Apologies to William Dollarhide.
The modifications I have made are very simple, really. But they don't follow the original system, so I want to be clear about the changes:
- When numbering siblings, skip the .n label corresponding to the direct ancestor. This allows us to know the birth order of the direct ancestor, a shortcoming of the Dollarhide system noted by Dollarhide himself.
- When numbering secondary marriages, always use the *n notation if there are any secondary marriages and skip the *n corresponding to the marriage of the direct ancestors. As far as I know, Dollarhide didn't speak to this subject, but I consider it a shortcoming that you cannot infer marriage order from labels. This modification corrects this.
- When using the numbering system on a very long ancestry chain, allow truncation at some point single letter and begin again. This helps with limited computer data fields.
- When using the label files, you must be creating in transliterating some symbols into symbols acceptable to your operating system: "*" can become "o"; "/" can become "-"; decimals (if this is reserved) can become "p".