 years. His final move was to Canada where he lived out the rest of his life and is buried, I don't know how others would record it but technically he Emigrated to Canada with quite a few extended stops along the way

Because we know the history of this individual I would code it close to the same what you do it but use the RESIdence fact to record that they lived in each of these places "FROM TO" using the arrival dates and departure dates from the "lived in country".  I would write down in the NOTES for the residence any additional tid-bit that make it interesting since in modern times (since WWII) most likely they flew to the new location.  Because I don't track distant relations (only closer relations) that traveled around the globe, I don't care about the boats they boarded that took days to cross just a note that they left "x country" and arrived in "y country".