Family Historian User Group

Hi, I'm trying to link a source citation to an external website (URL) and having no luck.

I thought at first it would be simply a matter of setting a multimedia record to point to the URL rather than a file but it seem not.

If this feature is not catered for in FH4 then it seem a major oversight in todays web based world.

By the way, it does appear to work when attached directly to an item in the fact list, providing you leave the type field blank?

Any help would be apreciated.

Ed

ID:4169

Hi Ed,

Sorry, but I must disagree with you. It is NOT an oversight to link to a URL because there is NO guarantee as to how long any URL will remain active and / or valid. If that facility did exist, then users would expect that links to pages on (for example) the Daily Telegraph, Times Online or other news websites would remain valid for the duration of their research.

I would suggest that it is better to 'print' the required webpage using a pdf printer and use the resulting pdf file as the one to be linked to the source. This has the additional merit of providing evidence of when and where the original was obtained.

Unfortunatly, I have had no success using the pdf printer installed with FH4 for this task, but have found that the FREE Bullzip PDF Printer works extremely well on Windows XP -> http://www.bullzip.com/index.php .

Hope this helps

Regards
Bilko  [cool]

Thanks Bilko for your reply and suggestions.

I appreciate your point regards the temporary nature of web pages and only use them as an additional citation for convenience when there is a website associated with the source. This worked well for me in FH3 but alas not in FH4.

What prompted this thread was my revisiting a rather dusty part of my tree and noticing a link to a website associated with the source. Although the link didn't work with FH4 I did visit the site after copying and pasting the link into my browser and very rewarding it was too as the site had been updated since my last visit over 2 years ago with some very interesting new information. Had the link not been there I doubt I would ever have remembered it.

I do believe it better to allow the user to decide whether to use URL links in this way, rather than to deliberately design in restriction that in tomorrows cloud based world, may be out of place. In fact one of the main reasons I chose FH was because it appeared the most flexible on the market.

In general I'm very pleased with FH, but do believe it is let down somewhat by the clunky way it handles multimedia.

IMHO you should do both -- capture the page as it looked when you visited it, AND record the URL. IIRC Elizabeth Shown Mills recommends that you save the original URL in her books [see http://www.footnote.com/page/1553_eliza ... own_mills/ for a bio] Evidence! and Evidence Explained.

Firefox has several add-ons that can help in this task -- Scrapbook (which saves a copy of the page, and stores the source URL), Zotero, and the WebtoPDF feature in PDF Download.

Even if Family Historian doesn't store a live link, a note attached to the source would allow you to keep a record of where you found something, and the link could be copied and re-pasted into a browser.

Jan

Very much in agreement with Jan and would just like to add that when Jan writes...

Even if Family Historian doesn't store a live link, a note attached to the source would allow you to keep a record of where you found something, and the link could be copied and re-pasted into a browser.

She aptly illustrates my original point, being (IMHO) FH should be more helpful in this regard.

I am of mixed feeling about whether FH should be more helpful in this regard. The question is simple: how much should FH re-invent the wheel? Tools already exist to keep track of references, and they can be used to do this task.

One can use Family Historian as a document index / control program. I once started out with bunch of scans, created Multimedia Objects, and attached the scans to make a list of what I had. Having made such a list, I suppose it would be possible to keep track of data entry by creating named lists and adding the scans to the lists -- e.g. 'make source records' 'enter data from sources' -- and remove each one from the list as they were analyzed and the information was added to FH.

But rather than adding features piecemeal to FH, I would rather have a proper program designed for research management.

Jan

Jan said...
But rather than adding features piecemeal to FH, I would rather have a proper program designed for research management.

Very much agree with that sentiment.

In fact I wasn't asking for FH to add new features or functionality but rather make what they have already done work. It seems like a no brainer that a link to a 'Multimedia Object' should be able to handle a URL.

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I've always just pasted the site address in the note section of my citation. When web pages are generated, the address is then shown as a link to click on to go to the address (V4).

It should be noted however that the link address generated will often be incorrect if it contains an ampersand (&).  FH often seems to add an extra semi-colon (;).  eg on my site see citation 7 on the page  http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.anc ... ind10.html

where it generates
http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/Index ... SessionID=&
with the rest of the address (;amp;event=births, including the extra ';') not linked instead of
http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/Index ... ent=births

While in this case the link still works, I have others where it is enough to stop it working.  I even have one (which I can't remember where it is at the moment) where a whole word has a space inserted in the middle of it. eg 'roots web' instead of 'rootsweb'.

This particular citation also illustrates a general problem with the citations on all pages where the citation number appears in the middle of the citation (vertical-alignment: 'auto' instead of vertical-alignment: 'top'), so that the interpage link jumps to part way through the citation, instead of the start of it.

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My preferred method (for what it's worth) is to enter the URL in the Repository Identification field, which is available (FH v4 onwards) in the Source Records window or Property Box ALL tab. This can appear in the Source information on a report if you tick the box for 'Repository Id for Source' on the Report Options Sources tab.  The Repository itself is the hosting website for the specific record.

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The GEDCOM Standard Release 5.5 (and thus FH) allows only one Repository citation per Source record:

SOURCE_RECORD: =

 n  @@ SOUR  {1:1}
...
+1 >  {0:1}
...

It could be argued that as far as your tree is concerned, your Source is only the scanned image from the Ancestry website (Repository). Personally I'm quite happy that Gedcom Census records the GRO reference in the Source Publication Information field. Ancestry obviously obtained their material from National Archives, and they in turn had obtained the material from whoever transcribed the original census return into the enumeration book, and the enumerator obtained the information from the head of household.  You have to draw a line somewhere.[smile]

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I would consider the GRO to be the main 'source' of the information, whilst Ancestry, FindMyPast, et al are transcribers. And like any transcriber, the act of transcription can produce errors which is why Ancestry and FMP can show different data for the same source.

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