Family Historian User Group

There have been countless words written in the FH magazines about acid-free this that and the other but...

1)
Does anybody know of any articles, guides, whatever to actually cataloguing all the artefacts that we acquire as part of our family history? I basically need to have some sort of reference system so that I can add a new item (great-grandfather’s favourite trowel or whatever) and give it a reference that will allow me to find it in the correct box – just like archives do.

2)
What would be the best way to add the archive reference to the relevant person in Family Historian bearing in mind that some things will be sources (certificates, etc.) and others will just be “things” that may or may not be in the list of Objects as they may not have a photograph to go with them…

Hoping somebody can help as, due to ill health, I need to get everything in order fairly quickly so that others can make sense of it after I’m gone.

Thanks

Duncan Amos

P.S. My Great Grandfather was a Master Builder and I do actually have his favourite trowel...


ID:2836

duncan_a said:
“things” that may or may not be in the list of Objects as they may not have a photograph to go with them…

I don't have an answer to your real question, but it occurs to me in passing that I would photograph or scan everything, add the picture to the tree, and use the object and/or source properties to link to whatever cataloguing system you come up with to identify the physical object.

I am sorry your health is not good. It must be frustrating to want to do this task and not have the energy to accomplish what you want to do.

I found a website for the British Library Centre for Conservation that may be of interest:

Caring for your treasures
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/whatson/ ... sures.html

I am not a trained archivist, so you might do better to contact someone at a local museum and see if they have brochures which might serve as a guide, or even if the conservation department could send an intern out to consult with you.

With that disclaimer, here's my advice.

Assuming you do not have the ability to photograph everything now, you can still create the source records in Family Historian and add them to a named list that indicates the photographs have not been taken yet. The custom ID can be used to number / identify the objects. You can use the notes field to write down anything you know about the object, including to whom it belonged, and how it came into the family.

In database design, I've read that it is bad practice to make keys that are meaningful. For instance, if you are doing 'acquisition numbers' for books, it is better just to start with 0001, and simply increment as you go, without worrying about what kind of item you are looking at. In other words, don't worry about grouping things or making a key 'C-001' for certificates and some other letter for other categories. Just start at the beginning and work your way through.

If typing is too strenuous, making a list in a notebook would do just as well -- and might be better in some respects if it could be kept with the objects. A composition book with a sewn binding has more longevity than a binder or a spiral notebook, which might lose pages.

For my academic research, my teacher advised us to use plain composition books which we could get at any office supply store, because she expected us to go through a LOT of them. But if you don't have very many items, you could splurge and get a fancier notebook. If you can sketch at all, a bound art notebook might work -- then you could sketch the object if you don't have a photo.

Things like your great-grandfather's trowel can be marked with string tags -- write your 'archive number' on the tag and attach it to the object.

Documents could be put into protective sleeves (the museum might be able to suggest a source for archival supplies) and the key number could be put on the sleeve. The difficulty here is that you need to be careful with adhesives because they will make a mark on items, plus they dry out over time, so they are likely to become separated from their objects. But you don't necessarily want to write on documents, either, so care must be taken about what you use to mark objects. A real archivist might know some obvious better way that I don't know.

I hope this helps you get started, and I wish you all the best for whatever time is left to you.

Jan

Thanks for the replies…

To take them in order:

Chris.
I am trying to photograph or scan everything that I can but one ends up with a vast number of objects that way which need to be embedded within Family Historian as it doesn’t seem to use relative addressing. That is to say that if I am running FH on my c: drive and my Family Historian program file is located at:
“C:Family HistoryFHv3Family HistorianProgramfh.exe”
with my data at:
'C:Family HistoryMyFamily_FH_FHv3.GED'
and I was to store all my pictures in:
'C:Family HistoryMyFamily_Heirlooms'
Then I can either Link the files and have a manageable file size or embed them and have a family history file the size or a small planet.

Should my cousin take over my tree and she’s running her copy of Family Historian at:
“D:Family HistorianProgramfh.exe”
with her data at:
“D: Family HistoryMyFamilyHistory.GED'
Then, wherever she puts the “MyFamily_Heirlooms” folder, none of the references within Family Historian (if she merges the Gedcom files) will remain correct - because they seem to use full addressing – and all the links will need to be manually re-made…
If the files are embedded then there is no problem other than the enormous size of the resulting file.
We have tried this in the past using ‘Tools – External File Links – Move’ but it didn’t work successfully.
If there’s a way round this, please can somebody explain it to me. Jane? -

Jan:
Thanks for your personal comments, they meant a lot.
Archival materials aren’t a problem as I can get them from various sources on the Internet. Although I’m English I now live in Spain as the blue skies do more for the spirits than the fickle weather in the UK. Whilst that helps a lot with facing each day, it rules out having a chat at the local museum as a) my Spanish is very limited and b) other than major cities I suspect, conservation and cataloguing methods (certainly in the town I live in) are almost non-existent. When I asked to see the collection of photographs of when the town was bombed during the Spanish Civil War, I was given a supermarket plastic carrier-bag full of loose photographs – not even in a box…
As to the numbering system – the acquisition number method works well enough to give a reference number to something – and I fully agree that it should be totally sequential numbers – but it doesn’t help when it comes to locating them as far as I can see.
As an example, Item 10506 may be a birth certificate located in a folder “Birth Certificates – Amos – 1900-1939”, item 10507 may be a “Silver platter awarded to Arthur Jesse Amos by Holmesdale Building Society” and boxed on its own, item 10508 may be another birth certificate in “Birth Certificates – Amos – 1900-1939”, item 10509 may be “Certificate of Freedom of City of London” in a folder labelled “Miscellaneous Documents – Reed”, etc…
As I understand acquisition numbers, they are basically a number given to an item ‘when it first appears’ – arrives from a publisher, is donated by someone, or whatever and ties the item to the source of the item and its description, condition, any other relevant information such as “needs woodworm treatment immediately”, etc – it doesn’t go any way to defining its physical location in the ‘system’ even though it acts as a reference number for the item.
In typing the last paragraph I think I have just realised that the ‘location’ is simply another field within the record of the acquisition number and, therefore, you have answered the question… I was basing my thinking on something like the Dewey System used to reference library books whereby the ‘code’ defines the item and its location but this sort of thinking is over-complicating the issue.

Thanks Jan – you’ve helped more than you know…

Duncan

Don't embed them, link to them, and put them in the same location relative to your Gedcom on whichever system you're using. I have a folder of pictures and other sub-folders in the same folder as the Gedcom on several systems with different drives and user paths and so on. You can either copy the whole lot, or just the Gedcom if you don't need to update the rest.

For storage purposes, it is convenient to group together items of a similar size or type, as they will take up less space that way when stored in boxes, and you can also get out the file of birth certificates, etc in one go.

Most archives give items a series/group number then a piece number within that group, so you could have one series for certificates, another for probate/wills and another for photographs, etc and number each document you have sequentially within each series.

One thing you do need to do as you have already mentioned is ensure that you have acid-free materials and above all make sure that you do NOT use PVC wallets, etc - these will peel text off printed documents very quickly. Use proper-acid-free archival materials.

http://www.arcare.com
http://www.secol.co.uk

Jeremy

Once files are linked, just ask your cousin to copy the gedcom and the images to the directories on their PC and open the gedcom and resave it before merging, when you open a gedcom on a new computer or from a new directory, FH will always to an automatic attempt at correcting the directories, even if it fails, using the Work with External File links tool can repair whole directories at once.

Once this is done, then do the merge.

duncan_a said:
In typing the last paragraph I think I have just realised that the ‘location’ is simply another field within the record of the acquisition number and, therefore, you have answered the question… I was basing my thinking on something like the Dewey System used to reference library books whereby the ‘code’ defines the item and its location but this sort of thinking is over-complicating the issue.

Thanks Jan – you’ve helped more than you know…

Yes, now you see what the problem is. Libraries do need a cataloging system in the Dewey sense, but they also need a straightforward record of what items they have, where each item has a number unique to that item.

I do see why you might like to devise your own cataloging system, but you can do that in a separate step. In a library, the acquisitions person and the person who assigns the Dewey Catalog number are two different specialists. As you say, you can put this pointer to an item's location in your 'shelf list' record of the item -- it is simply another field.

But you don't need to work out your cataloging plan in advance -- you can start making your list and notes of items first, and then let the cataloging system which seems best to you reveal itself as you work with the items.

And to return to your original question -- for the physical objects, you might be able to get ideas about cataloging and keeping track of where things are from books about other hobbies where one collects objects other than books (e.g. collecting rocks, sea shells, etc.)

Thanks for the kind words -- glad I could help.

Jan

Just to clarify a point in my first post, when I said 'source records' I meant that in a general sense, not that the items would be 'Sources' in the FH Source List.

What I would do is make a record for each item as a Multimedia Object and then if Source records are needed, attach the Multimedia Object record to the Source, and the Source to the person, as needed.

If you have photographs of the object, then those files can be linked to the Multimedia object, but if not, they will still be in place for someone else to come along later and do so.

Using Family Historian has the obvious virtue of being able to link the record of the object to the person to whom it belongs. But if you would like something more robust, you may want to look at a program that is specifically designed for cataloging things.

For my book database, there is a 'location' field in each record. If I have to put a box of books into storage, I can fill in this field with the box number, do a query on it, and then print out a report which is just the books in that one box, which can then be stored in the box with the books as a packing list.

For cataloging my own collections, I use BookCAT and other database software from http://www.fnprg.com -- one could press BookCAT into service and catalog the objects also, changing the 'Type' field as needed. I think Frederik (the programmer) does have trial versions available for download, so you could at least look at how the program works to get ideas for what information you might want to record for your own purposes.

If I did make a BookCAT database to supplement Family Historian, I would use the FH custom ID numbers to cross-reference them to BookCAT's own reference numbers.

Jan

I just saw an interesting quote in Ancestry Magazine in a sidebar titled 'Library or Archive?'. The author quotes Lyn Meehan from the Edmonton (Canada) Public Library:

An archive is a receiving agency whose purpose is to preserve. A library is a collecting agency whose purpose is to accumulate.

The article's author, Ellen Notbohm, explains:

... libraries and archives catalog their holdings differently. Libraries catalog every single item, usually by the system with which we are most familiar. the Dewey call number system: 971.22334 CAS. Archives catalog in multiples or groups, using accession numbers. You may see a number that starts with a year in which the documents were received, followed by the location: 1968.128 Box 10 item 3.

What does this mean for us, the 'family archivist'? It makes sense to me to keep groups of records together if they were 'received' together. There might be some clue in the context of records which were gathered together which would be lost if one separated them.

Whatever system one uses, the important thing is to know what one has, and how one can find it again at need.

Duncan, if you are still with us, I hope you have had success at your archiving task.

Jan