I've been working around many towns and villages in Flanders, the past few weeks (Geni-wise, not physically). It reminds me how hard it must be for so many people to understand the problems with these Flemish lineages, titling and naming. For instance, many 'van Gent' became 'van Aalst' because they assumed the Aalst lordship title. Still, they were the van Gent dynasty (which came from another, again). Having lived around there for about 30 years of my life, I know that all these places are just 10-15 miles apart from one another, so I get around the profile hurdles because I 'see' the places were they lived. Plus, I can read the old local-language manuscripts, of course.
Today, I worked mainly around 'van Gavere', van 'Liedekerke', 'van Herzele' etc. Again, all these are just a few miles apart, but it brings a huge confusion. All the genealogy pages are wrong on this families, because they confuse 'surnames' and 'titles', and it becoms a real headache when titles are passed on to different branches in the same dynasty.
The radical solution is to MP all the profiles, to avoid problems in the future, but that's almost impossible. Perhaps doing projects around these dynasties and attaching all the profiles is perhaps the only way. Otherwise, it's a never-ending story of running behind profiles, and researching everything again in order to get it right after new errors are introduced.
Any thoughts?
Thanks Hatte!
