Meeting today
I met with LB and SA to discuss how the association of people with places should be organized. This is how I see my tasks now:
For now, I will be leaving the genealogy spreadsheet as it is, and use the list of people in the first column of that spreadsheet as the list of people to whom I will refer when I make the other spreadsheets. In this list, people with the same name are distinguished by a number which follows their name. If I need to add to this list, I will add to the bottom of the list. If I need to take people off the list, I will leave a blank row, so as not to mess with their ID numbers.
I will take Carly's list of places, finish eliminating the duplicates (so that each place name will be unique), and create a list of places to which I will refer when creating the other spreadsheets.
Next, I will create an events spreadsheet. The first column will have an event ID number. The second column will contain the name of the place in which the event took place (the name will be the same as one from the places spreadsheet). The third column will contain the names of the people present at the event (from the list of people), separated by commas. The fourth column will have the citation for the presence of the people in the third column at the place in the second column. More columns of people and citations will be filled in as needed, in the manner of the first two. There will be one citation per citation column, but in the people column there will be as many people as were explicitly mentioned, separated by commas. I am not to infer the presence of people not specifically mentioned by name in the text cited, unless the evidence is overwhelmingly obvious (e.g. a mother's presence at the birth of children may be assumed, even if she is not mentioned by name).
Once the events spreadsheet is complete, the journey spreadsheet can be made. In the first column of that spreadsheet will be a journey ID number. In the second column will be an ordered list of the ID numbers of the events (from the events spreadsheet) which make up the journey. For a series of events to be considered a journey, there must be a description in the text (or a very strong implication) of the group (the members of which can change, but which must include at least one person) traveling from one place to the next.
Places and people will be entered with their names, rather than their ID numbers, for ease of proofreading and of making up the journey spreadsheet. Events and journeys will be entered using their ID numbers, because of the difficulty of coming up with a short but unique name for each event. Though it wasn't discussed in the meeting, I imagine that eventually we might want to be able to name the journeys, so that they can be searched for.