Life History Stories in Memories

Ted Duffy

I have over 150 short stories I have discovered from obituaries, newspapers, and other sources which I copied into documents I called Life Sketches and saved them in individual ancestor Memories. I just discovered the "Brief Life History" text box at the bottom of the ancestor's Details page.

Dumb questions - Is there any benefit for copying & pasting the Memories I have saved for each ancestor to their Brief Life History text box on their Details page or is this just duplicating stories? Same story, just in 2 different locations.

AmberML1

@Ted Duffy

Not a dumb question at all! Sounds like you're being thorough.

There is no harm in adding this information in both places. This is one of those personal preference situations.

Personally, I think more people check the "Memories" on an ancestor first. I would want it there first, then the Life Sketch second. However, others might choose the opposite approach.

Cheers!

Ted Duffy

Thanks Amber for your reply. Good thoughts. Happy Holidays.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

FS's tree has included a "brief bio" section for many years. On the previous version of the profile page(s), it was even called the Life Sketch, and defaulted to the top of the page. There was some outcry a couple of years ago when they moved it to the bottom and ran an algorithm that made Notes entries out of Life Sketches that weren't sufficiently biography-like. (There was also a message directing people to the then-new Alert Note feature. The message was there regardless of the contents of the biography, so it, too, perturbed many people.)

I'm sure I'm not the only user of FS who knows about the life sketch feature, but doesn't use it. (As I've said multiple times, my hobby is genealogy, not biography.) Likewise, I'm sure you're not the only user of FS who took a while to become aware of the feature. What I don't know is how these two groups compare in size with the users who like and use the biography box regularly, so I can't advise whether it's worth your effort to copy existing biographies from Memories to the Brief Life History. It certainly doesn't break any rules, though, so if you want to make your biography-writing efforts maximally visible, I say: by all means, go ahead.

Ted Duffy

Julia, thank you for your response and detailed info. I think you have convinced me to just keep my "life sketches" in Memories. No need to duplicate work. I use RootsMagic anyway and the sketches show up there, so any of my descendents will have two places to view the biographies.