Sorting lists or searching in source box

LegacyUser

Patricio Ungaro said: Please add a way to sort sources in source box by date, or at least to search for words in titles of the sources. When you have many hundreds or thousands of items in source box, it becomes really difficult to find a specific one.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome to the community-powered public feedback forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.

My first question is why do you have "many hundreds or thousands of items" in your source box. The original intent was to use the source box as temporary storage until the source had been attached to all the individuals for which it served as a source.

However, there are many users of FamilySearch FamilyTree who have done the same thing as you have -- used the source box as a repository for sources, which you now need to be able to sort or search.

I believe that FamilySearch has come to the realization that a number of users have not used the source box as originally intended. Since the source box has come up in a number of discussions, some of the requests have had to deal with (besides sorting and search) included setting up a tree structure for the folders. Also were discussions on how to clear sources other than a page at a time.

I have not seen (or remember) if FamilySearch was working on a solution, so it may be that some other user will remember where this issue stood.

By the way, my first question is rhetorical and does not need a response. Hopefully someone from FamilySearch can let us know if something is in the works for the source box.

LegacyUser

Patricio Ungaro said: The reason I keep them is because I often find myself manually attaching old sources from the box to newly discovered profiles. I like to extensively use every piece of information from every document, and often is not immediately obvious what the relation is between witnesses and the main names on document. Very often happens that I discover much later that a witness was a family member that now I have added to the tree, so I want to manually attach the document to the profile of the witness.

But I just had to go through over 30 pages of sources find the one I needed, because last time I used it was 2 months ago.

If the sources are deleted from the box, how do I manually attach an indexed source to someone mentioned in the document, but who was not indexed? I've been looking for an easy option to do this, but can't find it.

LegacyUser

Stewart Millar said: Patricio,
First of all . . . I believe you have fallen into the trap of believing that the "Source Box" is a long-term repository for your sources. The Source Box is intended for storing souces you may be interested in but not yet used and for sources that are not yet fully attached to all possible individuals. Once a source is fully attached to all possible named individuals there is no use for it in the Source Box - it should be removed.

With regard to the specific instance referred to of "witnesses" in a document coming to light as family members at a later time - my solution is to use the FamilySearch approach as used for instance with Baptism records were they create multiple source records - one for the child and one for each of the parents. How this works is as follows:

1. using the original source record created . . . "John Brown & Mary Smith - Marriage Certificate, 1881" . . . from the source list, open this source and use "View" then "Copy to my Source Box".

2. This has now created a completely new source in your Source Box named . . . "Copy of John Brown & Mary Smith - Marriage Certificate, 1881" . . . which I would Edit to change the title to . . . "Witnesses to the marriage of John Brown & Mary Smith, 1881".

3. Now go to the FS record for the witness and under the source list select "Add Source" followed by "Attach from Source Box" - from where you can "Attach" the source to the selected witness.

If there are any further unidentified witnesses you can either store this source in a folder for missing marriage witnesses or remove it from the Source Box as you may never know if any other witnesses are family related - and simply re-create another copy when a relationship is discovered for another witness (my preference).

This works well for Fathers in marriage certificates, Executors and Beneficiaries in a Will, parents in a baptism from a parish record (i.e., not indexed by FamilySearch).

Having made over 17,000 source attachments over the past seven years (who was counting! - according to the new stats!) - I do make extensive use of the source box as outlined above and generally only have less than ten active or potential sources in my source box . . . and I feel in complete control of my sources.