Family Historian User Group

There are major consequences of departing from the 'standard' approach of putting citations against specific facts, and putting all the citations on the Name. I am not saying you can't do that if you wish, but simply that you are ruling out a great many useful features such as Ancestral Sources that will be useless to you, and some Plugins including Lookup Missing BMD Records that relies on citations on the BMD facts. Also, later on, when you ask a question such as 'Where did I discover that Birth Date or that Death Place?' it is going to be so much harder to find the answer. With the citations against each fact the answer is so much easier to find. Again, I am not saying you are right or wrong, but just identifying some consequences of your decision.

Okay here goes again. I didn't mean I put all the citations against the names, just that the way I thought of each individual was as a name. So I would put a birth citation against the birth of that individual, their address against a residence fact and their wedding date against a marriage fact. I just don't think of them as FAMily or INDIvidual fact I think of them as facts about that person. So there shouldn't be consequences, yet. I was just trying to explain (obviously quite badly ) that I see citations as facts about a person (there for their name).

I agree the Facts are about the person, and it is of no concern to us how you see citations as facts about a person's name, BUT if expecting advice from genealogists you would do best to conform to genealogy convention when describing what you do. That means treating Citations as being recorded against Facts.

You used the phrase "I see citations as facts about a person", but Citations are not Facts.
The Events and Attributes such as Birth, Death, Occupation, Education, etc, are Facts.
Citations (with their Sources) are assertions or proofs that justify the Facts.

I meant to say 'I see citations as proof of facts about a person' but this has all stemmed from me describing how my mind works when I am working with FH, not what I actually do. I was trying to explain why I had maybe said things the wrong way in other posts. I am quite sure if you look through all my posts there will be rookie mistakes, but I have never been that pedantic about how people speak to me, even with things I am very knowledgeable about. If they get it wrong or ask advice, I will try to explain in layman's terms where they went wrong and the best way to approach it next time or again give them the advice they need in as non technical terms as they need it, so they understand what I mean. I don't send them away with a book to read and assume they haven't already read it and that is why they are asking the question in the first place or without atleast checking the answer to there question is in the book I am asking them to read.

No one should be made to feel inferior because they are trying to improve there knowledge about something new to them, after all they could be the next expert in that field at the beginning of their journey.

If you want to keep track of work still to do with a particular source, adding it to a Named List might suit you: how_to:create_work_in_progress_or_research_to_do_lists#named_lists|> Named Lists

Hi Helen,

I had a quick look at Named Lists and will be using them, you and a few others had suggested them when I had been suggesting a simple to-do list in another topic. I had just been asking about the use of short titles when the thought about using it for a marker more than anything came to me. Not the correct use but I was thinking to myself at the time, that if I was maybe working on a source and decided to call it a day. I could put "****This One****" or anything in the Short Title and that would change the Long Title, it would then stand out from the other Long Titles when I opened up the Sources. I would be able to go straight to that source, delete the short title and carry on where I left off. I never meant it to be a place to keep information, just some way to easily find a source I had not finished working with.

When you have a large number of Source records, finding one with a particular Short Title relies on you remembering what 'memorable' title you chose, because just scrolling down becomes tedious when there are thousands of Source records.

A quicker way of finding the Source record you worked on last is to open the Records Window on the Sources tab and click the Updated column header to sort into order. The last record you worked on will be top of the list.

Mike , I never thought of doing that (although I had just discovered I could use the same method for sorting my titles out alphabetically) so no excuse for not thinking of that, trying to find a solution to something that is already solved. Thanks again for more Tatewise perils of wisdom and everyone else for that matter.

As I tend to have a source for each new document (I am a splitter), I simply sort my sources by reference Alt-Clicking to get the most recently added to the top.

No disrespect here Jane, but what the hang do you mean by 'reference Alt-Clicking', as it makes absolutely no sense to me. But someone saying 'Simply' probably means I should know what it is and its uses.

Jane is referring to the same method as Mike (Tatewise) in his previous post, where he said "open the Records Window on the Sources tab and click the Updated column header to sort into order. The last record you worked on will be top of the list." By holding down the Alt key on the keyboard while clicking on the column heading the sort order will be reversed. However the default sort order can be changed by right-clicking on the column heading and sort descending (if it is currently set to sort ascending). This is the default Mike is assuming you have set. It will then not be necessary to use the Alt key at all.

Thanks for that Lorna, I never checked I just presumed that clicking once would sort it one way and clicking again would reverse it. So to Jane I say, thanks to Lorna I now know what the hang you were talking about . Thanks again