E.E. style Citations and RM9 Free-Form Source Templates

RootsMagic
1

After researching the compatibility of the various RM Source Templates, when exporting to GECOMs or Ancestry, I concluded that it was “safer” from a general compatibility standpoint, just to use the Free-Form template in Roots Magic for my master tree.

For each source, I was planning to create a master, to hold the generic citation information, and then have the many citations for that source as child records (source lumping)

With the Free-Form template, the full citation text is simply made up of the Master Source [Footnote] field, with the Citation Detail [Page Number] field appended to the end.

I am wishing to manually enter my citations, using the Evidence Explained style guidelines, which require you to ensure you have captured the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, and WHERE information.

I note in many examples, they place the WHERE (ie details of the physical location of the source) at the end, after the citation to the individual. But using the Free-Form template, it makes sense for me to place that in the Master Source, as it will stay the same for each citation, and only include the details of the name and dates for the individual (that parts that change) in the [Page Number] field

For example…

Following EE Guide for a Baptism record I have formulated this. (The bold text is entered in the [Page Number] field.

"Parish of St. Maurice (Winchester, Hampshire, England), “Register of Baptisms, 1834-1866”, Pg. 123, No. 1234, entry for Joe Bloggs, 31 May 1864; Ancestry.com, “Hampshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1921”, database on-line, (https://www.ancestry.co.uk : accessed 20 Feb 2024); citing Hampshire Archives and Local Studies; Winchester, England, UK; Anglican Parish Registers; Reference: 1M82W/PR12"

Which is made up of…
Layer 1: Physical citation

“Parish of St. Maurice (Winchester, Hampshire, England), “Register of Baptisms, 1834-1866”, Pg. 123, No. 1234, entry for Joe Bloggs, 31 May 1864”

Layer 2: Digital citiation

“Ancestry.com, “Hampshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1921”, database on-line, (https://www.ancestry.co.uk : accessed 20 Feb 2024)”

Layer 3: Source of the Source
“citing Hampshire Archives and Local Studies; Winchester, England, UK; Anglican Parish Registers; Reference: 1M82W/PR12.”

With Free-Form templates, I’d ideally want to put the “static” elements for the source in the Master Source and keep just the detailed citation to the individual in the Detail.
So, that’d be something like, Layer 2, Layer 3, and part of Layer 1 in the Master, and then only the Page No., Name, Date etc, in the Detail.

Master [Foot Note]
“Ancestry.com, “Hampshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1921”, database on-line, (https://www.ancestry.co.uk : accessed 20 Feb 2024)”;"citing Hampshire Archives and Local Studies; Winchester, England, UK; Anglican Parish Registers; Reference: 1M82W/PR12; Parish of St. Maurice (Winchester, Hampshire, England), “Register of Baptisms, 1834-1866"”

And then enter in the Detail [Page Number].
“Pg. 123, No. 1234, entry for Joe Bloggs, 31 May 1864”

Which would create the full footnote:

“Ancestry.com, “Hampshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1921”, database on-line, (https://www.ancestry.co.uk : accessed 20 Feb 2024)”;“citing Hampshire Archives and Local Studies; Winchester, England, UK; Anglican Parish Registers; Reference: 1M82W/PR12; Parish of St. Maurice (Winchester, Hampshire, England), “Register of Baptisms, 1834-1866”, Pg. 123, No. 1234, entry for Joe Bloggs, 31 May 1864”

Which is kind of still in the EE style but reversed.

Does any of this matter? Will I be flamed by E.E. purists?

2

I fully agree with your findings and conclusions but went one step further with an enhanced Free Form template. See
https://sqlitetoolsforrootsmagic.com/source-template-a-better-free-form/

1 Like
3

I don’t want to hijack your thread, but rather I want to build upon it a little bit.

It seems to me that we are largely controlled by the GEDCOM data model when setting up sources and citations. And by “we”, I mean we genealogy users and also I mean the collective community of genealogy software. By that I mean that for the most part we can’t transfer sources and citations from one genealogy software except via GEDCOM. And even RM’s drag and drop of data from one RM database to another uses GEDCOM as the transport mechanism.

GEDCOM doesn’t really support source templates or anything like source templates. All it really supports is a SOUR tag for sources and a PAGE tag for citations. This data model therefore imposes a very strict limitation on the contents of the left part of a footnote vs. the contents of the right part of a footnote. Namely, if software imports a GEDCOM, the software ultimately must create footnotes by concatenating the text from SOUR tags with text from PAGE tags. And the only real option is to concatenate all the text from the SOUR tag to the left of the text from the PAGE tag and all the text from the PAGE tag to the right of all the text from the SOUR tag.

Without studying it in detail, I believe that your long citation for parish records from Winchester, Hampshire, England makes a lot of sense, whether it is EE compliant or not. However, it is not clear to me how to break your citation into a left part and a right part as required by the SOUR/PAGE model.

I became an extreme source splitter in RM7 and its predecessors primarily because RM at that time did not support reusable citations. Now that RM8 and RM9 have reusable citations, it’s a reasonable question of why don’t I just use RM’s reusable citations in the manner in which they are intended and why don’t I quit being an extreme source splitter. I’ve spent considerable time investigating that question. I know that there have been other RM users who have converted their extremely split sources and citations in RM7 into reusable citations in RM8 and RM9. The thing that has stopped me so far is that I have many citations where data elements that need to be SOUR data elements are to the right of data elements that need to be PAGE data elements. As an extreme source splitter, I only have SOUR data elements so there is no issue of left parts and right parts.

I use source templates of my own design rather than using RM’s source templates or using the Free Form template. But I honestly can’t figure out how to redesign my templates in a reasonable fashion to get the left parts and the right parts organized correctly so that my footnotes still read in a a reasonable fashion. I hadn’t thought about it, but your message in this thread persuades me that even using the Free Form template would not solve this left part vs.right part problem in a very satisfactory matter.

Finally, there is the matter of layered citations. I understand the need for layered citations and I understand how they work. But my citations really aren’t layered and my footnote sentences are much shorter than layered citations. But even so, my sense is that my footnote sentences provide 100% of the information required to locate the information again. My favorite example is U.S. Federal Census records rather than English parish records, but the principles are the same.

The real repository for U.S. Federal Census records is obviously NARA and not ancestry.com or familysearch.org. And a properly layered citation for U.S. Federal census records would surely include such things as the NARA reel number and address and contact information for NARA. But properly layered citations can easily be several lines long. If I have hundreds or even thousands of citations in a report, I do not really want to repeat all that layered information over and over again for each footnote. Plus (and I repeat), all that layered information. is not necessary to find the records again. To the extent the layered information might actually need to be included in a report, surely it could be included one time in some sort of brief Bibliography or something like that rather than being repeated over and over again in each footnote.