Family Historian User Group

Interested to know how widely 'citations' is used by users who have migrated from other software (or who didn't use the 'citations' facility in FH for any other reason) .

I migrated to FH from old software that didn't have (as far as I know), structured ways of recording citations. I had a couple of projects with a lot of records, so I carried on recording these as I always had - my first 'note' on each record is on sources, and lists the source (baptism PR, 1911 census, 1939 Register, letter from his sister Mary Ann) and how I got it (Ancestry, FMP or other recognised FH website, fiche/film at ... record office, URL of nonstandard sources, email from Mary Palmer, document from Auntie Edna), with dates for any personal communication.

This works for me because I didn't have to go back through the original records and convert notes to citations, and if I want to know all the instances of a particular word/phrase in the source note I can easily write a query to find it. If I'd been starting from scratch with FH when I started my research I might not have done it that way, but such is life.

I recently found out that some plugins work on the assumption that all events will have a 'formal' citation rather than just a note (and many thanks to Mike Tate for his help on my previous query on that). Interested to know how other users have handled this - did you go back and add 'citations' for all your records? If not, did this cause you any problems and what did you do about it? If you did add citations, do you think the benefit outweighed the time spent?

I believe citations are widely used. Speaking as one who started off 30 odd years ago and didn't even think of recording sources (despite two degrees in history) because I was so excited finding records and seeing my ancestors' names, but who later realized I needed that information, yes, I did add sources afterwards. Admittedly, even then I didn't do it well - using Ancestry's attached sources, which over the years I realized are sometimes just barely adequate.

I've now gone back and added proper citations and continue to do so for my direct line and key collaterals. Since bringing my RM based database into FH last year, I've redone a lot of them using FH Source templates and, more recently Ancestral Sources (which allows me to retain the original citations). It took me years to really understand how to craft really good genealogy citations (a totally different animal from regular academic ones).

There are some people who use very basic citation formats - Jeff La Marca has converted his Simple Citations (https://simplecitations.com/) format to FH Source templates and made them available in the Downloads section here: https://fhug.org.uk/kb/download-type/source-templates/

You might find those easier to work with and will provide you with the citations you need to get the results you want when using certain plug-ins.

Hope this helps.

kimgroothuis wrote: ↑

01 Feb 2023 19:08

Interested to know how widely 'citations' is used by users who have migrated from other software (or who didn't use the 'citations' facility in FH for any other reason) .

<SNIP>

Interested to know how other users have handled this - did you go back and add 'citations' for all your records? If not, did this cause you any problems and what did you do about it? If you did add citations, do you think the benefit outweighed the time spent?

Many thanks, that is really useful. One for my to-do list!

Thanks to Mike Tate and fhtess65 I'm making good progress on adding citations retrospectively (from existing info in my notes). In case it helps anybody else, this is the approach I took.

I started with an 'ancestors' chart with me as the root, and worked upwards (backwards) a generation at a time. Where an event involved other people (eg census) I added the citation to the event for those people at the same time. I created a named list 'Citations added' and added people to it as I went along (only if I had added citations for all their facts). I've just completed that on my main project.

Next step, I've configured the columns on the records window to include membership of that list as a 'tick box', and sorted the records by descending relationship to root (just to keep the ones with no relationship at the bottom). I can now see at a glance whether I've already done the individual, and can work through them a bit at a time. When done I will add them to the named list.

Apologies if this is already blindingly obvious to everybody else!