A better method to re-arrange sources in a person's source list

Gail Clarke Hellings

WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO - I want to do accurate research

I want an easier way to put the sources for a person into an organized list.

Right now it's difficult to "click and drag" them to new positions. They are resistant to moving easily.

A person with 49 sources makes it much harder to get them into a useful order.

THE PURPOSE OF ORGANIZING THE SOURCES IN THE SOURCE LIST

Sources define who a person is. They help prevent us from muddling up people with the same name who could otherwise be mistaken for each other.

I open and read a person's sources whenever I am doing more research, checking facts, writing a Life Sketch, a story etc and am finding it difficult when the sources are not arranged in a useful order.

THE MOST USEFUL WAY TO LIST SOURCES

It's helpful to have vital sources for the person at the top. Such as christening, birth, marriage, death, probate.

Census records for that person should go next and can be arranged in date order.

Any sources for their children (christenings and marriages of) need to be put below those two other categories. Because when all of the sources are mixed together it is difficult to hunt for the ones we want to review again.

SO WHAT IS THE PROBLEM

Currently sources can be arranged according to date, or we can click sort them with our own method.

The date sorting which is automatic when selected as an option, puts children in between census and 2nd Marriages go right down the list to spot they might hardly be seen.

I'd really like to see this problem fixed.

It's critical to proper research because we start our research with what we know, and what we know about the person is what is in their Source Records.

Please help with this.

Alan E. Brown

@Gail Clarke Hellings : You may well be aware of how the custom sorting works, but for anyone who comes across this thread, I'll explain it. In the Sources tab for a person in Family Tree, you can use the Options button to choose to sort by Date or Custom. If you choose to sort by Date, that is your personal choice that will then affect how source lists for every person in Family Tree will be shown to you. Your choice to use Date instead of Custom has no effect on me, and my choice has no effect on you. If I choose Custom, then I can use drag-and-drop to arrange the sources as I see fit. But what I do to rearrange the list will affect everyone else who has also chosen the Custom sort order (and what they do will affect me).

Once the option for sorting dates chronologically was provided many years ago, I personally gave up on arranging sources using the Custom option. For one thing, there quickly came to be far fewer people contributing to organizing the source list order, so I found most source lists to be arranged somewhat chaotically; I didn't have the energy to work on carefully arranging lists for every person I encountered in the Tree. For another, it was not uncommon to discover that other people had significantly different opinions as to what optimal sorting would be, so I either had to live with their opinion, or run the risk of engaging in a battle over sort order, which is not good for anyone. So I prefer the Date option, since it is simpler and benefits more from lots of users adding source dates over time. But I certainly understand that some people might not like that option.

That said, you are welcome to use the Custom sorting option if you find that works better for you. However, it's not clear to me what you want to be improved. The only thing you said on this topic is "Right now it's difficult to "click and drag" them to new positions. They are resistant to moving easily." I have no difficulty dragging and dropping sources when I have Custom selected. Could you please clarify what specific issues you see that make it difficult?

Paul W

@Alan E. Brown

I completely agree with Gail here, although it appears we might be in a minority of two!

I arrange my sources almost exactly as she does and really do find it difficult to place "out of order" sources. I rarely seem to place them correctly at a first attempt: frequently moving, say, an out of place 1861 census source to a position either above the 1851 one, or below the 1871 source!

I have been very surprised more users have not complained about this problem. It seemed a good idea when the former "arrows" option was done away with (some years back), but tedious as that was (click, click,click, until you reached the right spot) at least there was not the current problem I now encounter when I try to drag a source to where I want it to be in the section.

If it's just me (and Gail) I don't see any chance of an enhancement, but - like Gail - I do dread having to rearrange a long list of sources into my preferred, customised order. Oh, and getting one to the top of the page (when the list is long) really is a challenge for me.

Gordon Collett

Here's a third person that also likes Gail's preferred order of sources of personal vital information first, then census records, then children's records. However, the biggest trouble I see with any type of auto-sorting in this type of order is that there is no indication on user created sources as to what they are so there is nothing to sort by. Unless an additional item is added to the source editing box of a dropdown menu where one could specify what type of source it is. Similar to the dropdown menu currently available for Alternate Names where you set what kind of name it is.

That just leaves the custom dragging.

With dragging, there are two issues and there are some device and browser dependent factors.

The first problem is just moving a source when there are more sources than fit on the screen. In Safari the page will not scroll automatically. If I grab a source and drag it to the top of the page, nothing happens. I have to drop the source, still out of place, scroll until that source is at the bottom of the page, grab it again, drag it to the top, drop, scroll, grab, drag, drop, scroll, grab, drag, etc. For a person with 100 source, this can take a long, long time.

Now on days I am feeling particularly co-ordinated and if I am using a mouse, I can hold the mouse with thumb and finger, click with a second finger, drag to the top of the page, use a third finger to get the page to scroll while still having ahold of the source, then drag more. This procedure is impossible when on my laptop with just a trackpad.

However, when I am using Firefox, when I drag a source to the top or bottom of the page there is a one or two pixel wide line that if I get the mouse pointer exactly there, the page starts scrolling. So that browser works much better. It would be nice, however, if I did not have to be so precisely positions to trigger the scrolling.

The solution for this first issue is to fix the programming so auto-scrolling occurs in all browser and to widen the stripe that triggers the auto-scrolling.

Here is a short video illustrating this first issue: https://youtu.be/M4LXEK9wTPU

The second problem is the unpredictability of where a source will drop. Yes, this is a minor annoyance. But the irritation builds up when you drop the source the same place every time and sometimes it goes above the source you are dropping it on and sometimes it goes below that source. If it goes to the wrong spot, you have to grab it and try again.

A solution for this would be having dragging work like dragging a name in the source linker where when you pause, a gap opens and turns yellow to show you exactly where the name is going to be dropped:

Alan E. Brown

I find it pretty easy to drag and drop sources within a screen. I just drop the source I'm dragging onto the one that should immediately follow it, and the dropped source reliably appears right before the one I dropped it on. That much seems straightforward.

But where I have great empathy for those who struggle with organizing longer lists is when I need to drop the source I'm dragging in a place that is off the screen. On other sites that support drag and drop, when I am in the midst of dragging and reach the top or bottom of the screen, the screen starts scrolling. On some sites, using the wheel on my mouse lets me scroll while still dragging (that can be a bit tricky, since I'm not particularly dexterous, but I manage to do it). But the implementation of drag and drop for sources doesn't seem to support either of those options. So that can indeed be frustrating; about all you can do is drop the source near the top or bottom of the screen, scroll, and then grab the source and start dragging again. For long lists you might have to repeat that process multiple times to get the source in the right place.

Gordon Collett

"On other sites that support drag and drop, when I am in the midst of dragging and reach the top or bottom of the screen, the screen starts scrolling."

As stated, this is also browser dependent. FamilySearch does support auto-scrolling on a Mac in Firefox, but not in Safari.

"the dropped source reliably appears right before the one I dropped it on"

Maybe things have improved. I hope so. In the past, this was anything but reliable. And is seemed to vary quite a bit depending on if you were dragging down or dragging up.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Like Alan, once the chronological sorting became available, I stopped using the custom sorting; I can find what I want using the default, so I don't spend time or energy on changing things around.

As an experiment, I went to an ancestor with 36 sources (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/GMYZ-Q1M) and flipped the switch to custom. Yikes. I can find no rhyme or reason to the ordering, and all of the auto-generated titles (which I have also not been spending time or energy on fixing) make it well-nigh impossible to figure out what a source is for.

As a further experiment, I tried moving the WikiTree source down to the bottom. Further yikes: I'm using Firefox (in Windows 10), so yes, the list scrolls, but it's sslllooooowwwww -- and then I got to the end and let go, and nothing happened: the source was still back near the top of the list where it had started. Turns out, you must let go when another source is highlighted with that dotted-line box, else your work was all in vain.

As near as I can tell, whether your item ends up above or below the highlighted source depends on the direction of movement: if it came from above, it ends up below, and if it came from below, it ends up above. I think.

All in all, I'm going back to the default chronological sort. I can tell what the cryptic titles mean that way (because they're paired with the manual sources that I created back before the films got indexed), and I don't need to do anything new/extra for it to work.