* Sources simplification and citations

[Bill48]

I have two basic questions. The first asks what source citation formats FH users have settled upon. With censuses, for example, I long decided that I don't want an individual source name for each census and each census year, in England, Scotland, Ireland, US, Canada or Australia. For this, for the past few years I have settled on the source "Census" and the details are filled out in the citation box. But I note in FH that the citation box does not exactly guide you to enter which census. The gedcom has placed this in "Where within Source", and for example shows there "1901 Ireland", which is not exactly appropriate.

Similarly, I have other generic sources "Newspaper", or "Probate", or Deaths Index, or Parish Register, or Death Certificate. Do others of you do this? As I am at last setting up FH to be clean, I'd like to standardise such things in the best ways to work with FH.

I hope the above simplification (reduction) can be accommodated. Note that I am simplifying sources, not the actual citation. The citation within each type of source should still be rigorous.

The subsequent question is, once settling on some formats, how to go through and tidy up the old records. But first I need to settle on the formats.

Bill

[tatewise]

Hello Bill.
I have moved this to General Usage because it is a question about using FH, and not researching your family history.

The Source Citation strategy you are describing is what we term Method 2, and the alternative of one Source record per Census Household, BMD Certificate, etc, is termed Method 1.

There is more on this in how_to:key_features_for_newcomers|> Key Features for Newcomers under Sources Methods 1 & 2. (I referred you to that Newcomers advice in your posting last month.)

Also the ancestralsources:index|> Ancestral Sources program discusses Recording Method 1 or Recording Method 2 in its Help pages under Ancestral Sources Reference > Options. If you have not discovered AS then I advise that you do.

Many users employ both methods, for different types of Source document, depending on what details they want to record.

It is arguable whether your proposed Method 2 is a 'simplification'.

As you have identified, you must record any details about each Citation in the Where within Source, Text From Source, and Notes of the Citation yellow Source For pane. In the case of a Census Household, those Citation fields must be repeated in the Census Event Citation for each Individual in the household, and if any new details come to light, then each copy will need to be updated. It is also quite complex if you wish to link a Census Household Media image to each Citation.

Some would argue that a separate Method 1 Source for each Census Household is simpler, because all the details are recorded once in one place ~ Where within Source is often incorporated into the Source Title/Publication Info, Text From Source and Notes are entered once, and a Census Household Media image is linked to the Media tab. Any new details can easily be added later in one place.

There have been many discussions on this topic, and a Search for Source Citation Method will find many of them.

Consider your specific example of Where within Source set to 1901 Ireland. To be rigorous this also needs to identify the specific folio/page/household. Furthermore, a transcript needs to be entered into Text From Source. This process must be repeated for every single Census Event Citation. If you currently have no record of such details, how are you going to discover them? I would propose that you use AS and enter your Source Documents from scratch, using after due consideration, whichever Method you prefer.

[Bill48]

Thanks for your full reply Mike, and apologies that the season has had me away from such matters for a few days. I will look into your directions.
As to your last para, I am a long-time and rigorous researcher who goes to great lengths to cite as much detail as possible, and I decry those who cannot support their records. My point is merely that my current "list of sources" is ridiculously long and cluttered. It is in that accumulated state because I have been doing this for so long. I may be new to FH but I am far from new to genealogy.
It will be more instructive to me or to someone reading my reports, say, to see that my source for saying that on this date this person lived at XYZ - is a census, or a directory, or an electoral roll. And all I need in my list of sources are those generic sources (with a few exceptions better to leave out here).
Then, the full citation details for that generic source can be entered, in full, for each fact or event.
My favourite of late is to enter a source simply as "Newspaper". If I were to enter every newspaper that I cite as an individual source, or the website where it has been digitised, that is what I am trying not to do. The newspaper name, its location, publication date, page etc., the web provider and the digitised web reference, and the relevant text are all to be recorded in the citation.
Cheers, Bill.

[AdrianBruce]

I would suggest, Bill, that the acid test is - if you had to alter the details of a "citation" for some reason - how easily can you find the text, and how many copies of that text do you have to alter (one per "fact")?

For me, with one source-record per census household, etc., ("Method 1") I know I'd only have to alter it once and I can find it easily enough in my list of source-records because of my naming conventions. The issue with Method 1 is perhaps that if you want a bibliography, then you end up with a bibliography entry per census household, which is way over the top because you probably only want one per country/census/year. Bibliographies are not FH's strong-point.

So long as you appreciate the issues in finding stuff in citations, it's really up to you how you want to play it.

Adrian

[tatewise]

Adrian makes a valid observation.

But look at it this way.
You presumably have no concern with creating a separate record for each Individual, or for each Family, or for each Media image file.
So why be concerned about creating a separate Source record for each BMD Certificate, Census Household, etc?

Each Source record has a Type field for recording Birth Certificate, Marriage Certificate, Death Certificate, Census Record, Newspaper, or whatever classification schema you prefer. So it is easy to find Source records for each category. If you use a logical naming convention for the Source record Title and Short Title the FH search filter makes it easy to find them. Also Ancestral Sources offers Templates to help you enforce those naming conventions.

With such separate Source records they would still convey that they are "a census, or a directory, or an electoral roll" by including such terms in the Title.

You did not actually answer my point about where you propose storing your rigorous citation details in the case of a Census Household when many Individuals all have the same Citation and the same Media image.

[NickiP]

if you had to alter the details of a "citation" for some reason - how easily can you find the text, and how many copies of that text do you have to alter (one per "fact")?

With Mike's "Where Used Record Links" Plugin, its now very easy to find out where a particular citation is used for multiple individual records. All you need to do is run the plugin, then click to sort the "Where within Source" column and then select the individual records which need the "fact" source citation amending. You can then amend the first citation and copy that source to the other individual records, deleting the existing one that is wrong. It may not be as quick as just amending one source record, but its easy enough to do now.

I can sympathise with Bill as I've been working through a similar process this year, having never previously actually entered sources in the software, simply kept a copy of the original document image stored on the PC. I decided early this year to remedy this and until recently I was using Method 2 with sources such as 1841 Census England & Wales, National Probate Calendar, Registers of [a particular Church], and the name of a particular newspaper. I would then add a citation for an individual Fact. I too didn't see the point of an excessively long list of source records.

That said, as I make extensive use of Narrative Reports and wanted a way of including a readable image of the document associated with the"Fact" in the report, I have decided to make use of both Method 1 and Method 2 at the same time.

In the case of sources like BMD Indexes, such as the General Register Office Index and New South Wales BMD Index (to name but two, and this is how they are titled), I use Method 2 as I do not intend to include an image of the entry from the original document.

Where I wish to include an image of the document associated with the Fact, I use Method 1 and then include a separate small part of the original document image with the Source Record, such as just the household from a particular census or the specific entry from the National Probate Calendar.

As most document pages are very large, where not necessary I do not include the full page of the document with the Source. This is done manually rather than using Ancestral Sources, but for good reason. I also create a link to the original full document image and attach it to the Fact itself so I can easily see from FH which documents I have for a specific individual. This isn't really something that can be done easily with Ancestral Sources because it allows for one or other Method but not both.

As I make extensive use of the Notes section for each Fact, even if I created the new Facts in AS, I would still have to go back into FH to edit each Fact so its just as easy to create the Fact manually in FH, link the document image to the Fact and create the Source Record. I appreciate you can include a "Text from Source" in both Sources and Source Citations, but I prefer to use a narrative than just the bare details and prefer to see it in the body of the report and not just within the source section. Where more than one individual is associated with the particular Fact, I simply click copy Fact and paste to the other individuals and edit the Note section in the Fact to reflect who it is attached to.

I also use Census Family Facts for couples where they are resident together on a particular Census, mainly to avoid duplication of the Note section in Narrative Reports. Obviously AS doesn't allow for Census Family Facts to be created, so to use AS to enter the Facts would mean subsequently having to return to FH anyway and create a separate Family Fact for a couple and then delete the one created in AS.

I agree AS is very useful for creating new Facts, but for me I find it just as easy to create them manually in FH but that is really down to how I use FH. Everyone has their own way of working. I also have a considerable number of Facts, such as BMD or CMB, Wills, and Probates, which need sources creating for them and links to document images. This being something I've not bothered to do until now as previous software I used didn't allow for the facility and, with over 17 years of researching, I have already a considerable amount of data already entered in the "Tree".

[Bill48]

Thanks for the kind responses. I am glad my issue is of some interest.
Adrian, in writing: " if you had to alter the details of a "citation" for some reason - how easily can you find the text, and how many copies of that text do you have to alter (one per "fact")? " Could I ask you for some illustrative examples please of this issue arising?
I have old LDS records whose web reference has changed more than once. But the source being cited of course has always remained the same. So the source type has always been the same, just the citation details have been modified.

[AdrianBruce]

... Adrian, in writing: " if you had to alter the details of a "citation" for some reason - how easily can you find the text, and how many copies of that text do you have to alter (one per "fact")? " Could I ask you for some illustrative examples please of this issue arising? ...

There will be different ways of dealing with these things but some instances could be:

- On several occasions I have replaced a secondary source with a primary version of it. For instance, an IGI reference might be replaced with an image of the actual parish register. One method would be to create a new source record entirely. While this is easy, I get worried that there remains no record of what I knew when. Replacing the contents of the source-record preserves the record-number and thus reminds me that I really did "know" the relevant facts earlier than a new source-record-number might imply. (Having said that, I am not sure if this applies if you use high-level sources, Method 2 style.)

- I am careful to write an explanation in the notes for a source-record about how and why I know that this "Thomas Purcell" really is my "Thomas Purcell" (and not his cousin, say) - a proof-statement, if you like. On several occasions, I have had to go and revise that proof-statement. I might need to deal with a sudden concern that the proof wasn't valid (e.g. "Ooops - he really was an undertaker as well as a cabinet maker") or I might discover that someone described as a visitor in the census turns out to be his sister, so I want to extend the proof-statement to include her, because it's important to understand the two people together.

- There are times when I realise that my citation data is plain inadequate - what I thought was a primary source of data turns out to be a second generation copy with a different author perhaps (this seems to happen very much with my excursions into American vital records - what I think is a source of marriage data made contemporary with the event turns out to be an extract only, made annually - or even years later!). Or I might find out that the key data I quoted wasn't as unique as I thought it was - e.g. I need the sub-district and well as the district.

It was important for me that I ran through those scenarios in my mind and tried to understand what I might do with this particular software - when I did, I came to the conclusion that for the most part it would be safer to go for Method 1, one source-record per detailed thing. Different people will come to different conclusions. Even I'm not 100% consistent - I have one source record for an edition of a city directory - absolutely not one per line of entry!

[Bill48]

As advised, I have been clicking around on Forum postings and Knowledge Base articles for recording census sources and I have the impression that I am not alone in getting a spinning head.
In theory, I "think" I like the concept of recording a complete "household" census from its original contents. But then, others disagree. I "think" that I might be prepared to expand my List of Sources to include each census event (by which I mean for example "Census 1911 Ireland", "Census 1901 Ireland", "Census 1890 Ohio USA", etc., etc. But inherently I'd instead prefer the one "type of source" in that list. The source is a Census. The source is a Newspaper. The source is a Death Certificate. The details, perhaps even a prominent sub-heading of which census, go under that in as much detail as is provided.
Are any FH users employing a similar regime?
However, be that as it may, I feel a need for more option tutorials than provided so far by Ancestral Sources (the name of which, by the way, I thought was relic from the Church of LDS).
I know that TMG people coming across to FH are needing to re-jig these sorts of recordings. And in the majority of cases, these new FH users, like me, will not be looking to make new census entries (for example) but adjusting existing census recordings. So, showing tutorials of how to enter a census record (for example) is a different requirement to modifying or homologating migrated records. New users are not "adding a fact".
And now, it seems, FH may have a large influx of FTM users within the next few years needing to make their records conform.
I appreciate that almost all of you reading this are passionate volunteers. But by the very nature of that, you are experienced FH users not facing the predicament of new users who know their genealogy (often very well) but are having difficulty adapting to new regimes in FH that can confront us as strictures. New users from other programs and FH need to be adaptable.

[tatewise]

Possibly, any perceived disagreement about whether to use Method 1 or Method 2, is because different users record different details for different types of Sources. It is perfectly reasonable to use both methods side by side for different forms of Source record Citation.

However, most users appear to agree that the main criteria for deciding between Method 1 and Method 2 is whether or not the Citation needs a Text From Source transcript or a Media image of a specific document.

If they are needed, then Method 1 is simpler, because they are easily entered once in the Source record.
(Otherwise with Method 2 they must be repeated in every Citation of a specific document.)

If they are not needed, then Method 2 is much simpler.

What I cannot find anywhere in your postings is where in the FH Source Citation structure you record the document transcript and image for the multiple Event Citations of say a Census Household, which could include not only a Census Event for each Individual, but also multiple Occupation and Birth Events too.

BTW: Users have employed Ancestral Sources when giving their database a major overhaul, because it can be used to replace existing Citations with new ones for existing Facts. So AS is not just for creating brand new Source Citations and Facts.