* What's the accepted wisdom on recording copious notes...

[dhj]

I am coming across copious notes relating to a number of my ancestors and was wondering what the accepted wisdom was for recording same ? I had thought of perhaps just linking to pdf's but it doesn't seem very elegant. Cutting/pasting will of course work but again, not as elegant as I would like.

Again, any help would be most appreciated.

[tatewise]

It all rather depends on the nature of the Notes, how copious they are, and how you hope to use them.
The options are much the same as any other documents you discover, but perhaps a bit longer, although Wills and Probate can get quite lengthy.

If you intend to use them as Source documents for Fact Citations then they need to be incorporated into Source records somehow. The options include a linked PDF Media file, multiple linked JPG/PNG Media files for each page of Notes, and a transcript in Text From Source, or Note field, or a linked Note record. You need to consider how they will appear in Reports and how searchable the text needs to be. PDF do not appear in Reports, and JPG/PNG cannot be searched.

Otherwise, perhaps just copy and paste the text into Note records, and link them directly to Individual records.
Whether those linked Notes are include in Reports is often a Report Option.

[dhj]

MIke,
Many thanks for the prompt response. Some good food for thought there. The sort of documents I am alluding to are, notes from Stirnet files, portions of Wikipedia articles and/or sections of large books (for example, a number of pages from the 'History of the Markhams' - a tome way too large to cut/paste). I could of course just paste in the links to the Internet sources but many of the family are not very computer literate and prefer printed books/diagrams etc.

Thanks again

Dave James

[dewilkinson]

Dave,

As Mike says, it depends what they are. For articles, screen shots and other things I want to keep for future reference I store them in the persons folder in the Media folder. When it is relatively short text I store the text in the Notes field for the Citation. As I have over 25,000 people in my database I have a rather large number of such folders, thus I group them in folders containing 1,000 personal folders. The benefit of keeping them in the Media folder is they get included in the Project back ups and if any are linked, the links are preserved upon relocating the Project. What made me start doing this was some old citations refer to Internet sites which are no longer valid, so there is no actual evidence for the citation now.

The way I name these folders is ID then name - see image. For documents like census files and family photographs I only store them once, with shortcuts in the other persons folders.

Untitled.jpg (76.61 KiB) Viewed 4761 times

Hope that helps

[tatewise]

I suggest the Source record refers to the original publication.
That is what the Publication Info and Author fields are for, and a Repository record can also be used.
That can include website addresses where appropriate.
They can also identify the portion of the document that is relevant, and just include transcripts and images for those portions.

It is possible to create a Media link to a web page, that when clicked will open that page.
See the Add Media URL Shortcut Plugin, but note David's comment about obsolescence.

As I said, an important aspect is how they appear in Reports, so you need to experiment with the Reports you want to use, and see how the Report Options affect what is included, especially the Sources tab settings.

[dhj]

David, great idea, I love it. As it happens I keep most of the extra papers/documents and what have you in family name folders seperate to Family Historian anyway. I was trying to amalgamate all of the stuff into Family Historian as I am paranoid about losing data and have numerous data backups all over the place. Dropping my existing structure into the Media sub-directory and linking where appropriate will do the job admirably. As usual, the simplest method is the best (for me anyway) so thanks again.

Mike, thanks again for the prompt response, the pointers are most welcome.

Dave