I’m really pleased that Jill was able to help with a citation example. I understand how you felt as the different family history sites do not make things totally clear. In the past, I have requested examples and they have rarely been forthcoming. I am going to raise this with Roots Magic - Jill’s example was great. Thank you
Thank you so much for your assistance Jill. Your examples speak louder than some online tutoring. Best wishes
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Hi Jill. I’ve been able to access the part of Evidence Explained you referred to. A good while ago I signed up to" archive org". It’s free and useful for my research. I’ve borrowed EE through it - an hour at a time. John
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Here’s an example from a source splitter where everything goes into the Master Source instead of into the citation. That means I had to make my own source templates. I find my source template to be much easier to understand than the RM source templates while retaining all the information essential to finding the original records again. In all honesty, I never really figured out how to do sources with RM until I created my own source templates that I could understand.
I agree with most everything that has been discussed in this thread. I have a copy of Evidence Explained next to my computer and I use it fairly regularly. But it’s over the top. You shouldn’t need a Ph.D. in citations and an 895 page book to be able to do citations.
I’m torn about the question of whether citations are to reflect where I found the record or whether they are to reflect where somebody else could find the record. Those are not always questions with the same answer. My citations are a little bit of both, but I do make note of where and when I personally found the record even that might or might not help future researchers very much to find the same record. When I create printed reports, I don’t try to print images of all the records like census records as a part of the report. When I publish my data to the Web, I do include all the images directly on my Web site and not as links to other Web sites.
My screen capture of a source and citation is using the view from RM’s Slide In Workflow because it shows more information than the standard view. My census source template breaks things down to the census page. The RM source templates break things down to the census family. I wanted a one to one relationship between my census images and my census citations, and you can’t have that if you break things down to the census family because multiple census families may be found on the same census image. You can see that I store census transcriptions in the Research Note and that multiple families in my database are in this same census image. I store the same transcription in the Master Source in the Source Text.
Thanks for your post and source image which I found helpful. It’s great when examples of completed citations are shared. I’ve been researching family for 6 years and have found it somewhat difficult pinning down specific examples. Best wishes from Oxford, UK. - John
I have found this post very helpful. I was intrigued by your format of census transcription. Did you invent this or is it based on a known format? Is it created by some other software maybe? What does TN mean?
TN = Tennessee
I use use U.S. state postal codes in my census transcriptions. The actual census doesn’t use the U.S. state postal codes because they didn’t yet exist for the censuses that are public, but seldom does the actual census spell the state names all the way out. There is usually some sort of abbreviation such as Tenn. for Tennessee or Ala. for Alabama, etc.
My actual census transcriptions look a good deal better than they way they appear in RM. But when I copy and paste them into RM’s Research Notes field, I am unable to maintain proper column alignment. Here is an example of what my transcriptions actually look like when I am able to format them properly. Sample Census Transcriptions
Thanks for sharing. Nice and neat, and I see what you mean - RM spoils it rather. I dabbled with Family Historian for a little while and there is an add on Ancestral Sources which does this via auto text when you enter census data. I wish RM had something similar or at least allowed tables in notes. I tried copying in a neat table and it was scrambled.
I could get by without tables in RM if I could just specify a font. Here follow three screen captures from my RM database containing four different renditions of the research note. Two of the renditions are from RM7 and two of the renditions are from RM9. The only rendition that is really correct is the rendition of the full footnote from RM7.
#1, from RM7. This is from the full research note screen. It looks fine because I’m able to specify a font and I specify a non-proportional font. This is what I want.
#2, from RM7. This is from the citation summary screen, and it’s just as mashed up as RM9.
#3 from RM9. I was able to capture both the full research note pane and the citation summary pane on the same screen. The research note is totally mashed up on the citation summary pane on the left and it is partially mashed up in the full research note pane itself on the right. Neither of these are what I want.
Thanks again for these. All food for thought. I need to play around with this and try to find a way to add all this text and not have it all move around. I am assuming this involves a lot of tab and space actions for you? I would also really need column headings - the Scottish census varies a great deal from decade to decade and I will forget what the abbreviations I write are alluding to. So a table would be ideal if I could copy and paste it in, even better if you could invoke one from a kind of note style sheet - sounds like a feature request so perhaps I should post one.
Spaces, yes. Tabs, no.
The problem with tabs is that there is no universal definition of the tab stops. I’ve been retired for nearly 10 years now and I had a 50 year IT career before that. So I have been through most of the history of modern IT. I remember very distinctly when text files with tab characters were all the rage and when the tab stops were assumed to be every 8 characters. But that is by no means a universal standard.
With modern word processors, you can use tab characters and you can define the tab stop positions wherever you want them within each document. But I don’t think that’s a very good way to enter data into columns. If you want to enter data into columns, I think you really need to use tables.
However, if RM started supporting tables, I would have to think long and hard about whether to use the tables. The problem is that there is a lot of genealogy software to which RM’s tables probably would not transfer. In particular, Ancestry and FamilySearch probably would not support RM’s tables if the data were transferred.
I transcribe census data onto my Web pages and then I copy and paste the transcriptions from my Web pages into RM. HTML does support tables, but I discovered that if I entered my census transcriptions into my HTML pages as tables, it was virtually impossible to copy and paste them into RM. So I switched to using the <pre> tag in HTML. <pre> stands for pre-formatted. That means two things. The first thing that pre-formatted text in HTML means is that a non-proportional font is used. I use the Consolas font because it looks much more professional than other non-proportional fonts such as Courier and Courier New. The second thing that pre-formatted text in HTML means is that white space characters such as spaces and new lines are not collapsed as they are in standard HTML. So I use strings of spaces to achieve columns in my HTML. It’s very clumsy, but it works.
The strings of spaces also copies and pastes more or less ok from my Web pages into RM. The data is certainly stored correctly. But there are still two problems in RM. The first problem is that there are places in both RM7 and RM9 where the strings of spaces are collapsed when they are displayed. RM is doing the same thing that Web browsers do when rendering strings of white spaces characters. Namely, it collapses the entire string of white space characters into a single white space. The second problem is that even in the places where RM does not collapse the entire string of white space characters into a single white space when it is displaying the data, it displays the data using a proportional font. In RM7, I can override the proportional font to make it into a non-proportional font. Just as I do in my HTML, I use the Consolas font in RM7. But in RM9, there is no way to override the font. So the research notes for my census transcriptions look ugly in RM9.