Introduction

See Working with Sources and Citations for an explanation of how to use sourcesSource: “where information was found”. This could be anything from an archive in a county records office, a book, or even a relative’s recorded recollection. Citing your Sources helps to show how you reached a particular conclusion about an Individual., and under the animated tutorial below see the Steps Involved in Recording the Details From a Birth Certificate for further advice.

Steps Involved in Recording the Details From a Birth Certificate

Although most of these steps are shown in the animated tutorials above, there are other pieces of information that could be recorded from information on the certificate. All of this assumes that none of the people referred to in the certificate are already in your file.

1. Create a Source for the Birth Certificate, giving the Source a meaningful Title (as explained in the animated tutorial).
2. Optionally type in a transcription of the Birth Certificate into the Text From Source.
3. Link an image to the Source via its MediaWhen you add a picture, video, sound recording, document file etc into a Family Historian project, a Media record is created to represent that media item within the project; the Media record includes a link to the actual Media file. tab (as explained in the animated tutorial).
4. Enable Automatic Source CitationsAutomatic Source Citation is a very powerful tool to ensure you remember to cite Sources for all your conclusions. (as explained in the animated tutorial).
5. Create the person that the Birth Certificate refers to.
6. Choose their Sex as specified on the certificate.
7. Enter the Name of the person.
8. The certificate will probably name the father so create a record for him.
9. Enter the Name of the father if included on the certificate.
10. Create a record for the mother.
11. Enter the Name of the mother.
12. Create a Birth event for the person the certificate refers to. This should include the DateWhen an Event happened, or an Attrribute was true. and PlaceAccording to GEDCOM, a Place should hold “The jurisdictional name of the place where the event took place…”   of birth.
13. Create an OccupationAn occupation is defined in the GEDCOM standard as: ‘The kind of activity that an individual does for a job, profession, or principal activity’. attributeEvents are things that happened to an Individual and Attributes are things that described them. for the father if specified. This should include the Date of the birth and the occupation at that time.
14. The informant is usually the mother or father and so a Residence factFacts are one of the key concepts at the heart of Family Historian; they are how you record the things that happened to, or described, each ancestor (Individual). can be created. This should include the Date the birth was registered and the Place they were recorded as living at that time.
15. Later Birth CertificatesBirth Certificates are a formal record of the birth of a child, and typically include the date and place of birth together with information about the parents. may also include:
    • Father’s place of birth
    • Mother’s place of birth
    • Father’s home address“The address structure should be formed as it would appear on a mailing label…”, according to GEDCOM; however, this is capable of a number of interpretations, and Address and Place are best considered together.
    • Mother’s home address
    • Mother’s occupation
16. Remember to turn off the Automatic Source CitationsA link between a source and a fact, documenting Where within the source you find information being “cited” to support the fact/conclusion. facility.

It is interesting to note that this one Source can lead to 3 Individual recordsEvery person in your tree will have a single Individual Record, which holds all the information about that individual that you have entered.  You can view and edit Individual records in the Property Box Dialogue. and between six and eleven Facts being created. The great thing about Automatic Source Citations is that all of these entries will be automatically linked back to the certificate Source record.

Updating Information Already in Your File

Very often the people mentioned on the certificate will already be in your database. Where this is true follow steps 1 to 4 above to create the Source and enable Automatic Source Citations. You can then add any new events and update existing ones from the information on the certificate. If you use the  Property BoxThe Property Box is the primary window for data entry and for viewing details of stored records.  It is used with records of all types.  : All Tab, or the Records Window, you can make use of the right click option to Paste Auto Citation to any existing event.

Using Ancestral Sources

Once the process is understood, all the above steps can be performed using Ancestral SourcesAncestral Sources is a utility written by Nick Walker, designed to be used in conjunction with Family Historian to allow faster, more convenient creation of Census, Birth, Baptism, Marriage, Death and Burial/Cremation records.   in a convenient and reliable way.

Ancestral Sources has options for recording the Birth Informant Role, including  ƒh V6 Fact WitnessesA Witness is somebody who played an important role in an event (or rarely, attribute) but were not a Principal, e.g. they could have been a bridesmaid at a wedding, rather than one of the individuals getting married., but see the Witness Facts advice.

A Note on UK Birth Certificates

There are two types of UK Birth Certificate. The long or full certificate, titled ‘CERTIFIED COPY OF AN ENTRY’ is a copy of the original entry in the birth register, giving all the recorded details. The short certificate, titled ‘CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH’, shows the child’s full name, sex, date, and place of birth, but does not give any details of the parents, and was often issued free to parents at the time of registration.