Add year to source created when linking an image to Family Tree
I am so grateful that images of births, marriages and deaths are available online in Bukovina and Italy. I have added many family members to Family Tree from these records. I have two suggestions.
- I wish I could add the year of the event while creating this record. Some of the people I have added have 15-20 sources from the births and marriages of children and grandchildren. It is time consuming to go through all these sources and add the year.
- Some of the marriage records give the names of the parents of both bride and groom. It would be nice if I could change the focus person to link both sets of parents to this source. When FT has a hint, I can change the focus person to link to both sets of parents, but not here. As a workaround, I have found that I can add the source to my source box, and then add it to the inlaws of the person I selected to link with. This clutters up my source box.
Comments
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James,
Regarding your 1st comment, if you are attaching index type sources, when you copy the date information across, that should automatically populate the source event date information. However, there are many times where the computer has no idea what date is appropriate (such as with image sources or with censuses where the month and day have not been indexed even though that information may be on the actual images). There are many times where the source event date is totally ambiguous. For example, if you attach the source for a Delayed Birth Record (created in 1944) to a person (who was born in 1920), would the source event date be for the birth or the date the record was created and notarized?
Regarding your 2nd comment, two things:
1) when taking a source through the source box to copy to another PID, remember that this doesn't work as expected when it is an index source. For your marriages example, if you copy the source from the daughter and attach it to the mother, the source for that mother points to the daughter's index data and NOT to the mother's as would be expected. This creates very confusing attachments when viewed through the source linker afterwards. If you have done this you will eventually be forced to undo it (or someone else will). However, all of this is not even necessary because:
2) It is ALWAYS possible (although sometimes unintuitive) to arrange things in the source linker so that they correctly line up and you can attach them all in one session without ever having to copy any sources. For example if you look at the source for the groom in the source linker, it will show the groom, his parents, and the bride in a way that they can attach all 4 of them. After that, in the source linker go to the "Person of Record and Spouse" and then use the "Change" pulldown to select the name of the groom's spouse. That will swap the groom and bride's positions in the linker and will move the brides parents to the top left of the linker where they will be lined up with the bride's parents as recorded in the FSFT at the top right of the linker. The bride's parents can then easily be attached at that point.
Even if the "difficult to attach" person is a sibling-in-law or a niece or nephew, etc. it is still possible to get the source data lined up with the tree data in order to attach the source. This is a bit more complicated, but again, it is possible.
Remember that EVERY line item on the left side of the source linker is a totally different index source and should only attach to one person in the tree. Taking the source for (say) the bride and attaching it to both the bride and her parents will create attachment issues. Although it is possible (and should probably be disabled because of the mistakes it fosters), Index type sources should not be copied through the source linker.
The source linker does NOT allow you to attach a single source to multiple people. It allows you to simultaneously attach multiple related index sources to the corresponding multiple people in the FSFT
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Unindexed sources are the red-headed stepchild on FS: people who work primarily with US and UK data don't even realize they exist, nevermind comprehending the shortcomings of the attachment process that FS provides. The software on the "Attach to Family Tree" button is older, and is therefore missing many needed features.
I concur wholeheartedly that the sort-by year should be addable during the citation creation process, and that the focus person (and thus the range of available immediate relatives) should be adjustable, just as it is in Source Linker.
Another feature of Source Linker that needs to get added to the "Attach to Family Tree" button is tagging: faced with a funeral notice that lists every sibling-in-law and niece and nephew (which normally would be a cause of joy!), the sheer tedium of finding all of those profiles, adding the citation from the Source Box, and tagging the new source to people's names is just ...overwhelming.
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Julia, I agree with everything including the “…overwhelming” issue with things like obituaries. Unfortunately, those types of sources are frequently the ONLY thing that actually documents couple relationships and parent-child relationships. And the fact that they typically have a whole bunch of names can make them even more valuable than census records at times. So as you well know, we MUST deal with them.
An expansion of the source linker to also handling unindexed sources is rather intriguing to me. It would have the side effect of educating folks on the fact that there are both indexed and unindexed sources in the system. Currently when people bring up the source linker for (say) a household in an indexed census, they think that they are linking the same census “source” to all of the family members. They don’t realize that the list of persons down the left side of the source linker window are each distinct and separate sources from each other that were just grouped together as a “household” during the indexed from the original image.
The source linker then just tries to match the focus person source on the left side with some guessed at person and their family on the right side. So all attachments are a single index source to a single person record in the FSFT.
So wouldn’t it be interesting if an unindexed image could be placed on the left and when the one person you were interested in (e.g., the person in the obituary who died) were placed on the right column with the rest of their immediate family there as well. You could then attach the single source on the left to all the appropriate people on the right.
Obviously, they would need to alter the display to mimic how the single unindexed source was attaching to all (e.g., use a different “attached” color from the green currently used for indexed sources). But allowing ALL source types to be attached via the SOURCE linker would make it more consistent, easier to understand, and would automatically reveal that there are really two distinct types of sources here (i.e., indexed and unindexed perhaps represented by the colors of Green and Red, etc.).
Either that or rename the source linker to “Indexed Source Linker” throughout the tool to emphasize that the source linker is ONLY for index type sources
:-)
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