Family Historian User Group

Forgive my daft query but I haven’t been using FH for very long and, I’m ashamed to say, haven’t been using the Source capability at all until now. (Somehow I managed to add Citations but not Sources. Ahem!) I’m also too scared to use Ancestral Sources because it says you have to have mastered FH first and I’m convinced I will lose everything! Should I be brave and risk it?

Up until now, I knew I had to record my sources somehow so I (stupidly?) downloaded and saved every useful census and parish register page to my various individual records as a Multimedia item. Now I need to go through all those saved images and turn them into proper Sources with Citations and I’d really like to get it right this time.

I’ve only recently learnt what all those funny reference numbers mean when quoted by real genealogists so I thought I’d be precise and try to use those, too … but when I try to add a Source like a census record the fields given don’t seem to match the reference numbers I want to input. Am I looking in the wrong place again?! Finally, I want to add to each Source the census/register image which I already have as a Multimedia item. Is there a simple ‘drag-n-drop’ type solution? My ICT skills are of the Special Needs variety so please simplify!

You should practice using AS for a while with the sample project or with a copy of your own project. Anyway if anything ever does go wrong you can always go back to a backup. Mike Tate put together some tutorials on the knowledge base that you may find useful.

AS is unlikely to cause you to lose everything. My warnings about having a good understanding of Family Historian before using AS is because AS creates various record types - individuals, census facts, sources, citations, media records, etc. and it is a good idea to understand what these things are. However, I suspect a lot of users have done things the other way round and used AS and then by studying the records AS has created have discovered more about how FH works.

The tutorials are here ancestralsources:index|> Ancestral Sources under User Guide.

If relatively new to FH then the how_to:key_features_for_newcomers|> Key Features for Newcomers has a lot of useful pointers, including Backup & Recovery and Sources Methods 1 & 2, but I would advise you become familiar with all the topics.

Many thanks to both of you. I've just done all the tutorials and I'm ready(ish) to bite the bullet and use it!