Q, thank you for your response. I appreciated all of your questions/comments, and would like to give more detail as to what my goal is...

I am not an expert on Child Ballads, but this has been of interest to me for many years. I am now in the stage of analysing/comparing variants that I find elswhere (in different languages as well). A passion of mine, really.

My choice of writing about Child ballads in Canada is not a random one. I lived in Canada for four years and gathered many songs and a few collections of songs (Creighton, Fowke) while still there. This doesn't, however, provide we with sufficient primary/secondary literature.

Your questions go straight to the point and are well-founded.
"Simply recording the presence of a Child ballad is insufficient to characterize the content", as you rightly say. But this should be a linguistic/literary task, and my analysis would be based on the aspects of language and style found in those ballads - meaning, metaphor, lexis, etc. as compared to the 'original' Child ballads. The song's context cannot surely be ommited (your questions #4 and #5), but I would like to keep it in the background, concentrating on the linguistic and stylistic choices.

Perhaps I really am too naive to want to give concrete form to a project of this scope.

But my dream is to find someone - a kindred soul - for whom it would be interesting and perhaps in some way enriching to discuss a song here and a song there, for the sheer pleasure of it.