Add relationships to SOURCES
For many of the people I am working on, the SOURCES section can get very cluttered and confusing. This is not because they have many PERSONAL sources, but because they have many sources from RELATIONSHIPS. For instance, someone has 5 children and each of those 5 children have birth records, marriage records, death records and obituaries with their parents' names on them. I love connecting these sources to the parents! However, this creates a LOT of sources that are not actually for the PERSON, but for those they have a RELATIONSHIP to. This is why the SOURCES section can get extremely cluttered and confusing.
It would be really nice if there was a way to differentiate Sources that are 1) just for that person, and 2) those where they have a relationship to the primary person.
Thank you!
Adrianne Erickson
Comments
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There is actually supposed to be a way. In sources that are actually for a different person, the title should read "Person A in entry for Person B". (Person A being the person you are on, and person B being the person the record is about.) I have heard that there have been issues with the names lately, though.
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Yep, as Brayden says, the source titles are what's supposed to differentiate between records where the person whose profile you're on is primary versus records where the person is merely mentioned. There is an automated process that generates those source titles based on the indexed information. However, this process has become schizophrenic: it thinks it's following the non-primary-person template, when in fact it is applying the primary-person template to everything.
You can turn off the auto-titler by editing the source title to something that doesn't match either template. For example, you can use "in entry of" instead of "for". Once you've done this, the system will stop trying to apply the schizophrenic process, and you can edit the titles to ones that are useful for telling sources apart.
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I have just been in communication with one of the Community moderators, who has said he will pass this to the engineers for investigation.
As Julia suggests, a secondary problem attached to this issue has been in not even being able to edit the titles ourselves - in order to make it clear to whom / what the source primarily relates. She helpfully provides the way of making the edited titles "stick", as (as she mentions) using the "in entry for" expression in the title meant it was impossible to save the edited version.
I believe only the engineers who made the changes that have caused this issue can properly explain exactly what went wrong - and why they felt the need to make any change when the source titles / attached information were displaying just fine (until the latter part of 2023).
It is of regret that the engineers very rarely feel the need to participate in this Community forum, as they would be able to pick up far more quickly on issues where their changes produce negative outcomes. As things stand, we have to rely on the help of a third party (helpful site moderators) to pass on our complaints, and are only often only aware of any work / changes being made to address a particular issue once the required adjustments have been implemented on the main website.
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