Family Historian User Group

Hi, I am about to start entering a whole bunch of sources I have been collecting and still not sure the best way to enter the information. I know that the Title field is shown as a heading in FH Source Pane unless the Short Title is used in which case the latter is shown preferentially. Apart from a scan of the corresponding cert I am thinking the available fields can be used as follows (using example for Birth Cert):

AUTHOR:      GRO (Was it always 'GRO'?)
TITLE:      (not sure what to put here)
SHORT TITLE:      {surname}, {first name} {other names} (year of birth): Birth Certificate
TYPE:      Birth Certificate
CUSTOM ID:      (not used)
PUBLICATION INFORMATION:      GRO Birth Certificate: County Name / Registration District / Registration Sub-District / Birth Year
TEXT FROM SOURCE:      Col no.      Date Of Birth      Place Of Birth      Forename      Sex      Father’s Forename And Surname      Mother’s Forename And Surname      Mother’s Maiden Name      Father’s Occupation      Name Of Informant      Description Of Informant
NOTES:      (if needed)

I'm thinking the Publication Information can carry the header information from the Cert whilst the Text from Source should best be used for all that is a direct copy from the register.

On the right track? Comments?
Thanks, Ric


ID:3624

Looks about right to me.

I also have a repository record linked to my Certificate sources. As repositories have web links and I attach the scanned version of the Cert to the source.

As an aside I keep my certs in archive clear folders with the source ID on the folder, so they stay in order.

Well, I'll add what I do, but that is certainly not saying what I do is right!

1) I find it preferable to avoid abbreviations - so I put 'General Records Office' instead of 'GRO', etc. Trying to decode abbreviations meaningful to other people can be difficult.

2) I put the stuff you have in 'Short Title' in 'Title' and generally leave 'Short Title' blank.

3) I would suggest you think carefully about how, when you have a long list of these sources, they appear in FH. I put the 'Birth Certificate' text FIRST, so that they appear as a group with people ordered alphabetically in that group. Not everybody likes this.

4) I record what you have in the publication information in the 'Where within Source' field, where it is more useful to me as it appears in the Sources Box. I'm too lazy to add it twice!

5) Ditto the text from source. I'm far too lazy to type all that in, although I'm sure it is very useful for searching, etc.

Good luck!