* Military Service & Sources

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ColinMc
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Military Service & Sources

Post by ColinMc »

I'd like to follow up a post by Helen in this topic.

New user requesting confirmation that I am following best practice (17791)

I like the idea of dealing with military service in the way she suggested, as it seems to simplify matters significantly. I did have a look at the downloaded (I think) Military fact set, but there seemed to be too many facts, too much detail etc for my needs. I know I could hide the ones I did not want.

How do others deal with the mass of military info sometimes available as sources. Fold3 recently had a free weekend, and I was able to download quite a lot of info.

For one ancestor, I got 70 documents, I found another with over 180, which I did not download at this time, (I might take a short term subscription in a few months and look in more detail), and I am sure there will be others with many many more!

My initial thoughts were to create a single source with all 70 media files linked to it, and to ignore the "Text from Source" section. I was then going to create individual facts that I thought were relevant with a detailed note attached.

However if I adopt Helen's suggestion, I can create a single fact with a - presumably much longer note (or series of notes all part of the same note.)

Am I giving myself any future problems doing this? The alternative of creating 70 sources (or more) does seem overkill for my needs.

And "No", I have no idea yet how I want this info to appear in reports, but I just want to avoid potential problems if possible.
Colin McDonald - Researching McDonald, McGillivray, Tait, Rountree families
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davidf
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Re: Military Service & Sources

Post by davidf »

ColinMc wrote: 30 May 2020 15:47 And "No", I have no idea yet how I want this info to appear in reports, but I just want to avoid potential problems if possible.
That last sentence is really the killer!

Fundamental to the question is how you wish to use FH. I see two general approaches.
  • To use FH as a means to produce "finished" reports, DVDs, Websites etc.
  • To use FH as a holder of information which you will draw on when writing Family History
With the first, you have to play by FH rules and enter the information in a manner which can be output by FH's various outputs. Long notes can have unexpected consequences. An occupation note may indicate "He was a foreman in a woollen mill" - which is probably a lot shorter than a military biography; this could affect the "balance" of reports (it really messes up diagrams!).

With the second approach you can really do what you like, because extracting data into say a word processing document is a manual operation as you decide what you want to say. You may for instance want to create a fact for every promotion (UK officer's promotions will be gazetted) so that you can quickly refer to his or her progression during say WW1 or WW2. Alternatively you may decide to have a single military service fact and in your sources/citations put a note such as "downloads from Fold3 in C:\Documents\Genealogy\Military Service\Joe Bloggs\Fold3". (You can of course put that folder in the FH project hierarchy if you want all your downloads included in FH backups.). Within your word processed "family history" document* you can adopt a source/citation method supported by your wordprocessor.

* FH7 is due to have "word processed notes", which may mean such documents could be included as sort of shared notes linked to the various people cited. We await to see how powerful the word processing is.

I personally use the second approach supplemented occasionally by directly output family tree diagrams.
David
Running FH 6.2.7. Under Wine on Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS + LXDE 11)
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tatewise
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Re: Military Service & Sources

Post by tatewise »

I agree. That last sentence makes it very difficult to advise about potential problems.
The very assertion that you have no idea about reports is the potential problem.
Before committing all the data to one strategy, experiment with some representative samples to see how they appear in reports & diagrams, etc, and then adapt the strategy as necessary.

I suspect that rather putting everything in one Military Service fact, it would be better to divide it into logical phases, such as each theatre of operation in WWI and then in WWII, and put each phase in a separate Military Service fact.
Depending on what sources you have, it may be possible to group them into logical subsets.
I think that would make the management of the data and the notes much easier.
Mike Tate ~ researching the Tate and Scott family history ~ tatewise ancestry
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LornaCraig
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Re: Military Service & Sources

Post by LornaCraig »

I certainly think it would be 'over the top' to create a separate souce for every single image, particularly if you have 70 for one person! If someone had a single period of military service I create a single source called "John Smith: military service records" and attach all the images to the source. If they had two or more distinct periods of service, for example because they had left the service but re-enlisted during WW1 or WW2, I create a source for each period.

I don't normally transcribe anything in the Text from Souce field but I do sort the images out into some kind of order and number them and give each one a title such as 'Attestation', Medical', Next of Kin', Discharge' to make it a bit easier to locate information. I list these in the Note field of the Source record. I then construct a summary of their service and enter it in the Note field of the Military Service fact, citing the Source. If any specific separate facts are needed I use the 'Where within Source' field in the citation to refer to the particular document number/title.
Lorna
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ColinMc
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Re: Military Service & Sources

Post by ColinMc »

I suspect like some users, I have no real plan for output. My challenge is the hunt for data, and the ability to source/verify it.

I do know however that I will not be producing DVD's, a book, or a website. I am interested in Family History as a hobby for my own benefit, Any benefit for others is incidental.

My own immediate family has no current interest in the topic. I have discovered a few distant relatives with similar interests , and we have and will continue to exchange info. So far, I have been more than happy with standard reports and diagrams to let me do this. Would better reports help? Probably, but they have been fine for me so far. And reports I have received from others have also had their drawbacks. For my needs, how a report looks is quite low down the list of priorities.

I would not be recording every fact. Individual promotions for example would only be captured if they had a relevance to the story. I would be quite happy recording start and end ranks, and if anyone else does happen to be more interested in this level of detail, the info will be in the media files.
I create a single source called "John Smith: military service records" and attach all the images to the source. If they had two or more distinct periods of service, for example because they had left the service but re-enlisted during WW1 or WW2, I create a source for each period.

I don't normally transcribe anything in the Text from Souce field but I do sort the images out into some kind of order and number them and give each one a title such as 'Attestation', Medical', Next of Kin', Discharge' to make it a bit easier to locate information. I then construct a summary of their service and enter it in the Note field of the Military Service fact, citing the Source. If any specific separate facts are needed I use the 'Where within Source' field in the citation to refer to the particular document number/title.
This is exactly how I had envisaged working, and if my needs change in the future, I am more than capable of using Word to generate more advanced reports, living with whatever restrictions my data choices have imposed.
Colin McDonald - Researching McDonald, McGillivray, Tait, Rountree families
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ColeValleyGirl
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Re: Military Service & Sources

Post by ColeValleyGirl »

I handle source images as Lorna does -- mostly one source, multiple document images. My output only goes to a website where I display the fact notes and (if I've done a transcription, which isn't usually the case for voluminous service records) the text from source.
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ColinMc
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Re: Military Service & Sources

Post by ColinMc »

Thanks, seems a sensible way forward.
Colin McDonald - Researching McDonald, McGillivray, Tait, Rountree families
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AdrianBruce
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Re: Military Service & Sources

Post by AdrianBruce »

ColinMc wrote: 30 May 2020 15:47... And "No", I have no idea yet how I want this info to appear in reports, but I just want to avoid potential problems if possible.
Putting my tongue in my cheek: my personal opinion is that if you don't change your mind several times over a topic, the topic wasn't worth doing in the first place! ;)

Perhaps more seriously, I think it does make sense to ask for opinions and work something out in your own head. Just don't imagine that's going to be the final answer.

There is one thing that you might consider and I'm not sure if it's mentioned above. You might record various detailed things as events in the own right but also refer to them in the narrative notes for other, higher level(?), events. Then, when creating a narrative report, omit those detailed events. The advantage of doing that would be that you could run queries on those detailed facts but they wouldn't mess up the porder of the narrative reports.

An example might be that a military service attribute has a value of Cheshire Regiment for 1915-1919 and the note contains the full narrative for the guy's career in the Army, including his promotions. The note would be written in "biographical order". In addition to that, you could have rank attributes of "private" for 1915-1916 and "corporal" for 1916-1919, with no notes. If you wanted to run off a query for who made what rank, you could do that. But when you run off narrative reports, you'd suppress / omit the rank attributes and include the military service attributes.

This duplication (shock horror!) would perhaps only make sense if you were going to record a lot of military stuff and were interested in the military stuff as a field of study in its own right.
Adrian
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