* Essential source templates not to standard?

[DavidJChilds]

The essential source templates in Family Historian are supposed to be based on the work of the University of Strathclyde. Their referencing guide says a birth certificate should be cited something like:

“Births (CR) England. Weymouth, Dorset. 20 November 1913. CHILDS, Harold John, Entry no. 103.”

Only after using the template the footnote just says:

“Birth certificate of CHILDS, Harold John, 20 Nov 1913.”

It does not reproduce the fields that are filled in and I think it should at least reproduce the registration district, county and country. The same goes for marriage and death certificates. Were these template just rushed to get the project out and are they likely to be updated?

[Mark1834]

You’re asking the wrong people. We’re just ordinary users like yourself and have no insight to CP’s logic and future plans.

If they’re not to your liking, I suggest you ask CP directly using their Support Ticket system.

[DavidJChilds]

Thank you. I have sent a message from your link. I know you are nothing to do with the software company, but there are some knowledgable users on here who know about programing who may have a way to change the templates.

[ColeValleyGirl]

I have moved this to the Sources, Citations and Repositories sub-forum where it belongs best.

I would not expect CP to update the templates, as that would affect users already using them happily. The exact description of the Essentials collection is:

an Essentials collection, designed by Calico Pie with help and advice from the Genealogy Programme of the University of Strathclyde

(from What’s New in Version 7 )

so CP makes no claim to full 'Strathclyde compliance' although the templates do capture the necessary elements to achieve that.

You don't need programming skills to achieve what you want -- you can clone each template of interest and modify the copy.

[DavidJChilds]

Thank you for your reply. I feel as if I have ruffled a few feathers. You are correct the fields are in the template but are nor reproduced in the citation footnotes. I do not know how to best modify the templates to read as it should. I have used some Ideas of this group to change how the 1939 Register looks in the facts tab and reads in reports. Just thought I might get some guidance on the best way to have more detail than just "Birth Certificate of person". How do other people cite Birth, Marriage and Death certificates? I think the advanced tempates are overly complicated.

[ColeValleyGirl]

Thank you for your reply. I feel as if I have ruffled a few feathers.

I haven't any feathers to ruffle

Yes, the Advanced Templates are a step too far for many people. If you want more detail than the Essentials collection provides out-of-the-box, then cloning the templates and modifying them for Strathclyde is probably the best way forward unless you want to design your own citation system from scratch. There are people around who have done this 'Strathclyde modification' (although none of them has published the results in the Knowledge Base, more's the pity) and I hope they'll weigh in later on.

It is notable that even Strathclyde has variants! The MacDonald book doesn't exactly match the latest Strathclyde Referencing Guide IIRC.

FWIW I currently cite births thus:

Wales, birth certificate (certified copy) for Agnes Margaret Jones, born 19 January 1925; registered 3 March 1955, Merthyr Tydfil district 11a/1369, Lower Merthyr Tydfil Sub-district, County of Merthyr Tydfil C.B.; General Register Office, Southport

but that's based on an Elizabeth Shown-Mills approach. I'm planning a redo when I can find the time and might move to Strathclyde because the punctuation makes more sense to me, although I'm not sure the original example you quoted would enable anyone to find the Birth Registration.

[tatewise]

You can experiment with your own customised Source Template as follows.
Use Tools > Source Template Definitions... and select the Essentials Civil Registration Certificate.
Click the Clone... button to create a custom copy that you can View/Edit...

Edit the Footnote Format (and other Formats) to produce whatever you prefer.
Use similar expression techniques to those you used to edit Fact Type definitions for sentences, etc.
e.g.
<{Type} (CR)>< {Region}>.< {Location}.>< {%SOUR.~DT-DATE:LONG%}.> <{Principal:REVERSE} and {Principal_2:REVERSE}>, {%SOUR.~DT-DATE:LONG%}, {Reference}.

[Mark1834]

I take a “necessary and sufficient” approach, rather than following an arbitrary standard, with a limited Source Title (what, when, who, where) followed by a transcript of the key text.

GRO Birth Certificate: 1869 - Arthur Poole, Ranton, Staffordshire
17 Sep 1869 - Ranton, Arthur, Boy, f = (blank), m = Elizabeth Poole, i = Elizabeth Poole (X), Mother, Ranton, 28
Oct 1869.

Others may prefer to add additional details, but this is all that I (and anybody else familiar with UK Civil Registration) need to answer the “how do I know that?” question. I also record the Index reference (which I will always have, as that’s what I used to order the certificate), but don’t report it in the citation.

[LornaCraig]

I believe that the format DavidChilds quoted for the citation is actually the Strathclyde format for citing an entry in the birth registration index. An entry in the births index should be recorded using the Civil Registration Index template. You will find that it produces a footnote in exactly the format quoted. (With the exception that if you had only seen the index you would not be able to give the exact birth date, only the quarter year in which it was registered.)

The guide says:
"These index source types are only used when you have only used an index for BMD and have not
actually viewed the actual birth, marriage or death certificate or a transcription of the information
from the certificate".

As you have found, the Civil Registration Certificate template produces a different format. I couldn't find a Strathclyde format for citing a birth certificate but I would be surprised if it’s the same as an index entry. At the very least it needs to indicate fact that the source is a certificate, not an entry in the index. This is because the certificate includes a lot of information which is not in the index. (Exact date of birth, place of birth, father’s name, mother’s name, father’s occupation, name of informant registering the birth, date of registration.) You can cite the certificate as a source for all of these separate facts. But none of these facts can be obtained from the index.

Incidentally there may be other aspects of the certificate which are worth recording. For example is it an original certificate issued by the local registrar at the time the birth was registered? Was it issued at a later date when the individual needed proof of age, for example to claim an old age pension?

[DavidJChilds]

I believe the guide says for BMD indexes to cite:

Births index (CR) England & Wales. RD Crickhowell, [Brecon]. 1st Q., 1892. WESTERMANN, Esther. Vol. 11b. p. 95. www.gro.gov.uk : accessed 24 July 2018.

and that birth certificates are cited:

Births (CR) England. St. Heller, London Borough of Sutton. 5 February 1972. BEECHING, Gerald. Entry no. 151.

The entry number comes from the certificate, If this is wrong I stand corrected. All I want is for more information to be in the footnote, Country, County and Registration District. I agree that the citation should mention that the source is a certificate, And as ColeValleyGirl has said it needs more information to find the certificate again on the GRO website or register office.

I have been trying the codes supplied by tatewise to get the footnote to format as I wanted. Has anyone got a better Idea of how I should get the template to format the citation of a birth, marriage or death certificate? i.e.

"England, Portland, Dorset. 20 November 1906. Birth certificate of CHILDS, Harold John. GRO Reference: 1913 D Quarter in WEYMOUTH Volume 05A Page 496" Maybe?

[AdrianBruce]

I believe that the format David Childs quoted for the citation is actually the Strathclyde format for citing an entry in the birth registration index. ...

Actually, it's not, it is from the template Civil Registration Certificate. It took me a little while to confirm this (a) because I don't normally use Source Templates (but do have a tiny project that I used for exploring the possibilities of converting from Generics to Templates) and (b) my tiny project had discovered several hacks that I needed to make to the Essentials templates to make them usable in my view, which I needed to reverse to investigate this.

Here are the 3 formats for the index for my GG-GM's birth registration on FreeBMD:

Screenshot 2024-04-27 130028.jpg (16.89 KiB) Viewed 618 times

And the 3 for the actual certificate ordered via the GRO online ordering service (which I decided for the purposes of this exercise, was a collection):

Screenshot 2024-04-27 130052.jpg (18.01 KiB) Viewed 618 times

So, aside from the fact that I have the GRO online ordering service extra, this is identical to David's entry. I would wholly agree that this is an inadequate citation format. Oddly the index citation format contains much of the stuff that should appear on the certificate format - but doesn't, even though it's in the corresponding Source Template Definition.

Converting my 5,000 odd source records from Generics to Source Templated records was never going to be on anyway, but the realisation that I'd have to tweak the Essentials Templates in cases like this as well, didn't help. Not all the Template changes would have been due to inadequacies like this as many required changes would have been simply because that's how I like my citations.

At a rough guess, if I were to use the Essentials Civil Registration Certificate in earnest, then I'd be adding fields that are already in the Template Definition to the formats - having cloned the original first and working on the cloned copy. But I'd probably also end up adding in other items from my personal preferences such as whether the certificate is a hand-written copy, a facsimile, a digital version, etc.

Somewhere in FHUG I am convinced that I posted about discrepancies between the "Strathclyde" book from Ian MacDonald and templates in the Essentials collection. However, I can't find that post right now.

[AdrianBruce]

It appears that I did spend some time hacking/editing the Essentials Source Template for a Civil Registration Certificate to be more to my liking. This is the result:

Screenshot 2024-04-27 133842.jpg (181.93 KiB) Viewed 614 times

(You may need to right click the image and open it in a new tab or similar to embiggen it)

This is the Footnote format copied and pasted here:

Code: Select all

{Creator}, <{Type} certificate> <of {Principal} and {Principal_2}>, {Date}, {Indexed_place}, <entry no. {Contemporary_no}>, <{=TextIf(Text(%SOUR.~EN-CONTEMPORARY_COPY%) = "yes","contemporary", "")} {=TextIf(Text(%SOUR.~EN-CERTIFIED_COPY%) = "yes","certified", "")} {Creation_method} copy> <made {Creation_date}>, {Repository} <ref. {Reference}>.

There are various tweaks here such as whether this was a contemporary copy given to my relatives when the child was registered, whether it's a certified copy, what sort of a copy it is, etc. This are all for my own purposes and can be ignored if you want pure Strathclyde.

Note also that the Short Footnote is grossly inadequate if you have two people with the same name, of course! Dates and places presumably ought to appear there as well.

[LornaCraig]

I believe that the format David Childs quoted for the citation is actually the Strathclyde format for citing an entry in the birth registration index. ...

Actually, it's not, it is from the template Civil Registration Certificate. ....
.....
Converting my 5,000 odd source records from Generics to Source Templated records was never going to be on …..

Sorry, I stand corrected. I have now found the Strathclyde example of a birth certificate citation which I couldn’t find earlier.

Like Adrian, I don’t use templated sources in my main project because I couldn’t face converting nearly 5000 sources from generic to templated format!

[Mark1834]

Note also that the Short Footnote is grossly inadequate if you have two people with the same name, of course! Dates and places presumably ought to appear there as well.

Playing Devil’s Advocate , why? If the Fact is John Smith, born 1 Jan 1923, Somewhere, Somewhereshire, and the citation is to Civil Registration Birth Certificate, Somewhere District, that’s sufficient to obtain a copy of the Certificate. Certainly the extra details may help the GRO find it more quickly, but adding precise date and place doesn’t distinguish between two online entries. It still needs a manual search to resolve, just as if these details weren’t there…

I would add extra detail myself as well, but just prompting users to distinguish between what’s essential and what’s just convenient or to conform to a convention.

[ColeValleyGirl]

David, try:

{Type} (CR). {Region}. {Location}. <caps>{Principal:SURNAME}</caps><, {Principal:GIVEN}> <and <caps>{Principal_2:SURNAME}</caps><, {Principal_2:GIVEN}>>. {Date}. {Reference}. <Collection: {Collection}>. {URL}.

which is as close as I can come.

If you don't want the Surname in CAPITALS you can replace:

<caps>{Principal:SURNAME}</caps><, {Principal:GIVEN}>

with

{Principal:REVERSE}

and ditto for Principal_2.

It gets a bit more complicated if you use a full place in location, as you'd have to exclude the 'Region' from {Location} but that's beyond me and I'd probably settle for omitting Region and using Location, but Mike T may have a complicated way of something better if it matters to you.

[fhtess65]

I didn't realize I could publish templates to the KB - I will look into that.

And yes, Macdonald's book doesn't match the Strathclyde Referencing Guide. His style is a tad spare. I always add more information and my templates (modified from the Essentials templates) do have more fields for additional details.

Thank you for your reply. I feel as if I have ruffled a few feathers.

<SNIP>There are people around who have done this 'Strathclyde modification' (although none of them has published the results in the Knowledge Base, more's the pity) and I hope they'll weigh in later on.

It is notable that even Strathclyde has variants! The MacDonald book doesn't exactly match the latest Strathclyde Referencing Guide IIRC.
<SNIP>

[ColeValleyGirl]

I didn't realize I could publish templates to the KB - I will look into that.

Add/Update a Download

[ColeValleyGirl]

P.S. I think this discussion illustrates why the Essentials templates are NOT pure Strathclyde, but templates that can be understood by beginners without venturing into the niceties (if that's the word) of template construction.

[fhtess65]

Ok - will look into doing that. My templates are not as pretty as the more experienced users, but they do get the job done (at least for me) and may help others.

Thanks!

I didn't realize I could publish templates to the KB - I will look into that.

Add/Update a Download

[gosforthian]

A genuine question on this very topic as I would like your views please. For an England and Wales certificate index source what is wrong with simply "GRO Stourbridge Q4 1900 6c 103". And for the matching certificate, why not just show the source as "Certificate" and add the image?

[ADC65]

A genuine question on this very topic as I would like your views please. For an England and Wales certificate index source what is wrong with simply "GRO Stourbridge Q4 1900 6c 103". And for the matching certificate, why not just show the source as "Certificate" and add the image?

In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with that reference. In fact I would go as far as to say that is all that is required. I use pretty much the same except I use 'GRO Births', 'GRO Deaths' and 'GRO Marriages' rather than just 'GRO', as they are actually separate indexes.

I do similar to you for the Certificate, although I do add the GRO reference into the Publish Info field for further reference. Since I split my sources for Certificates, I title them as, for example, "Birth Certificate - BLOGGS, Joe Joseph [I1234]", where the reference in brackets refers to the person ID.

I expect you'll probably kick off a bit of a debate on this, but your reference is perfectly fine to find that index entry, and that's all the citation really needs if you're not publishing professionally.

[tatewise]

Please clarify exactly what fields you propose should hold those values in Essential Templated Sources.
i.e. Are you talking about the Source record Title, or citation Footnote, or specific fields?

Please recognise that:
The Essentials Civil Registration Index only has one 'lumped' Source record per {Region} and {Type} and the {Registration_District} and {Reference} are Citation-specific fields.
The Essentials Civil Registration Certificate uses 'split' Source records and no Citation-specific fields.

In some cases, a source for the Certificate may exist without any Index source, e.g. if a family member already has a copy of their BMD certificate.

[gosforthian]

I simply add the GRO reference as the Citation title, with no other fields completed. Given that the person's data fields have the place of birth, marriage or death and the address, including the town, county and country, I don't see any need to duplicate the info in a source record. It could be argued that I should make more explicit what "GRO" stands for. But adding a glossary would address that once, rather than including it in every source record.
Ian

[gosforthian]

On Certificates you make a good point about where I got it from. In England and Wales the real source is GRO but who it came via may be interesting to note I guess. As I have lifted certs from other ancestry trees, or been given them by a relative, or ordered them myself. Where in a Citation called Certificate would I say where I got it from?

[Mark1834]

Agree - these simple citations are all that’s required. Remember that the primary purpose of a citation is to identify where the source was/can be obtained for verification. It is not for reproducing the contents of the source.

Simple versus detailed citations is a choice of personal style and preference if you don’t have to follow the house style of a publisher, neither is intrinsically right or wrong.