Is it possible to attach sources directly to individual notes? For example, if I have a note to a name that explains a discrepancy (e.g., an error in a specific record, a variant spelling, or another source-specific issue) and I want to cite one or more sources as evidence (e.g., in footnotes), can that be done, and if so, how?
Rather than already having created a Person (general) Note that explains and THEN sourcing that Note, RM offers Source Option>Source Settings>Citation Type/Actual Text/Comments> where Footnotes/Endnotes can include Research Notes and Comments.
Apologies! I should have been more specific. I meant Fact Notes rather than Personal Notes. So in my example above, could I have source(s) as part of some particular point that I am making in the Fact Note for Primary Name? And there might well be more than one source involved in a Fact Note.
Here is a fictional example of what I mean for a Fact Note for a Primary Name:
“John Ronald Smith was typically known “Ron” before the age of 10,^1 but most often “John” afterwards.^2”
There would be two footnotes to two different citations giving examples of this.
Based on what you are saying, that does not seem to be possible.
There isn’t an option to embed a footnote inside of a note. Personal Historian has that option but not RootsMagic. You would have to manually add a citation inside the note. Otherwise, citations come at the end of the note
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In your particular use case, you might consider adding an Alternate Name fact and linking your citation to the Alternate Name.
Another thing you might try in some cases is to create a new fact type called Story or Narrative or some such. It’s purpose would be only to contain a note and it doesn’t really matter what you call it. Such facts can have a citation.
A limitation is that in reports the citation superscript goes before the note rather than after, which looks very ugly and unprofessional. I get around this by entering the first part of such a note in the Description field. In reports, the citation superscript then comes after the Description field and before the note.
For such narrative only notes, I do not include [Date] or [Place] in the sentence template, nor do I enter a date or place in the fact itself. But I do enter a sort date for the fact to be sure the note appears in the correct place in reports.
I really wish RM supported a [Note] variable and that the citation superscript would be listed after the note. But such is not the case.
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If you want to see the effect of using facts in RM that are only facts, you can look at the Obituary fact and the Narrative fact for a person at RM data where there is a fact that is only a note This Web page was produced by an app called GedSite rather than by RM, but it’s 100% RM data, transmitted from RM to GedSite via GEDCOM. About 99% of the time I spend working “on GedSite” is actually spent working in RM, prepping the data.
For this person, scroll down to the Obituary fact and to the Narrative fact to see the effect of how the facts work in RM. The first line of each is from the Description field in RM and all the remainder is from the Note field RM. Unlike RM, GedSite places the citation superscript after note rather than before the note as does RM. I have no control over this behavior in either GedSite or RM. It’s just what they do. In any case, since this is a Web page rather than a report printed on paper, you can click on the citation superscript to see the citation.
Thank you! That was very useful to see!
I am more used to “evidence-based” data entry (i.e., the source, not the person, has primacy), rather than “conclusion-based” data entry (i.e., personal facts are entered but already have certain assumptions/conclusions made when entered [e.g., a “birth fact” will have dates and places, but the source being used might only give one and not the other; this cannot be recorded without multiple birth facts, which is naturally not ideal]). In Family Historian 7, I was dealing with this in Fact Notes, where I could cite individual sources and point out the specific data they provide.
However, most software, including RM, are “conclusion-based” so I am having to rethink my workflow and how I enter data. Unfortunately, Family Historian is not so good for DNA and is rarely updated with any new features, so I am trying to come back to RM.
The way that I wish genealogy would deal with this would be that what RM calls a “Birth fact” be treated as two “facts” - a Birth Date fact ad a Birth Place fact. Each could have it’s own citation. Some citations would be for one of the facts, some citations would be for the other of the facts, and some citations would be for both of the facts.
I also would love to see some word other than “fact” be used because the word “fact” suggests a certainty that often is not warranted. However, I have come to realize that it’s curiously difficult to come up with a satisfactory alternative, at least in English. There might be a more suitable alternative in some other languages. In English, something like “assertion” comes closer to what is needed, but somehow or other, terms like “birth assertion” and “death assertion” don’t really roll off the tongue very well.