Citation links for portraits
I work with museums to digitize their collections. One collection is a series of newspaper photographs that are all well documented, so I thought I'd try to connect them with descendants over FamilySearch.
Here's an example: George Henry Burdick From NYHeritage — FamilySearch.org
I ended up putting the link in a clumsy place (Description) because there was no other appropriate place for it. It's not that I need to drive traffic to nyheritage.org, because that's not why I'm doing this work, but because I end up getting messages over FamilySearch from descendants who say "I can tell this is a cropped photo; where's the rest of it?" or "do you have more like this?"
The trouble is, I still get those questions, even as I tried to make it clear that they can see as much information as the historical society has over at that link. Plus, it bothers me that I'm putting a link in the Description field because clearly that's not right.
So I humbly suggest you add some kind of field for external links or citations, for situations like this where historical collection stewards might want to proactively share their material with genealogists. Or - maybe there is such a place and I'm doing this all wrong, in which case, please correct me!
Comments
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I think there is a great - if not better - solution already in place. Create a memory and then create a memory source. To see an example, go to one of my ancestors, Samuel Handley McClure LHGL-984. In his memories you will see a clipping named "S. H. McClure's store in Bruceville ..."
Then go to sources and see the memory source dated 1841. It has the web link you are asking for and much more. One of the draw backs of using web links is that they change. In fact, while gathering my info for this post, I noticed the web link in the source no longer worked so I had to go get the current one. Thus, source was created Aug 30, 2021, but was modified today.
BUT, the reason I think this is a better solution than what you are asking for is the amount of information you can add about the link. "Where the Record is Found" contains information about the web site. "Describe the Record" contains my interpretation of what the clipping implies about my ancestor.
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One of the draw backs of using web links is that they change. In fact, while gathering my info for this post, I noticed the web link in the source no longer worked so I had to go get the current one
If you want to use a web link as a reference, you can nearly always/often save it in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine https://archive.org/web/web.php#forum. This is especially useful for websites which subsequently "die", as you can then access the webpage using the archived link.
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