* Multiple Sources on one page

[Little.auk]

One question on sources - I have an instance where I have two baptisms on the same media source (Parish Record) - One is for Tamar Smith (aged 17), and the other is for her niece Eveline Smith (aged 14), who is the illegitimate daughter of Tamar's sister Rebecca.

I am not sure whether I should treat each entry as a separate source, or whether it is better to treat the media page as the source and create the Source citation for Tamar and then add a citation to it for Eveline.

[ Mike Tate says: This topic was extracted from the AS Custom ID (20591) thread. ]

[tatewise]

Peter, you need to make a policy decision about how you handle such sources.

The same situation can arise with Census records where two households related to your tree are on one page.
The converse is where one household spans two Census pages.

Policy 1: Treat each household, baptism, marriage, etc, as one source entry regardless of other entries on the same page.
This can result in the same Media image appearing in more than one Source Citation, although the Details Frame can focus in on the specific household entry applicable to each specific Source Citation.
When one household (or whatever) spans pages, only one Source Citation is used, but two Media images are needed.

Policy 2: Treat each physical page as one source, however many related households, baptisms, etc, it may hold.
This can lead to quite distant relative's facts sharing the same Source Citation.
It also can lead to one household being split between two Source Citations for adjacent pages.

[NickWalker]

I wouldn't recommend Mike's Policy 2 as it just splits up a household unnecessarily.

Personally I wouldn't worry too much about storing the same image twice for the different individuals. You could link back to the same image (AS allows you to link to an existing image) but then the multimedia record may not have a suitable name and so you'll end up faffing about renaming the multimedia record and perhaps the file too. In scheme of things a few duplicate images makes little difference - storage is so cheap nowadays.

[ChrisRead]

I've used what Nick refers to as Policy 1 for baptisms, burials and census entries. Particularly since FH7/AS7 and using Rich Text to give a decent looking tabular output for the "Text from Source" (I re-did a lot of Source records at that time for this reason, and did some RT templates for AS). It avoids duplicate image files & Media records, while having the just pertinent information readily readable in the Source record(s).

I've had a year off from the genealogy waiting for all the 1921 census stuff to sort itself out (nod to Nick & AS) and to see if FMP per 1921 item access cost will reduce after a year or so as I have quite a few potential entries to do. Then I'll get the bug again and trace/record all the 1921 entries.

[davidf]

Personally I wouldn't worry too much about storing the same image twice for the different individuals. You could link back to the same image (AS allows you to link to an existing image) but then the multimedia record may not have a suitable name and so you'll end up faffing about renaming the multimedia record and perhaps the file too. In scheme of things a few duplicate images makes little difference - storage is so cheap nowadays.

Can't you (at least in FH - even if As does not "play nicely") have multiple multimedia records (which are really just glorified indices taking up negligible disk space) for a single image? That way you can have meaningful multimedia record titles (for, for instance, multiple households on a single census page - one multimedia record per household), but only a single image - no need to duplicate the image?

When I capture an image it is almost immediately associated with a multimedia record, so the file name ceases to be of any importance - I access the image via the multimedia record(s). I tend to leave the file name with the one given on download if it has some uniqueness (e.g. from FMP or Ancestry). Then if I try to download an image a second time (because say I have become interested in a second household on a census page), I get the operating system warning that the "file exists" - which prompts me to find the existing image.

[NickWalker]

Can't you (at least in FH - even if As does not "play nicely") have multiple multimedia records (which are really just glorified indices taking up negligible disk space) for a single image? That way you can have meaningful multimedia record titles (for, for instance, multiple households on a single census page - one multimedia record per household), but only a single image - no need to duplicate the image?

Yes I guess you could do that. I think most users would probably assume that a multimedia record refers to one file (and vice-versa) and personally I'd find the concept of multiple multimedia records pointing to one physical file a bit confusing, but horses-for-courses. And as you suggest, AS couldn't cope with that (but just to avoid confusing anyone else reading, it can cope with having multiple sources pointing at one multimedia record).

Cheers

Nick

[KFN]

When it come to source and source_citation and images associated with them I see these in a very specific way.

The source is the book, census, bound collection of pages, microfilm, etc. the only images I associate with this record is the cover, title page, and other similar pages that describe the source. If the source is a single page such as a letter or an unbound document I would associate no images with the source record.

The source_citation would contain images of the information associated with the fact that I am asserting, if the information is hard to identify I may highlight the line in the text and/or write the text out in the citation text. This may lead to multiple images of the same page if I highlight a passage.

If an citation entry in a book spans multiple pages, or the page format is too wide to fit reasonably in a single image I don’t have a problem creating a multi-page image using pdf.

I also don’t name my images using words that correspond to the contents of the image, for example “John Doe - Birth Certificate”. I generate a random and unique file name for images I don’t physically own and for images of items I physically own I create an accession number. I use file attributes (jpg EXIF, and PDF keys) as well as a database cataloging tool to manage my images, rather than descriptive file names and folder hierarchical concepts. I have a physical filing system that also keys off the accession number for images I own.

The accession number, is used in several places as Custom IDs for images, individuals and sources in my database.