* Occupation and Multiple references

[dz1958]

I have a relative who was a professional musician. I have collected 300+ newspaper references where he is mentioned as a musician, or that he is performing at a certain time and place. The locations, dates, and newspapers vary over a 30 year period.

I want to have a chronological record of his occupation: where he performed and when. 300 citations for OCCUPATION is a bit much. But they are all important as they have photos, locations and document changes in his band and his movements.

He also had another career which needs to be documented.

My idea:
1. Customize the OCCUPATION fact, "musician (from-to date) with a few key sources cited,
2. For each venue repeat the same, but cite all the sources. Sometimes he headlined for 2 years at a time, with 40-50 articles and advertisements.
3. Individual articles and references, add as an individual fact with the source cited. (I have already added a NEWSPAPER ARTICLE custom fact, which I use for other relatives.) Question: Would it be a bit too much to also list each clipping individually like this?

I would appreciate any suggestions on how to best accomplish this.

[Gardengirl]

Good morning. I’m new to FH, too, but I would suggest that you scan the articles and create your own digital 'book' with them in chronological order then add that as a source and just cite it once, Occupation - musician. Date span for the years. Anyone interested in future years could then flick through the entire book without going in and out of 300 separate files. A paper copy would be rather nice, too.

[gwilym'smum]

Hi
My suggestion would be to put your sources into categories, say newspapers/posters etc and preface the category with say letter A - then B etc. This would put your sources into order in your source list. Then for each record in the category give it a reference number say year, group he was in, place (say Manchester), venue (Bridgewater Hall) these could be abbreviated. By starting with year they would also appear in order then hopefully it would take the group and all those would be in order.
Obviously I have not worked out an exact system but I would work something on these lines. I will probably have the same problem as our son is a professional musician and I have many files with information on is career
Stay safe
Ann

[AdrianBruce]

Yes, I would tend to think along the same lines as Gardengirl. Remember, just because you can enter the information as lots of events and lots of sources, doesn't mean that you should. Because of the density of stuff, I'd possibly write a free-standing document in Word, or whatever, that describes their career in plain English. Whether you need to scan the newpaper reports (if they aren't images already) is pretty much up to you, but I'd tend to concentrate on writing a readable story first - the article images could then be in the appendix*. The articles can be simply cited in your document (because even though it's free-format text, you will want to check up why you thought that it was a summer season in Rhyl rather than Blackpool, say) using basic footnotes or whatever.

Then you can create maybe one source in FH that is called by an appropriate title ("Musical career of ...", e.g.) and create maybe one long-dated event for his occupation that cites that source.

* Re having images of the articles in the same document: If the document is going no further than your PC, it doesn't matter, but if you ever want to publish the document in any fashion, then copyright, etc., comes into question. Your text is your copyright but images of newspaper articles probably belong to someone else's copyright and / or terms & conditions apply to their usage. It may be simpler therefore to have yet another document with all the images in - if you want them all in one place.

[dz1958]

Thank you! I think the freestanding document would be best.

I am a freelance writer, and one of my sub-projects is to write biographies of all individuals. So I think I can dovetail this into the main FH data compilation. I know that after I compile a list, there is always SOMETHING (out of sequence) which pops up later to be added. I can always update and revise the version number of the freestanding document.

While this project is currently PC-only, it may go into a privately-published volume; some of these images will almost certainly require permission (e.g. Ancestry.com, Newspapers.com), which I will pursue.

Documenting/collecting the images isn't an issue. Everything is documented and numbered in a master catalogue list of photos/documents; digital copies are stored including backup copies, and the publication/date, column/page, source repository and URL are all referenced. (I only need to print backup copies.)

I have several individuals which this same issue = 2,000+ clippings (blessing/curse of having well-known relatives living in small towns!) So this solves a big headache!