* Entering Evidence! Style citations

[stanm]

Perhaps other users out there may be using Evidence Explained style citations. If so, I'd be interested to learn how you use the FH interface to enter them.

So far, I'm happy with the approach I am using (but maybe I could be happier). My approach goes like this ...

Use 'Source.Title' as a free-form citation, and the other fields in the source record are either suppressed in reports or are just left blank (e.g. author, pub info). 'Source.Short Title' is used as a short, unique, easily recognizable name for the source. When using the "Add Citation" command, the available fields are used as needed but not displayed in reports, with the exception of the Note field, which is added following the citation in square brackets.

There is a minor thing that I'd like to get working. How can a string be italicized in a block of text in the source title field? I've tried using <i>Some text</i> without luck. Is there some other way to annotate the text to get italics? For now I'm using the convention _Some text_, which could undergo bulk conversion to <i>Some text</i> after web pages are generated.

[ColeValleyGirl]

I just use the short title as you do, for an easily recognisable name for the source, and put the full Evidence Explained citation in the long title. There's no way to italicise text so I mark it with <i> and </i> for conversion after web pages/reports are generated.

[stanm]

Thanks Helen. It's good to know we share the same approach.

[santatraugott]

I've just come across this interesting exchange. One question I have is, what happens to the "short footnote" and bibliography associated with the source, when all the information is in the title? Do they end up just repeating the whole title?

I have experimented with putting the whole EE citation in the "Publications" line, which produces a nice looking, EE compliant Footnote, but however the "short footnote" and bibliography just repeat the Title.

In either of these approaches, it seems that the "where within" field is not used.

Is the "where within field" something that is normally picked up when a GEDCOM is created?

[tatewise]

This is talking about generic Source Citation records.
The Tools > Preferences > Sources > Generic Source Formats... determine how Footnote, Short Footnote, and Bibliography are formatted.
The Where within Source field is a standard/generic FH/GEDCOM Citation field that is still supported the way FH has supported it for decades.

[AdrianBruce]

As perhaps a relevant aside, my sources are all generic and I've always set my Footnotes and Short Footnotes to be the same because I'm unclear when the short one is used. I know it says "Use the Short Footnote format for citations to a source, if that source has already been-cited" in the Help for the Report Options, but it seems to me that if the first citing is 20 pages back, then it's seriously impractical to expect anyone to read backwards in the hope of finding the full version.

Any comments from experience?

[davidf]

Surely how you arrange citations, footnotes, endnotes, references and bibliographies etc. etc. depends on your audience - who you are writing for?

If you are writing for a journal you will probably have to follow their house-style.

If you are writing for a relative, they are probably not too interested in the minutiae of your sources - anything significant you will discuss in the text. In those circumstances discreet footnotes may be useful so that you can get back to your sources to answer any questions.

Expecting a piece of software to write all your text and references (for all possible purposes) I think is unreasonable; but I will use if to store sufficient information for me (or someone who may inherit my work) to get back to those sources. When I "write family history", I use a word processor, not Family Historian. FH is then used as a meta-source and I usually find as I write I dig deeper to answer specific queries for the piece I am writing - I will often review sources in the context of the purpose for which I am writing. It is then, in the word-processor that I will craft the citations and references relevant to the item I am writing.

[santatraugott]

At one point I had the Footnote, Short Footnote, and Bibliography all the same. It made for a lot of pages of print! That was my first motivation for using the short footnote. More important, it's just a style I'm used to, from academic/humanities writing and reading, and the issue of how onerous it is for the reader to page back and forth just never occurred to me (perhaps it should have) having done it that way all my professional life. If one's publication is online, as many are these days, perhaps looking back for a particular citation is less difficult.

I agree that I wouldn't publish anything directly from FH, but would write my own research report or blog or think piece, editing source citations there as necessary. I'm just aiming to get all the information into my source citation that would make it, at one extreme, EE compliant, so I don't have to return to the source at a later date to pick up additional details about the source, and to enter the details in FH in a way that is translatable from platform to platform to the extent possible.

[Kai Chandler]

Perhaps other users out there may be using Evidence Explained style citations. If so, I'd be interested to learn how you use the FH interface to enter them.

I keep an Excel research log with my recent findings, each with a citation that I created from the Evidence Explained book or website. Once I've created a new type of citation, I keep a copy to use as a starter for future templates. I keep them in another Excel worksheet (tab). Mostly they are very similar, eg. English or Danish Parish Registers for births, confirmations, marriages and burials. I recently created a couple of Freeform Source Citation Templates to make it really quick and easy to paste into FH7: one for plain text and one that includes an italic section.

This is described at Freeform Citation Source Templates from which I've included a link to where FH7 users can download the templates and which includes full instructions.

Hope that helps!