Introduction

Family Historian 7 introduced Research Notes to help you organise and track your genealogical research, while keeping notes about your research separate from notes about the subject of your research. This article explains how to create and access Research Notes, and the customisation options which are available.

Note: Family Historian does not determine the way  you manage your research; it is up to you to decide what suits you best. ‘Out-of-the-box’, the program’s initial configuration gives a good starting point, but – as with everything in Family Historian – the facilities are deliberately flexible enough to accommodate many working methods.

Common Features of Notes (Shared Notes) and Research Notes in FH7

• Both are essentially just text documents, with no predefined content or structure.
• Both use the same new Rich TextRich text can be applied to most long text fields such as Notes and Text From Source, and offers a word-processing style of formatting. Editor.
• Both can be linked to an unlimited number and combination of other records, such as Individuals, Families, Sources, etc.

Differences Between Notes and Research Notes

• Notes are always blank when created, although Autotext can be inserted in the Rich Text editor after creation.  Research Notes can be created directly from an Autotext template.
• Research Notes are omitted from the majority of standard ƒh Reports, which are generally about the subjects of your research, not the research process itself. They are only included in Reports specifically about Research Notes, such as the ‘Research Notes’ report and the ‘Record Details – Research Notes’ report.
• Notes and Research Notes are displayed on separate tabs in the Records Window.

Creating a Research Note

Research Notes are created in a number of ways:

• Select  Add Note from the Notes tab of 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.   of another record (this create a Research Note linked to the record in the Property Box)
  • • • • • • or, Select Add > Research Note from the main ƒh menu
            • or, Right click in blank space in the Research Note tab of the Records Window and select Create Research Note.

All these options present a list of available templates to choose from, plus the option to create an empty note.

Once the initial note is created, you can edit it as normal.

Research Note Templates

Research Notes can have any format you want, but the standard templates (shown below) come with a number of standard labelled text fields. ( Labelled text is text that appears in a single paragraph outside a table, prefixed by (e.g.) “Status: ” (the label). )

The standard labelled fields are: Title, Type (values: Log, Task or Plan), Date, Description, and Status (values: Open or Closed).

The available templates are managed in the same way as any other ƒh7 autotext, via the Tools > Manage Autotext… menu.  The Manage Autotext Window is shown below with the Research options expanded, and these are the available standard templates for new Research Notes.

New Autotext templates can be created for Research Notes in the same way as any other Autotext.

 

Records Window Display

The Notes tab of the Records Window displays five fields by default; Research Notes (the Title, or the text of the note if no title is specified), the Record IdEvery record in Family Historian has a numeric Record ID, which uniquely identifies it within its type of record., the Type, Date and Status fields, the number of Links to other records, and when the Note was last updated. You can filter the display on Title, Type and/or Status.

The image below shows the default Records Window layout for Research Notes, along with one freshly-created example of each pre-defined format. The “Type” of each note is highlighted, and the contents of the Records Window display match the values in the 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.. (If you inspect the column configuration, you will see that the Type column has been pre-configured using the techniques described in Customising the Records Window and the GetLabelledText() function to return text following the ‘Type: ‘ label, and the same technique has been applied for the Date and Status labels.)

The next image shows the same Research Notes with other fields completed, and Date and Status columns follow the same format. You are not restricted to the pre-defined labels, and in these examples we have created a new field called Priority: and tabulated it in the Records Window display.

Note 1: FunctionsA 'function' is an expression which returns values based on computations. Typically, functions require data to be supplied to them as 'parameters'. A function in Family Historian is similar to a 'function' as used in spreadsheet applications (such as MS such as =GetLabelledText() have two significant restrictions when used to define Records Window fields in this way. What follows the label must be normal text. It must not be a hyperlink, and must not be within a table, although formatting such as bold or italic text is permitted.

Note 2: There are no special fields associated with the Research Note, and all data are represented as text (or Rich Text).  As a result, the datesWhen an Event happened, or an Attrribute was true. as written here can only be sorted in alphabetical order, not chronologically. This is not particularly useful, but unfortunately there are no options in the Records Window configuration for a text date to be read as a true date field. One workaround is to store the dates in year-month-day ISO format, for example 2021-03-31 for 31 Mar 2021, as alphabetical and chronological sorting produce exactly the same sequence.

Linking to Other Records

There are two methods of linking a Research Note (or a Note record) to other records:

• • Standard links from another record to a Research Note (using the Add Note command in the property box of the relevant record). These are links that are compliant with the GEDCOMGEDCOM, an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, is a specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software. It is a file format that most genealogical programs and online trees recognise. standard and so identical in structure and behaviour to the links between all other record types.
  • Links from a Research Note to another record, embedded in the body of the note, using the Add Link button within the Note Window. These are links that can only be made between rich text fields (including Notes/Research Notes) and all record types, and are not GEDCOM compliant.

Although both types of link are bi-directional, they are not symmetric, so the two methods are not equivalent. Which you choose has consequences for the visibility of the link, and for the results returned by queriesQuerying is a very powerful feature that allows you to specify and save criteria for identifying a set of records of a given record type. (discussed in more detail shortly).

In general standard links work best for visibility from the Individual’s Property Box, the Research Note Records Window, and Queries.

If it is important to you to see a record link within the note text, you should supplement the standard link with an embedded link. (Tip: to quickly create that embedded link, when adding a new or existing Research Note from the Property Box, click Go To Record to locate the linked record in the Record Window and drag it from the Record Window into the Note).

An embedded link alone may be useful where you want to refer to other records from within the Note but not to include those reference items in the results of queries etc.  For example, you may be researching the marriage an individual; it might be helpful quickly access details of their father within the note, but not to have the note show up if you query for open research tasks for the father.

Querying Research Notes to Create Research Logs

Even when used individually, Research Notes provide a powerful tool for keeping a record of your family history research, but adding standard links extends their power. In the example above, relevant standard links have been created between the Research Notes and other records: Research Note [1], “Scotland’s People searches”, has been linked to that RepositoryA repository is a place (physical or online) where collections of original source data are stored and maintained. record; and Research Note [3], “Things to do regarding Ian Munro”, has been linked to his Individual record.

A number of standard Research Note queries are provided, which will collate notes linked (for example) to a specified Individual, optionally filtered by Type and Status. And of course, you can create your own custom queries, which will be useful if you define extra labelled text fields or remove standard ones (which can cause the standard queries not to work as expected).

Such a simple custom Research Note Query could be used to collate notes by any defined field, such as all open notes sorted in priority order. And as with any other Query, linked records can be included to enable queries such as all Individuals with linked Research Notes, or all Research Notes linked to a given Repository.

 

Portability and Compatibility

Notes are part of the GEDCOM specification and generally very well supported by family history apps.  As a result, they export and import cleanly, with little if any corruption or loss of data.  By contrast, Research Notes are a proprietary feature within ƒh, and are not understood by other apps.  Even if they have a similar feature, such as To-Do lists and Research Log in RootsMagic, the formats are incompatible.

File > Import/Export > Export < GEDCOM File… has the option to exclude them from an export, and the Export Gedcom File plugin will offer to retain them, exclude them or transform them into Shared Notes.

Most of the functionality described in this page could be achieved with standard Note Records.  This would, however, require a lot of detailed customisation, and the Research Planner Plugin addressed this in earlier versions of ƒh.

Having a specific Research Note record type in ƒh7 provides greatly enhanced recording of your research directly within FH, and future pluginsPlugins are small programs that allow new features to be added without upgrading Family Historian itself; some plugins are written by Calico Pie and others are written by users. and program developments are likely to enhance this further.