There is a huge problem with the Source Box
If you use it to add a source to multiple people in the tree, every time you edit that source for one of those multiple people, it puts the same edit on all of those people -- even if you add an Event Date. You should be able to edit a source on one person's page without it putting the same edit on anybody else's page just like you can if the source is NOT added through the Source Box. I have known this to be a problem for a long time. But I was recently helping someone who was changing the title each time she added the source in the Source Box to a new person -- ex. Birth Record for Mary Jones in _______ Parish Record, 1800-1850. So it changed the source title for everyone it was attached to to Birth Record for Mary Jones in _______ Parish Record, 1800-1850, no matter whose page it was on. In this case, it was siblings or cousins, so then what happened was because there were sources for Mary Jones on Abigail Matthews page, possible duplicates were showing up on Abigail Matthews page for Mary Jones! And we all know there are people who just merge all Possible Duplicates just because they are there. This is a huge problem. I was aware of it a long time ago, so I quite using the Source Box to attach sources. Instead I reattach it over and over manually as many times as necessary.
Before anyone assumes I don't know how to attach sources, try it. Add a source to your source box, attach it to a second person and edit the Event Date for that second person in his/her sources. Then go back to the first person you attached it to, or ALL the people you attached it to and you will see -- they all have the same Event Date. Which is fine if it's a birth record you are attaching to the child, father and mother. But when you find a page like this which has lots of births in my family, I could not add an Event Date to one without it putting the same Event Date on all of them.
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The trouble is, this is the basic design and intent of the source box, to allow us to add one identical source to multiple people. I doubt this will ever be changed.
If you want to have different sources attached to each individual then you need to create and attach a different source. To do this, when you go into the source box, instead of simply clicking Attach, click on the title of the source to open the expanded view of it, then click copy, then in the new source that is created click Edit, make changes as appropriate and save and then attach it to the person you want this specific source on.
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Dale
Belatedly ...
FYI
Please be aware that, the "State" of ANY "Source", that one "Saves", to one's "Source Box", is a "Snapshot", of WHAT that particular "Source" was like, WHEN one "Saved" that particular "Source" to one's "Source Box"; and, of course, if one also attached that particular "Source" to, an Individual/Person; or, Relationship (ie. Couple; and/or, Parent-Child).
IF, one makes "Changes", to ANY of the 'Content", of that particular "Source" in one's "Source Box"; THEN, those "Changes" are NOT reflected to the PRICNCIPLE "Source" in 'FamilySearch', those "Changes" are ONLY reflected in, the "Source" in one's "Source Box"; plus, if that particular "Source" is also attached to, an Individual/Person; or, Relationship (ie. Couple; and/or, Parent-Child).
IF, one makes "Changes", to ANY of the 'Content", of that particular "Source"; THEN, those EXACT "Changes" will appear on that particular "Source", regardless to WHERE it is attached, if in MULTIPLE locations [ie. "Source Box"; an Individual/Person; or, Relationship (ie. Couple; and/or, Parent-Child]; as, a "Source" CAN be attached to MULTIPLE locations.
Therefore ...
In the case that you refer ...
IF, a "Source" references MULTIPLE individuals/persons (as above); and, you want to 'Reference' some or all of those individuals/persons separately (eg. as in the 'Title"); and, attach separately to each individual/person, rather than the SAME "Source" 'As One' to all; THEN, it is NO GOOD "Saving", such a "Source" that one found against ONE particular individual/person, in one's "Source Box"; and, attaching it from there - you NEED to find that SAME "Source" against EACH individual/person in turn; and, attached them separately. One can still "Save" each of them, to one's "Source Box"; but, they will ALL be separate and distinct from each other.
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Such is NOT about to "Change" ...
And. such should NOT "Change" ...
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Been there, done that ...
I found that out a long time ago ...
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Brett
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I am one of the patrons that Sis. Hein has been helping. This problem would be alleviated if there were better instructions with Source Box. First of all, when a person creates a source, there are no instructions, just a form that tells you to fill out information in various places. Of course, these might be different for each person. There is nothing to tell you how to edit it if you want to add different information for another person also using the same source. In an attempt to change all the wrong sources attached to my names, I got rid of all the sources in my source box. Then I detached all the wrong sources that were attached to my names and re-wrote all the sources that were wrong. I never touched the Source Box. I thought that this would eliminate sources for the different people showing up on my names. It didn't. The sources which I had just made for that person were gone and other people's sources were there. Does anyone know how I can fix this tangled mess?
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Hopefully, my problems with sources will soon be fixed. Sis Hein showed me a new way of creating sources from microfilm images on FamilySearch that I didn't know about. I started doing family history years ago and didn't know about this new easier way. The fog has lifted. I am so grateful for these helpful, knowledgeable, and patient missionaries.
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Brett, thank you for your explanation, but I get all that. So my point is, because that's the way the source box works, it's useless. Once you have saved the source to the person it's for (or maybe the few people it's for and the date is the same for all of those people), which is what we should do anyway, then it doesn't need to be in the source box. We can't use it again. Not if we want to put the date for that new birth record or whatever it is, because then it will also change the date on the source we originally attached when we added the source to the source box. I can see no value at all to the source box other than maybe to help us remember -- oh, there is a book that has a lot of my family in it. But certainly not to ever attach that book source through the source box! No, no, no. And I don't think FamilySearch makes that known well enough. And then some people, like Barbara Hansen, didn't notice how it REALLY works and attached tons of sources to her ancestors using the source box and couldn't figure out why there were so many edits to every source on every one of her ancestors' pages. Even if they put a popup when you start to attach a source from the source box. Something like, "If you edit this source at all after attaching it to another person, such as adding an Event Date, it is going to change that information on this source for everyone else you already attached it to."
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If I may suggest, the solution to this problem is not to allow you to change source details on an individual basis. Having the ability to update a source once and have that update all profiles that are related to that source, is an excellent time saving advantage.
If I fix up incorrect details on an electoral record that holds details for an entire family, one change to the source fixes everyone.
In your example, the source should be named something like "St. Peter's Parish Records, 1800-1850", and have no event date, because your source is not an event, it's a list of events. The source should not be named after a specific record within the source.
However the problem you raised is still a valid one, and one that should be solved.
So I suggest a better solution would be for FamilySearch to allow us more controls over single-record and multi-record sources. Much like their indexing system, they should allow us to index our own multi-record sources.
Then, you could apply event dates to each record of your Parish Register, and tag specific records to specific individuals.
In this way, we retain the excellent advantages of keeping sources and people as very distinct entities, but also gain what you're looking for. Person specific event dates.
I think this solution would keep everyone happy.
In summary: FamilySearch should allow us to index our own sources, and tag individual records to events.
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El Dubs, I like your idea! I don't understand how it would work, but I sure do appreciate that someone understands the problem I am talking about. And until they can come up with a solution, I would like to see them put a popup in some logical place that a user would see as soon as they attempt to edit a source they attached from their source box. OR.... as soon as they add a source to their source box. Something like if you attach this source to anyone else in your tree and add an event date or any notes at that time, it will change the event date and notes to the same thing for every other individual you have previously attached it to.
I agree it's a great time-saver when attaching indexed sources or even sources we attach by going through a microfilm on our own and then clicking Attach to Family Tree when we find a specific birth record or whatever. But when you attach a source either of those two ways, you are attaching one entry on one page of a record. But usually Add to Source Box is automatically checked when attaching an indexed record. It makes no sense to me why that box is checked by default. You've already attached it to everyone it can ever be attached to, so it serves no purpose whatsoever to put it in your Source Box --- other than to make it too crowded and more difficult to use.
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I didn't read all the replies, because I'm anxious to point out that this is by far the BEST feature of FS's sourcing mechanisms. The propagation of changes to every instance of the source citation makes life much, much easier. It is very definitely a FEATURE, and not a bug in any way, shape, or form.
You can "disconnect" a citation by using the "copy to source box" button; this will change the title to "Copy of ...", and changes to any of the original instances will not be reflected in any instances of the copy.
What I really want is the inverse of that "copy" button: I'd like a means of deliberately connecting to existing source citations so that edits to one instance are reflected on all of the of other instances. Right now, if you forgot to save it to your source box, or someone else made the citation, then you either have to make do with a disconnected instance (using the aforementioned "copy to source box" button), or you have to re-do all of the citations on all of the affected profiles. On a funeral notice with a lengthy list of relatives, this is a truly daunting task.
Getting further into "wishful thinking" territory, I would really like for the Notes field on a group of index citations to propagate to the entire group. For example, an indexed marriage is typically six index entries, which means that currently, a transcription of the full document has to be added individually to six different citations in six different profiles' source lists. If the Notes field propagated to all six index entries in the group, I'd only have to add the transcription once.
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If I am understanding this part of your comment correctly,
"Getting further into "wishful thinking" territory, I would really like for the Notes field on a group of index citations to propagate to the entire group. For example, an indexed marriage is typically six index entries, which means that currently, a transcription of the full document has to be added individually to six different citations in six different profiles' source lists. If the Notes field propagated to all six index entries in the group, I'd only have to add the transcription once."
Did you realize the system will do that for those times you find the indexed transcription by clicking FamilySearch under Search Records on the person page? In those instances it works the same as Record Hints. You get the Source Linker to pop up when you click Attach to Family Tree.
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@DaleLinda, what Source Linker attaches is not a transcription. It attaches the indexed data, which is generally only a fraction of the information available from the image.
Here's an example of an index record attached by Source Linker:
Vilma Serena Theresia Kossuth
Hungary, Catholic Church Records, 1636-1895
Name: Vilma Serena Theresia Kossuth
Event Type: Baptism
Event Date: 13 May 1843
Event Place: Belvárosi, Budapest, Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kis-Kun, Hungary
Father's Name: Lajos Kossuth
Mother's Name: Theresia Meszlenyi
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And here's a transcription of the record that was indexed:
1843
Május 13a.
Vilma Serena Theresia, törvényes
T. Kossúth Lajos Ur, A. vall., Meszlényi Theresia R.K.
tábla biro
T. Kiss Károly Ur t. biró, és Lászlóné született Szüts Jozefa Asszony
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The transcription adds the child's legitimacy, the religions of the parents, the father's occupation, and the names of the godparents. The religions and occupation in particular should be in the source citation attached to the parents, but currently the only way to get it there is to individually edit the citation attached to each profile. That's "only" three times for a baptism like this, but it all gets highly tedious and time-consuming and it's incredibly easy to miss one, especially when a family has eight or ten children.
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The kind of source I most often put in a Source Box is a family genealogy book. A book running many hundreds of pages has the potential to be attached to tens of thousands of PIDs and I wish I could customize the source title to add relevant page numbers.
A book has a publication date, so generally that is what I use as the date when attaching the source, even though the book may mention birth, marriage, and death dates. One book I use as a source goes back to the early 1600's but its date is 1949.
I also wish such books were in FamilySearch historical records, with every name indexed. But at the same time I am ambivalent because while much of an historical family genealogy may be accurate, there can be patches of faux genealogy.
Given how it works, I sometimes think Source Box should be named Historical Record Box. As implemented in FamilySearch, historical record and source are not synonyms. Sources in a Source Box do not behave like other sources.
Upvoting.
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Could we get bespoke indexing? That would be awesome!
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There are over a hundred genealogy books that are having every name indexes made. They are found among the Community Tree section of Genealogies along with other projects. You can see the full list here: https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Community_Trees_Project
They should not be under historical records as confirmed by your feelings of ambivalence, because they are not historical records. They are compiled genealogies. The ones picked by FamilySearch are usually of high quality, but, as you also stated, can have errors. They need to be checked against the actual historical sources.
I use a lot of Norwegian community histories, known as Bygdebøker. When I use these as sources, I generally take FamilySearch's lead and create a new source for each person. At broadest, I'll create one source for a family. That way I can customize the source title and information for each person or family. Since I have a source template stored, it takes less than a minute longer to attach a unique, better quality source to each person rather than a less informative global source to everyone in the book. For complex situations or where the book has a lot of interesting information, I'll scan the page and include it as part of the source which takes a lot more time but can be very worthwhile to include.
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Alas, Community Trees Project, which I am aware of, does not help me. My situation is that every detail in certain massive genealogy books has already been contributed to tens of thousands of PIDs on Family Tree without sourcing. If the books were indexed as FamilySearch historical records, FT hints would then propagate the source to all the PIDs.
There is no bright line between historical record and compiled genealogy. The line is blurry for at least two reasons, one minor and one major:
- Just like family histories, historical records are not always factual. An example is General Register Office of England and Wales official records fabricated in the 1840's (Park 2003, Copsey 2021).
- Historical records are not always extant. A modern example is testamentary wills proved (probated) in Devon England over 4 centuries that burned in 1942 but genealogical data from the wills survives in a family tree printed in 1886 (Dunsford 2021). Going farther back in time, surviving historical records are increasingly derivative.
Copsey, Peter (2021) Marriage Challenge Update: GRO Index - Are there errors? - Part 2. Journal of One-Name Studies 14(3):7.
Dunsford, Robert (2021) The Value of a Guild Profile. Journal of One-Name Studies 14(3):17.
Park, Peter (2003) Fraudulent registration of births and deaths in the 1840s means fictitious people may be in your records. Journal of One-Name Studies 8(3):6-8.
( Journal of One-Name Studies is published by the Guild of One Name Studies, https://one-name.org)
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Semi-random thoughts.
There is definitely a similarity between conclusions entered in Family Tree based on a published genealogy, without attribution, and profiles imported into Family Tree based on old indexes, without attribution. I deal daily with the mess created by the latter; it's at the point where I prefer dealing with unindexed Lutherans, and dread it when they enter into mixed marriages and I have to deal with Catholics and their little baptism-based tryptichs floating like little thorns in the tree. Yes, the system does generally find the corresponding index entry and offers it up as a source hint, but this is a lot less useful than you'd think, because it practically enshrines the errors in the index, and because the resulting citations are unconnected: adding a transcription or translation in the Notes field on the child does bubkus to the citations on the parents' profiles. (Peripherally-related pet peeve: when merging such families, could we please get an option to merge the parents in the same step, seeing as how nobody has two sets of biological parents?)
I haven't dealt with citing an entire book as a genealogical source, so I don't have actual experience with this, but I believe the way to do it is to save a general citation in your Source Box, and then use the Copy feature to create "personalized" versions of it for attachment. Edits to the copy will not affect the original, and vice versa. (In other words, FS has tools in place already for disconnecting citations. What it lacks is a way to connect existing citations, or to "continue the chain" with a citation that isn't already in your source box. I need a version of "copy to source box" that doesn't disconnect it.)
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Another thought: for minor individualization of a Source Box-based attachment, the "reason" box can serve admirably. It's one of the very few times when I've been known to actually use it -- I pointed out that the marriage record was being attached to this person because he was one of the witnesses. For a citation of a book, you can put all the generalities (title, author, publication data) in the source itself, and then put the relevant page numbers in the reason box when attaching it to a profile. This will not work on the sort-by date, of course; for that, you're back at using the Copy feature.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi , would you agree with me that a more structured Source Box would help? There could be both ubiquitous content and specific content.
Ubiquitous content would be bibliographic information such as author, book title, publication date, etc.; or repository information: link to a scan of the document in FamilySearch Library, other collections.
Specific content would be such as relevant personal names, page numbers, note providing context for the attachment of the source to certain PIDs.
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Depends on what you mean by "more structured", @dontiknowyou.
One of the things I strongly dislike about both Ancestry's and Geni's sourcing tools is that they try to impose a structure on citations that doesn't make sense to me. For one thing, I think Ancestry uses the word "source" where the rest of the English-speaking world would use the word "collection". And then there's Geni, which offers to "capture a webpage" -- which is inevitably some version of FS's "you're not logged in" error message. (It's no wonder nobody on Geni ever cites a source for anything, anywhere.)
FS's more freeform approach is much easier to parse, for me: there's no question about where my notes belong (unlike on Ancestry, where I never know where to put a translation: under Transcription, or Detail, or Other Information?), the thing I put in the Title field is what will actually show as the (gasp!) title, and there's just the one simple Citation field that can serve equally well for webpages, books, and family papers, depending on what I write in it.
Where the Source Box and FS's sourcing structure in general could use improvement, I think, is clarity. Just looking at a citation in an individual profile's source list, it's impossible to tell whether an edit will show up elsewhere or not; depending on how a source citation is created, some of the fields are (annoyingly) uneditable; and the Source Box is largely un-organizable.
If there were some sort of simple visual clue that "this is one of several instances of this citation", then one would know to click View to see which profiles use that citation (and therefore, which profiles' Sources lists will be affected by an edit). While we're at it, a revamp of the View page would ideally have a means of adding a citation to profiles, instead of just removing it. A Source Linker-style setup would be nice, allowing citations to be attached to every desired profile on one screen, instead of tediously, one by one. Also ideally, the linker page would allow connection or disconnection of citations: if half the siblings are on page 50, and the other half on page 51, it should be possible to create and attach one version of the citation to the first group, and a different version of it to the second group.
I'm not sure how useful your distinction between "ubiquitous" and "specific" would be, for me; I'm afraid that it'd be most of the way to the mess on Ancestry or Geni. I suppose it makes sense to other people, given that millions of people use it daily....
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Delete/Remove Source Box
https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/128037/delete-remove-source-box/p1?new=1
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