I don’t know why (and I don’t think I am alone) but I have an unnatural fear of source citations! I’ve been working on my genealogy for many years but only started using RM about 3 years ago. I want to set a goal to make sure I have all my sources and citations done “correctly”. I have a copy of Evidence Explained and some other books but I can never find a template for some things I’m looking for. This just tends to heighten my frustration. Before I get deeper into the source templates in RM I have a question. Is there a reason to “convert” Ancestry citations to the RM templates and, if so, why? I have tons of data I’ve gotten from Ancestry (and, now, MyHeritage). Should I be concerned about “re-formatting” their sources to the RM format? I’m really interested in the thoughts of those in this group if you will take the time to present them.
I do all my RM data entry by hand, even if it is coming from ancestry. That includes the names and facts, the sources and citations, and the media files. I use TreeShare for WebHints but not to bring data into RM automatically, so my situation is different from yours. I don’t have any citations coming in from ancestry that might need to be converted.
I guess if I was letting data come into RM from ancestry via TreeShare, I would just leave the citations as they were. Otherwise, you almost might as well do your data entry by hand the same way I do.
It’s not quite as automated as TreeShare and ancestry, but most genealogy sites these days will give you a ready made citation that you can just copy and paste into RM or any other genealogy program. The problem is that the ready made citation is already complete and RM expects you to fill in individual fields so that it can construct the citation for you. There is no good place to paste such a completed citation into RM. I think there is sort of a conflict there that I’m not sure how best to resolve.
In my case, I just do everything manually. For example (and taking ancestry out of it), I construct my own citations for Find-a-Grave using an RM template rather than trying to copy the citation provided by Find-a-Grave and trying to paste it into RM. But if I were using TreeShare to bring citations in, I think I would just leave them alone.
I have gone round and round about this and what I was going to attempt to do is keep my “working tree” that is linked to Ancestry and MyHeritage and create a new “final tree” that has all of the source citations done the “right” way. Since I’m 71 I’m not sure I’d get it all done before I pass away and I know that no one else would give a hoot about sources! While I’m posting this, can you tell me which source template would you use for the U.S. Public Records Indexes on Ancestry. I can’t seem to find anything in Evidence Explained or in the RM templates. Would this be a template I’d have to create?
I made my own template for U.S. Public Records indexes, which doesn’t help you very much. I really don’t see a good template to use in RM’s list nor in Evidence Explained. I’m really hoping that somebody else on this forum might have a good suggestion.
There is a Website (with multiple databases) template which screams to be used for this purpose. There is also a slightly customized version. Of this template out on the site that Renee runs, who’s URL I don’t recall.
@thejerrybryan it can help. From the source template list, highlight the relevant source template and select the Export button. Save the Source template ( I think it goes to the report folder as defined in the settings, but you can change the location). You should then be able to upload that file here for use by others(??? not sure about this). They can then use the Import button from the source template list to import that source template into their system.
