make Source Box searchable

LegacyUser

tihuszar said: The source box is really cumbersome. I have 4.5 thousand records in my source box, and have no way of searching them. A search field for source-boxed items, plus a column containing date of source being added to the source box would be of great help of finding particular sources within.
Thank you for considering this.

LegacyUser

Juli said: They really should call it your "source shoebox": it's about as well-organized as scraps of paper in a shoebox. I think if you have nearly 5000 sources in it, then you're not using it the way they intended it to be used, as a temporary holding area.

I used to diligently save everything to the source box, but it quickly got unwieldy (as you've discovered), and at one point while searching for a particular marriage, I realized something: I would never need most of these things ever again, because they were already attached to everyone mentioned in the record. Since then, I diligently _uncheck_ the "save to source box" checkbox on everything except marriages and funeral notices. (I save those because the source attachment method on unindexed images always misses one set of parents on a marriage, and can't do the aunts and nephews and other varied relationships on funeral notices, either.)

In fact, I go a step further: once I finish attaching a record to everyone mentioned, I try to remember to go and delete the source citation from my source box. Of course, some of the early stuff is still there, so it's still a bit of a mess, but one of these days....

LegacyUser

tihuszar said: if that is doable for you, that is great!

I found it so often that a witness, a godparent an informer who were just names when a record was first attached later turn out to be distant family members etc, but can't find the source record saved again to attach to them as well.
I constantly struggle to find these records in the source box.

For the marriages, missing half set of parents: if you use the mobile application, that allows you to attach both sets of parents. So often I attach to whom I can on the PC then go to that person in the app, and review attachments, and can add the other set of parents too. bit fiddly, but less annoying, than going back and forth to the source box for everyone.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I agree. The currently source linker (that is the tool we use to attach a historical records source to persons) often does not pull in both sets of parents of a couple in a marriage event record, even though they appear in the tree and in the index. For some reason, I have run into a number of instances, where I have had to note the source, and then make the spouse (where the parents would not show up) the primary person and then use the show all relationships function of the source linker. This is still using the PC, but as you mentioned, it is fiddly (clunky) and should not have to be done.

I'm hoping that the source linker gets a full makeover wherein the full record of the person(s) that exist(s) in the tree is displayed, not just a shortened version. Yes, it will take more time to load, but being able to see all notes, discussions, relatives (including in-laws) and reason statements will go a long way toward making the system more usable.

AZ176

I was reading through the previous comments, and I agree it would be great if the source box had search or sorting capabilities. Source boxes can get pretty large, and it is hard to find something you previously filed there. Yes, folders are helpful, but being able to search by year or by name would be better.