ORDER OF SOURCES.

LegacyUser

Pamela Joyce Stibbards Wilkinson said: ORDER OF SOURCES.
At present sources can be ordered either chronologically or Custom Order. However, chronological takes priority, and as I originally put mine in custom order, when someone else adds a source in chronological order, all the custom order sources get pushed lower and lower down. Why not make chronological mandatory? I am having to go through my entire database (of over 5000 names) just to put in all the chronological dates! Any sources without a date could be pushed to the bottom.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Citations without dates *are* pushed to the bottom, if you set it to chronological.

What do you mean by "make chronological mandatory"? Do you want to get rid of custom ordering? That'd make some people Really Unhappy....

I haven't used the custom sorting much, but I believe that new citations get added at the top in this setting. The idea is that the system can't know where a new entry belongs in your scheme, so it puts it where it's easy to grab it and drag it to where you want it to be.

Yeah, adding dates to all of your old source citations is a pain. I only do it if I'm looking at someone's source list anyway.

The really annoying part is that attaching new citations using the image browser's "Attach to Family Tree" button hasn't been updated: it offers no means of putting in the date. You have to finish the process, then go to one of the affected profiles and edit the source citation. (Ditto for tagging, which is an even older feature that still hasn't been added to this tool.)

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Pamela,

Prior to the chronological sorting feature, if you moved the sources around in order, it would actually change the order they were saved in the database.

Today, it is still the same. The only difference is that when you enable Chronological viewing, the list is presented on the screen in a chronological list based on the "Event Date" assigned to the source.

NOTE that I have not used the term "Chronological Sort" here. The ambiguous use of the sorting terminology on the web leads one to believe that when you select the "Sort by Chronological" that the system changes the way the items are stored in the Database. This is not true. It only takes the contents of the source list in the database and displays them on your screen in chronological order REGARDLESS of the custom order that they have been stored in the database.

Putting in the chronological dates will have NO effect on the order that the sources are displayed in if the Custom option is enabled.

I always use the custom Option because in really long lists. a chronological display makes it very difficult to find things that you are normally searching for. When I get a notice that someone on my watch list has had a source added to their list, I know that it will show up at the top of the list and will not be in it's appropriate categorical location in the list. I really like this as it makes things easier to find.

When you say that "Any sources without a date could be pushed to the bottom", that ONLY applies when the automatic chronological display of sources is enabled. It does NOT affect the order that they are stored in the database which you can always see be using the "Custom" option.

If you always use the Custom option, then the Source Event Dates are redundant (and just get in the way as far as I'm concerned) and of little value since they do not affect the display order while in the mode.

Also remember that if someone goes and scrambles all of the Event dates on the sources, it will NOT change the order that the sources are displayed in under the Custom option.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Also note that Source Event Dates have a LOT of ambiguity. For example, what event date would you put on a find a grave index record for some memorial? FS puts the death date (which has nothing to do with a burial plot record). I always put the actual burial date if known. Of course, it could also be the date that that the memorial was created (maybe 100 years later).

Or what about a delayed birth type probate record? In 1940 a delayed birth record is created for a person who's birth in 1913 was never recorded. The actual date that the probate record for the birth was created in 1940. That's 27 years AFTER their actual birth, and yet FS marks the "Source Event Date" as 1913 and not 1940. The Source that is being dated didn't even occur for another 27 years.

And what about a source citation to a book that contains births, deaths, and marriages for many different people in a family? Do you use the publisher's date for the book as the "Source Event Date"?

The Source Event Date is the main key for display sorting of the list, and yet the key is ambiguous and at time, schizophrenic. This is just another of many reasons that I don't worry about those date assignments.

This is just my personal opinion, but the main advantage to me for others using the chronological option, is that it keeps them away from the categorical organization that I need for long lists :-)

LegacyUser

Paul said: I would ask the same question as Juli: are you really suggesting there should no longer be an option for custom sorting? If so, I would be totally against the idea. I find it far more important to see the person's death source near the top of the list than way down, beneath every event - including children's births and marriages and even directory / electoral roll entries. For some of my relatives, there are 20 or 30 of the last named sources - I certainly don't want them appearing in the Sources section(s) before the Vitals sources!

To be honest, I can't quite see what your argument is about. For those who like dates against the events the problem lies in the inconsistency in when we have to add a date manually, or whether the date field already has a "FamilySearch" input. (We never have had it properly explained why some indexed sources have dates attached and others don't.)

Also, a good point has already been raised about "what date" should be entered. If my ancestor's will was written ten years before his death, should it appear with that date, the date of his death, or the date probate was granted - which occasionally can be several years after the death.

Regarding your comment, "I am having to go through my entire database (of over 5000 names) just to put in all the chronological dates! " I would be interested in knowing why you find an immediate need to do this. Why not wait until you are working on a particular ID and add the dates then? Surely there is no need to carry out an exercise on around 5,000 IDs if you are not currently working on them?

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I would go absolutely bonkers trying to find things without the the ability to organize the sources by category instead of date. When trying to find information in a list of sources, you are typically looking for a source type in order to find event dates and locations. A list of sources using the chronological ordering is the exact OPPOSITE structure to what you need. A chronologically order list is most effective only when you ALREADY KNOW the date (i.e., the main sort key for the list). This is rarely the case.

Anyone who has had to search for things in very long source lists (e.g., over 40 items) on a regular basis will begin to understand how much more superior a categorical grouping of sources is. Can you imagine a library where all of the books have been organized based on the date they were published? It's no problem if you only have 10-20 books, but with a lot more than that, you'll never be able to browse without then being organized into subject categories.

The problem is that depending on experience, different people have different views on what source categories should look like. As a result FS would not predefine things for automatic sorting in a way that everyone will agree upon. So in order to provide what "appears" to be a fully automatic and low maintenance mechanism, they provided the chronological view option. That option has significant weaknesses but because you don't have to fool around with it much, and it's concept is fairly easy to conceive, it is very popular with many people for short to medium length source lists (even though the sort key is ambiguous at best).

The only reason that *I* "like" the chronological option is that most people will use that, and leave the highly detailed categorical groupings that I have set up under the "Custom" option alone :-)

I would really like it if the view presented under the "custom" option would have all of that clutter and the ambiguous event dates removed from the view as it all makes finding things in long lists very difficult. They do not add ANYTHING to my ability to find the sources I need to view. But I doubt that any of that will happen. That is how it used to be long ago before things were "improved".

Here's a blurb I put up on using the Custom option for supporting categorical ordering of sources:

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...