[This material based on a presentation made to the National Genealogical Society's Computer Interest Group, July, 1986. Revised, December, 1987, for presentation to the Seattle Genealogical Society's Computer Interest Group. Additional revisions, April 1988, April 1990, February 1991, and November 1993.
[A good source of additional information on numbering systems is an article by Donn Devine in Ancestry Newsletter (Vol. 4, No. 1, Jan-Feb, 1986) entitled "How to Number People in Pedigrees and Genealogies." This summary of numbering systems used in genealogy is based in part from that article. Ancestry Newsletter is published by Ancestry, P.O. Box 476, Salt Lake City, UT 84110. Toll-free order number is 1-800-531-1790. A more recent article by Joan Ferris Curran gives excellent descriptions of the "Register" and "Record" systems but gives scant attention to other systems (in the case of the "Henry" system, the article is inaccurate). See "Numbering Your Genealogy: Sound and Simple Systems," National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 3, September 1991, page 183.
[Richard A. Pence, 3211 Adams Court, Fairfax, Virginia, is a former editor of the National Genealogical Society Computer Interest Group newsletter (the NGS/CIG DIGEST), was the founding system operator of the NGS Bulletin Board System and is a current co-sysop, is co-moderator of the National Genealogy Conference (GENEALOGY) and the GENSOFT (genealogical software) conference on the FidoNet amateur BBS network. He was co-author with Paul Anderick of the first edition Computer Genealogy (Ancestry, Inc., Salt Lake City, 1985) and editor of the revised edition (1991) of the book. He has been a frequent contributor to the quarterly Genealogical Computing(Ancestry, Inc.) and a contributor to the NGS Quarterly. He was editor in 1984 of the widely aclaimed The Next Greatest Thing, a pictorial history of rural electrification in the United States.]