Read on Twitter
#genealogy Other people may say differently, but here's my two cents. Put the idea of "fixing the incorrect info" out of your mind. I'll explain below. /1 https://twitter.com/PJGenealogist/status/1327750866800177153
I would put thoughts like you describe in my research notes, but not in the middle of a transcription. When I was training, we used paper notebooks, and the information went on facing pages. What the record said went on one side of the notebook. Our thoughts on the other. /2
Our research notes and analysis were firewalled from the information that was in the record itself. If we had to go back and look at the data later, it would always be clear what was data from the record and what was something we had thought about it. /3
Think of the five elements of the Genealogical Proof Standard. While you are transcribing a record, you're describing what the record says. You're in the middle of the analysis. Conclusions come later. Your correlation with other records belongs in a separate document. /4
Other genealogists might disagree with me, but my teacher was super-strict about this, and there are advantages to doing it her way. She had set it up so that if you got something in your data that was erroneous, you could take that data out of your data set if you needed to. /5
In linguistics, that might be because you were punked, and your informant gave you bad information as a prank. In genealogy, it might be that the document you are looking at belongs to a person who is not your person of interest. /6
Putting things in brackets is for things you must interject because of defects in the document, like filling in missing letters because the newspaper that was microfilmed had a hole in it and you're guessing at what the letters might be. I wouldn't put *analysis* in there. /end
Just to clarify: If I'm guessing that S....h could be S[mit]h, that *is* my own conjecture. But the notes about *why* I'm filling in those letters are part of my analysis. I don't put *that* analysis on the same page as the transcription itself. https://twitter.com/packrat74/status/1328052231686426625
