Family Historian User Group

I have been experimenting with the Source Template features in V7 comparing them to my existing generic sources. Due to the generally impoverished nature of my ancestors I have a fair amount of "Poor Law" sources such as workhouse admissions, bastardy and settlement examinations and out relief payments in parish accounts. These do not seems to fit comfortably in either Church Register or any of the Civil categories.

I could continue to use generic sources though I like the idea of imposing some structure on myself through the use of a template. I am thinking about creating my own template for these sources but before I spend a lot of time on this I would welcome other peoples thoughts on this. How do you currently handle these sources and how do you think they should be cited in reports?

If I was using the Essentials collection, I'd record them as 'Miscellaneous Unpublished Document/Artifact' under Archived Material, especially since they're usually viewed at Archives (although some are coming on line now). There are more options in the Advanced collection, but they're all related to Archived Manuscript records

Helen's recommendation seems sensible.

From my v6 out in the sticks, the problem is that there's a bit of chicken and egg here, I think. You need a lot of experience with Poor Law documents before you can get a handle on what items ought to be distilled out for use in Source Templates. But you want to start off with a Template... (So would I!)

What I don't know is how easy it is to adjust templates once the source-record has been created - how easy is it to add or subtract items as you gain experience about what is important for citing? Or to split a template into two?

(Parallel example - the Irish Registry of Deeds records contain - mostly - records of property transactions. What if I entered a load of property transactions from the Registry of Deeds collection - then suddenly found that I had some will extracts, or marriage settlements, and should have entered a document-type. How do I insert the document-type into (a) the template and (b) the existing source-records? These are the sort of questions that I'd be asking. Which may not be sensible!)