Allow new attachments for existing sources

Richard Otter

This is already easy to do if the source is on the SourceBox. However, there are times when a source is located already attached to a person and one wishes to attach it to an additional person.

The source may have been created by another user.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

This goes back to FamilySearch's completely-backwards treatment of index versus source citation: because indexes are machine-parsable, while images are not, they've made the pointers the primary "sources" and the actual sources that they point to into a secondary or even tertiary consideration. That is, if an image has index entries associated with it, you cannot cite the image without workarounds.

One effect of this backwards thinking is that "normal" citations (which refer to a register entry or similar document entity) are sort of shoved into the corners and edges of the FamilySearch tree-sprawl. For example, if you find a citation that you want to re-use, but don't have it in your source box (because you forgot the dratted checkbox, or it was too long ago, or a cousin created it, or ...), then you have to create a copy of it, and any uses of that copy will not be connected to the original. If you want to cite a funeral notice in such a way that fixing the transcription in any instance of the citation will fix it in all instances (the desired setup, in my world), then you have to either do it all at once (i.e., remember the source box checkbox, and then attach it to everyone before it gets lost in said source box), or you have to re-do any previous work of attaching it (and then remove the redundancies).

I've been wishing and asking for a means of attaching such existing citations to further profiles, but nobody at FS has made any response, and other users of the various forums seldom even understand what the heck I'm talking about, because they've internalized FS's upside-down-and-backwards approach.

JeffWiseman

Richard, you may be aware of all this , but if not…

Your text seems to imply that you are talking about about citations attached to a person record that references sources that are *NOT* in index files. I.e., they reference image files--Pictures, Censuses, obituaries, or the like. If that is the case, then what you want to do is possible but complicated (see Julia's note).

However, it is important to realize that if a Citation attached to a PID source list is referencing a source that *IS* an entry in an index (a category of which MOST of the citations attached to person records will fall into), in general you should NOT be reusing that citation anywhere else. If you do, you will make the source linker go wonky and your source list will NOT behave in a predictable fashion. A citation to a source that is in an index file only refers to ONE specific person (i.e., the person that was indexed out of some other source such as a census page). It should ONLY be attached to that ONE specific person's record in the FSFT.

For that reason, in general you wouldn't need to ever copying a citation to an Index file into your source box either.

For example, let's say you have a citation attached to a man's person record that references the index data from an image of his US WW I Draft Card. Let's also say that his wife is included on that card along with her residence address but her name has NOT been indexed. I want to use that draft card as a source for the wife's record in FSFT (both to show the relationship of "wife" as well as evidence for her residence at that time).

I can NOT just copy the US WW II draft card source citation from the man's source list and paste it into his wife's source list. That citation only points to data about the man and nothing about the wife. Because you've used a citation meant for only a single person and have attached it to both you could even have the system start telling you that the man and his wife are duplicates needing to be merged.

Instead you would need to go to *PAST* the source holding the index data for the man to the source that it was indexed from (i.e., the archived image of the Draft Card for the man). You would then need to create a new citation that references that card image directly. You would then attach THAT citation to the wife's source list.

Jordi Kloosterboer

Yeah I asked for this some time ago; it would make things so much better.

Right now the best way I go about this is to copy the source to my source box and then add it to all the people in question and detach the original source(s) (nothing is lost except for who originally attached the source and when it was attached).

You could also just copy the source to source box and just add it to another person, but then the source is "disconnected" with the original source, which I do not like; this means any info in the notes does not get updated for all the people in question.

The sources I am referring to are the ones that are made and have notes referring to multiple people.

Like this one:

A link to the image for a URL and the source citation

My notes on the source:

Place: Wesepe

Baptized: 3 May 1767

Father: Derk Klein Weeleman

Child: Jan

So I would attach this to the child and the father. But if someone else created it, they may have only attached it to the child (or only the father etc). So I would copy it and attach to the child and the father and then get rid of their source.

Also it may have been attached to the wrong father or child, so then the source would be added to the correct people instead.

But it would be easier to go to a screen and decide who to add and delete the source attachment to instead like you can with photos in Memories.

Funnily enough I attached this source back in 2018 only to the child lol:

Source View Edit — FamilySearch.org

I can't be bothered to recreate the source and attach to the father too.