Need way to attach relationship sources that aren't in Source Box
I'm fanatical about documenting what is shown on Family Tree, and am very appreciative of the features that are already in place, but of course I want more.
I've been adding sources to relationships (spousal relationships or parent-child relationships), and this works great for sources that are in my Source Box. In some cases, however, the Source I want to add to the relationship is not in my Source Box, but is already attached to one or more people in the relationship, and there is no way for me to add the source to the relationship. For example, a marriage record might already be attached to the husband and wife as individuals, but it is not added to the relationship between the husband and wife.
I suppose I could take that source, copy it to my source box, and then attach the copy of the source to the relationship. But then when we look at either the original source, or the copy, to see what each source is attached to, we ill only see part of the what the source contains (one source will list the people, and one source will list the relationships)
I envision that there could be another option besides: Add a new Source, Attach from Source Box, and Add New Memory Source. Maybe the new option would be called Attach from Individuals, and it would list all of the sources that appear for any of the individuals involved with the relationship, and the user could attach/detach any of those sources to the relationship. In an ideal world, sources at the top of the list would be the ones that are attached to multiple individuals in the relationship.
Thank you for your consideration.
Comments
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What this really boils down to is that we need an option of "Add to Source Box" instead of or in addition to "Copy to Source Box".
I never bother with sources in the relationship sections (see below), so that's not why I want it. I want it for propagating citations of unindexed images.
Currently, if someone else finds and attaches, say, a funeral notice, but only to some of the people named in it, the only way I can finish the attachments is using "Copy" -- but that breaks the chain: fixing the transcription in the copy doesn't fix it on any of the original's instances, and looking at who the original is attached to doesn't say anything about the copy. If I want it to be a properly-connected set, then it's a half-hour task of tediously adding the copy to everyone, deleting the original from everyone, and then fixing the copy so it doesn't say "copy" any more. And I'll look like a moron for doing it: "why did you replace my perfectly good source with your own version of exactly the same thing? Are you so starved for attention that you want your name on everything?"
(The same half-hour tedium applies to recovering from the error of forgetting the source box checkbox at a crucial moment, but at least that doesn't cause the "why do you want your name on everything?" impression.)
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I am philosophically opposed to separate relationship source sections. Relationships should show every source that the two people have in common, and anything added to a relationship should show on each individual's page. (Yeah, I know that's not how indexed sources are set up, but those should really not need to be separately added to each relationship: they should show up automatically.) Of course, this would require a complete revamp of FS's relationship-editing setup, and of source tagging -- but both of those things are long-neglected aspects of the Tree.
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I think your suggestion is even better than mine. I have run into the same issue with being unable to attach an existing source (in someone else's source box) to additional people, and a "Add to Source Box" feature (rather than Copy to Source Box) would solve that nicely.
I like your suggestion about automatically showing all sources involving more than one person in the relationship. I think that would go a long way to making this process of documenting relationships easier.
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