Rules for compiling data
- Birth dates can be considered as fairly correct. They were supplied by the interviewed persons for themselves, their families and ancestors; other birth dates were supplied by the Catholic Church in Nablus in 2004.
- Only persons carrying the Soudah family name were considered in this census which means that the descendants of female members are not considered here. This is done for the simple fact that married women take up the husband’s family name and thus become very difficult to track.
- In order to estimate the age of a male ascendant it was calculated, from direct observation of available dates of birth, that the average age of a father is 27 years at the birth of his first son. Thus if the Catholic church in Nablus declares the date of birth of Hanna Issa Sliman as being the 3rd. of June 1897, then the year of birth of Issa, his father, is estimated to be 1870 and that of his grandfather Sliman to be 1843.
- The names of some members of earlier generations were added simply based on oral information of their earlier existence given by some descendants. This applies mainly for individuals who did not have direct descendants. Statements like: “ My grandfather had a brother called Hanna but he never married” were considered as being true without further proof.
- The existence of some individuals in earlier generations was simply extrapolated. Thus the existence of the above mentioned Hanna is simply proven by a birth certificate issued by the Catholic Church in Nablus in which he is registered as Hanna Issa Sliman. In Palestine, and certainly elsewhere in the Middle East, by law, the name of the father must be added to the name of the child. As a tradition the church adds the name of the grandfather too. So there is no shade of doubt that Issa and Sliman were Hanna’s father and grandfather. This tradition has helped complete the genealogy a couple of generations backward in time.
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