* When to stop with Sources

[GeneSniper]

Hi all, I have started to redo my tree in FH as you may or may not have noticed and want to get it as right as I can, not for me but for hopefully my daughters or granddaughter in years to come. I have been thinking about this for a while and was wondering when or if to stop adding citations? By this I mean do you add a citation for a Name at every opportunity or do you just add a few and leave them once you have a few proofs of what they are called. As you know we can end up on many certificates etc birth, marriage, death, reporting deaths, children's births, I could go on and on. I just used name as it is a well used example, but it could be anything really, like someone born in a house lived all there days there and died in it and 20 events through their life at that address, do we need to know their residence 20 times when it doesn't change at all? They could even have been married in the house and therefor you would have the location of the marriage and their residence from the same source as the same.

What do you do? Add every bit of information every time or the information when it adds to or changes your information on a person.

While I am on about names, Should you add a change of name in the name section, for example when a woman takes her husbands surname after marriage, as her name would show up as the new name through most of her life on certificates etc.

Look forward to your replies.

[tatewise]

That is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string
It depends on how rigorous you want to be.
But the main thing is to be consistent.

By convention the Name of a person is their Birth name as recorded on the Birth Certificate or Baptism Register or whatever other document you have.
See how_to:handle_people_with_multiple_names|> How to Handle People With Multiple Names.

I record citations in precedence order, so initially Birth citations may refer to Census records or a GRO Index entry, but once I have say the Birth Certificate then that goes to the top of the citations and less contemporary citations may get removed.
Personally, I don't record citations against Names unless their is something unusual about them.

[ColeValleyGirl]

1. I record every piece of information -- and if that demonstrates that nothing changed, so be it -- that's still valuable to know.
2. I'm neutral about name citations -- I tend to end up with a lot of them because I let AS generate them automatically, but there's no overhead as they're linked to sources that are being cited elsewhere. So for example my mother has several name citations, one for each source entered via AS but none of sources such as her Land Army record that were entered directly.
2. I don't add the woman's married name to the name section (the way I generate my websites adds the married name in as an alternate in the index automatically) I do record whatever the source says her name is in the source title and also the text from source.

[GeneSniper]

Helen, If I understand you then your sources would be, Birth- Maiden name, Marriage- Maiden Name and Death- Married name. If someone else decided to carry on your tree how would they be able to tell whose death certificates were whose by just looking at them. Now I am not criticising your method, just asking as I have said I would love my daughters to carry this on and am looking for a uniform way to enter the information so that they or someone else can follow it. I am like you, in that I seem to cite everything as it is really only an extra minute or two when adding the information, I just wondered if it would be over busy for someone else and maybe put them off and think of me as a lunatic for proving someone's name 10 times.

Oh and the bit about changing names was not on the main tab front section but in the 'more' button to the right of the name section.

[Gowermick]

I tend to add a source for the name, whenever I come across it. (Birth, Christening, Marriage, census, burial etc). Not to prove I have correct name, more to confirm I have correct event! I originally placed the sources in the order I encountered them, but have recently been sorting them into chronological order, for consistency.

As for married women’s names, if John GREEN, marries widow Jane SMITH, I use the form Jane /SMITH Nee ??/ indicating I don’t yet know her maiden name. When I do find her maiden name, I then change it accordingly to Jane /BROWN/

As for a burial image of a married woman, I use the form J00259 Burial of Jane GREEN Nee BROWN or just J00259 Burial of Jane Green for the filename. The J00259 is her custom ID, so image is easily associated with correct person.

[AdrianBruce]

I think I'm closest to Mike. Off the top of my head, names and births are the two single events / attributes / facts that are most likely to get multiple sources.

For births, I do cite them all against the birth simply because values often shift through the years and having access to all the possibly relevant sources in one place is helpful.

For names, if their name doesn't change, then I'll cite the first source that I found that tells me the name. Then I'll cite the baptism or birth certificate (if I find it) because that tells me the best bet for a birth name. But all the rest? Why bother?

(In fact, this is my purist / pedantic mathematical / logical view about citing the other sources for names. Feel free to ignore this! But it's misleading or even wrong to cite sources for names after (a) the first one that you found and (b) the closest to birth. That's because the cited source is meant to be evidence for the name. But if it's a later source then that's plain wrong - I used the name to prove that's the right source for this person, not the source to prove that's the right name. As I said - feel free to ignore my pedantry but there is something in there about the direction of the logical arguments that we use.)

Usual caveat - I don't use Ancestral Sources for various historical reasons so if it's easier to cite them all, then feel free to do so.

Oh - if I find a source with evidence of a variant in the name, then that will get cited as well. Probably.

[ColeValleyGirl]

Helen, If I understand you then your sources would be, Birth- Maiden name, Marriage- Maiden Name and Death- Married name

Short Title would be <<Year Event Place, Maiden Name>>: Marriage 1733 England Clifton with Glapton, William Fletcher and Hannah Stubbs

Long Title would include the name the individual was using at the time.

Plus of course the sources are all linked via facts to the individual, so there's no doubt which belongs to whom. And the media are accessible via the source-media link (I never start from Windows Explorer when I'm looking for a source image -- I have a very flat filing system and use FH to navigate around it.)

[tatewise]

It is NOT usual practice to add the married name of women via the more (+) button as an Alternate Name.

Like others, I use the married name nee maiden name format for files/records that use the married name.

If in any doubt, it is possible to trace any item through its links up to the associated Individual record.

[LornaCraig]

...like someone born in a house lived all there days there and died in it and 20 events through their life at that address, do we need to know their residence 20 times when it doesn't change at all?

You don't need to record 20 Residence events. If you are satisfied that someone lived at the same address over a long period of time, simply create one Residence event with a date range from the earliest to the latest known dates. You can then cite as many sources as you like against this single event. Alternatively if you don't want a huge list of sources for the single fact when you generate a report, you could add a note to the fact saying that this was the address recorded at the time of birth, baptism, marriage, children's births, censuses, etc... The details of any of these can always be checked by going to the sources for those other facts.

[tatewise]

On that last point, you don't need to create a Residence fact at all, as the Address is recorded in each of the other 20 facts, and will be fairly obvious in any reports, etc.

[AdrianBruce]

It is NOT usual practice to add the married name of women via the more (+) button as an Alternate Name.
...

To be honest, I rather wish I'd done exactly that. As it is, if I get a woman who married 2 or more times, I always enter at least the first married name as an alternate name.

At first, I didn't add any married names as Alternates. However, my 5G GPs have the rather distinctive names of Samuel Pickstock and Margaret Gandy. Or rather, that's what their marriage record said. Margaret was a widow when she married Samuel and fairly quickly, I discovered her maiden name to have been Hughes. I duly set her primary (and only) name to the more prosaic Margaret Hughes. Then one day I brought up their diagram and some head-scratching ensued while I thought - "Didn't I have an ancestor with the name Gandy somewhere round here?" Of course, it hardly took much time to realise what had happened but ever since, I've added married names for women who married twice and ensured that all alternate names show up in diagrams.

And of course, in the USA where previous surnames sometimes, but not always, float down to become middle names on remarriage, you really can't tell what the married name will be, it needs to be done explicitly.

There are, no doubt, other ways of recording such married names.

[Mark1834]

I go further - I rarely give an explicit citation for name, as there is an implied citation in every source you quote, as you have assumed that the person named in the source is the same as the person in your database. Similarly, if all I know about an individual’s birth is what’s written in a census entry, I don’t cite the census for birth details as the implied source is clear.

I also list citations in reliability order, due to the odd way that FH queries work, where it distinguishes between “source1”, “source2”, etc. So for date of birth, a GRO certificate trumps a GRO death index or 1939 Register entry. I also add birth surname in parentheses to source and record titles that refer only to the name at the time of the event, such as death/burial/probate records. I don’t add married name to women where I don’t have birth name, but maybe I should, as I have an awful lot of Mary, Ann, Elizabeth etc entries.....!

[ColeValleyGirl]

I don’t add married name to women where I don’t have birth name, but maybe I should, as I have an awful lot of Mary, Ann, Elizabeth etc entries.....!

You can see their family context in the focus window and property box; and I add columns in the records window for First Spouse and Second Spouse to make the context clear there as well.

[Valkrider]

I don’t add married name to women where I don’t have birth name, but maybe I should, as I have an awful lot of Mary, Ann, Elizabeth etc entries.....!

I add the married name in square brackets as the surname so I can easily see the context and replace it with the maiden name when / if I ever find it.

[natashahouseman]

...like someone born in a house lived all there days there and died in it and 20 events through their life at that address, do we need to know their residence 20 times when it doesn't change at all?

You don't need to record 20 Residence events. If you are satisfied that someone lived at the same address over a long period of time, simply create one Residence event with a date range from the earliest to the latest known dates. You can then cite as many sources as you like against this single event. Alternatively if you don't want a huge list of sources for the single fact when you generate a report, you could add a note to the fact saying that this was the address recorded at the time of birth, baptism, marriage, children's births, censuses, etc... The details of any of these can always be checked by going to the sources for those other facts.

Picking this old thread up as it was exactly what I have been thinking about this morning. For many of my ancestors I have have a range for residence and a range for occupation. I think it's cleaner to use a range and attach all the sources to one address, but then that misses out odd details like age in a census or size of farm. So to give a specific example. My Great Grandfather was a farmer. He moved farms between the births of two children and then moved back between the birth of two more. The 1911 census tells me he employed three farm servants on his own account, the 1901 he was working for his Dad. The best I am coming up with is to not include an address on the range I use for the occupation, but to add specifics to the notes.
I also have a secondary question as to whether I should be using frm or btw. I know they moved between the dates of the children. Am currently thinking I should use frm with the known dates and leave a gap between residences. Hopefully, with further evidence, i can narrow the gaps with no residence.
(PS am also on the camp of, how many sources do i really need to cite for a residence or occupation as well as a name or DoB - partly it's because I am starting to build my tree on FH from scratch again and for the first few generations I have a lot of sources already, I am sure it'll be different when I am getting rigorous with those from the 17th & 18th centuries!)

[tatewise]

Regarding Period Dates (frm to) versus Range Dates (btw and) ...

Period Dates define the whole period during which an Attribute such as Residence or Occupation applied.
i.e. They lived at an address frm 1900 to 1920.

Range Dates define the limits for a Date of an Event such as Birth, Marriage or Death that usually only happens on one day.
i.e. They were born btw 1900 and 1920 but not sure which day.

Double-click on any Date field or click the [...] button on the right of any Date box to open the Date Entry Assistant.
On each tab, there is an explanation for each type of Date &/or a Help button that gives further advice.
( Hint: That double-click or [...] button feature together with a Help button applies to several FH fields. )

[LornaCraig]

The best I am coming up with is to not include an address on the range I use for the occupation, but to add specifics to the notes.

The decision about how to handle this depends on what you want to do with the information. For example if you are interested in producing narrative reports you might find the narrative flows better if you record separate occupations, with appropriate notes, for each of the locations so that the sequence of occupations and residences follows a chronological order. So the narrative would say something like “In 1901 he was a farmer at Farm X in Village A. He was working for his father.” Then “From 1909 to 1912 he was resident at Farm Y in Village B”. Then “In 1911 he was a famer at Farm Y. He was working on his own account and employing three farm servants.”

Narrative reports are inevitably a bit stilted in style but you can improve them a lot by using {note} as an alternative, rather than addition to, to the sentence template on a case by case basis. For example you could record both the 1901 and 1911 occupations in the usual way, with date, place and address, but the notes could read “At the time of the 1901 census he was working for his father on Farm X” and "The 1911 census shows that he was a farmer working on his own account at Farm Y and employing three farm servants." If you replace the existing sentence templates with {note} for these instances for this individual this is what will appear in the narrative report.

On the other hand if you are never likely to use narrative reports your alternative approach is probably neater – record one ‘farmer’ occupation with a summary of dates and places in the note.

[fhtess65]

I started doing this recently. Sadly, RootsMagic and TreeShare (RootsMagic) created Residence facts each time I saved an Electoral Roll record against my ancestors... I'm working on a project to consolidate these against a single Residence event. If only I'd known then what I know now *sigh*...

<SNIP>
You don't need to record 20 Residence events. If you are satisfied that someone lived at the same address over a long period of time, simply create one Residence event with a date range from the earliest to the latest known dates. You can then cite as many sources as you like against this single event.
<SNIP>

[tatewise]

You don't need to record 20 Residence events. If you are satisfied that someone lived at the same address over a long period of time, simply create one Residence event with a date range from the earliest to the latest known dates.

As I said earlier, that should be a date period (from to) and not a date range (btw and).

[LornaCraig]

As I said earlier, that should be a date period (from to) and not a date range (btw and).

Sorry, if I'd known that people would be quoting that four years after it was written I would have corrected it long ago!

As it happens, I included a correct explanation in a draft of the post I made earlier today, replying to 'natashahouseman', but Mike's post with his explanation came in first so I deleted that part of my reply to avoid duplication.

[natashahouseman]

The best I am coming up with is to not include an address on the range I use for the occupation, but to add specifics to the notes.

The decision about how to handle this depends on what you want to do with the information. For example if you are interested in producing narrative reports you might find the narrative flows better if you record separate occupations, with appropriate notes, for each of the locations so that the sequence of occupations and residences follows a chronological order. So the narrative would say something like “In 1901 he was a farmer at Farm X in Village A. He was working for his father.” Then “From 1909 to 1912 he was resident at Farm Y in Village B”. Then “In 1911 he was a famer at Farm Y. He was working on his own account and employing three farm servants.”

Narrative reports are inevitably a bit stilted in style but you can improve them a lot by using {note} as an alternative, rather than addition to, to the sentence template on a case by case basis. For example you could record both the 1901 and 1911 occupations in the usual way, with date, place and address, but the notes could read “At the time of the 1901 census he was working for his father on Farm X” and "The 1911 census shows that he was a farmer working on his own account at Farm Y and employing three farm servants." If you replace the existing sentence templates with {note} for these instances for this individual this is what will appear in the narrative report.

On the other hand if you are never likely to use narrative reports your alternative approach is probably neater – record one ‘farmer’ occupation with a summary of dates and places in the note.

Thanks, this is super helpful in explaining the implications. From my own perspective, I do plan to use and download narrative reports, but only as containers of information (both facts and sources) as I am slowly writing more readable stories to which I figured I could attach an individual narrative report rather than cite the story itself. So clunky sentence structure in a narrative report is less relevant than having all my bits and pieces together under one occupation. Starting to love family historian already in terms of the ability to make choices!