User talk:Sylphene/sandbox
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editDate format: this should be consistent throughout the article, and because the subject became American, Wikipedia would want it to be MM-DD-YYYY, as in April 8, 1881, throughout (no th etc.).
The paraphrase from https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/titanic-survivor/ellen-bird.html is certainly too close, and would be detected on Wikipedia as copyright violation. For example "The Strauses had been in Europe since January 1912 and were trying to find a new French maid to bring back. They had no success but did hire a British maid who left them at the last minute and Ellen Bird was then hired." has become "The Strauses had been in Europe since January 1912 and were looking to find a French maid to bring back. They had little success and instead hired an English maid before sailing home." Something much more concise, like "She had been hired as a maid by the Straus family" would be appropriate.
There is plenty of information about Ellen in https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=So2atynax1oC. In fact there seem to be at least 20 titles on Google Books that come up with "Ellen Bird" as the search term. You should reconstruct the biographical details as much as possible from that kind of source.