As far as I am aware, RM offers a pretty sophisticated way of linking every single information to a number of sources, but in practice I find it overwhealming. Is there any way to get a reasonable grip on this within a managable time frame? So far my understanding is so rudimentary, that I can’t even ask specific questions.
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It is difficult to master genealogy research as an endeavor, learning a new genealogy program, and get into the weeds with complicating how one documents sources. I personally believe the concentration on sources has become way too difficult and complicated for the average user.
One should document their sources in a manner that either you the researcher or the consumer of your reports/database can go back and find the actual source you used. One does not need – in most instances - excessive details like images or many many details.
Personally I still use generic sources for the most part like birth certificate, marriage certificate, will, residence, obituary even though I consider my self an advanced research with many years experience. Just put the page numbers, name of newspaper or whatever you need in the details line.
It is absolutely necessary to good research for each person to look at the source themselves, not the fact it was referenced on FamilySearch or other place. Everyone can make mistakes in interpretation. May people make complicated sources without ever looking at the original or photocopy of the original. I can not stress enough the interpretation of what you read on the actual page of the source you are using.
My recommendation is to keep it simple in the beginning and worry about getting excessively detailed once you find a need to become more specific. Also think about what your reports with endnotes will look like. Again, you just need to direct the reader to where to find the material for themselves or go back and reread what you used as a source in the first place.
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I’m not sure I can point you to a specific learning resource. But maybe I can give you a short overview that will help a bit.
Suppose you weren’t doing genealogy at all, but instead were writing a report for school about the history of musical notation - treble clefs and bass clefs and quarter notes and half notes and such. So maybe you go to the library and find a couple of good books. You want to have footnotes in your report. One of the books is “How to Write Music on Paper” by Harry Beethoven, and the other book is “Writing Music Made Simple” by Mike Mozart.
So your sources are the books, and depending on the style guide you might refer to the first book as something like, Harry Beethoven, “How to Write Music on Paper”, Smith Brothers Publishing Company, New York, 1937. You might refer to the second book as something like, Mike Mozart, “Writing Music Made Simple”, Harvard University Press, Boston, 1899. I’m sure that neither of my examples are quite right for any particular style guide, but they give you the general idea.
For the first book, you might use page 17, page 92, and pages 249-270. For the second book, you might use pages 103-120. These are your citations.
Then for your footnotes, you might have things like the following. Essentially, you are combining a source together with a citation to make a footnote.
Harry Beethoven, “How to Write Music on Paper”, Smith Brothers Publishing Company, New York, 1937; page 92.
Mike Mozart, “Writing Music Made Simple”, Harvard University Press, Boston, 1899; pages 103-120.
So far, so good, except that as soon as you start trying to use this concept with RM, everything will fall apart. Which is to say that RM is extremely inconsistent in what it calls things. For example, if you use what RM calls free form sources, the book information is called a footnote (not logical), the page number is called a page number (very logical), and the footnote sentence as a whole is called a citation (maybe logical, maybe not, but inconsistent). But the point is that what ultimately becomes a full footnote sentence at the bottom of your pages has two parts. Another terminology you will see on RM’s screens is “master source” for the book part and “source details” for the page number part. By the way, it’s not really RM’s fault. This problem afflicts all of genealogy.
The next complication is that most genealogical sources don’t really follow this simple model where you have a “book part” and a “page number” part. Instead, you have things like census records and marriage records (courthouse marriage records or parish marriage records) and birth records and death records and obituaries and it goes on and on. These kinds of sources often don’t have any obvious “book part” and “page number part”. And yet RM and really all of genealogy still insists on using this model of “book part” and “page number part”, even though it’s a terrible fit.
What RM does for you is to provide you with what are called source templates. The source templates are intended to be “sources and citations made simple”. And to a certain extent, they work well. If you are entering sources and citations for a census, then you use one of RM’s census templates. If you are entering sources and citations for marriages, you use one of RM’s marriage templates, etc. There is a “fill in the blank” form, and you just fill in the information you have into the appropriate blank place in the form and RM does the rest for you.
It sounds great in theory. In practice, I don’t find it so easy. For one thing, RM has a gazillion different templates for census and a gazillion different templates for marriage, and it’s hard to know which template to use. There are good and valid reasons for all the different templates, but that still doesn’t make choosing the correct one any easier. And even with the templates, you still have to deal with this “book part” vs. “page number” part, or “source part” vs. "citation part’, or whatever you or RM prefer to call the two parts. The two parts are still there, and you still have to understand them even though they can be incomprehensible at times.
The concept is sound. For example, with census the “source part” could be the census year, state, and county whereas the “citation part” could be the page number and family number on that page. So you could think of it as the “big part” and the “little part”. And the same “big part” can be used over and over again with many different “little parts”. But it still can be very confusing.
I don’t think I have answered you actual question, but hopefully I have given you some insight. Perhaps if you gave a very specific source that you have that you want to enter into RM, I could talk you through how to do it. Then if you do a few successfully, you will probably see the pattern and be able to do most of them on your own after that.
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to be fair – I don’t think there is a simple answer to what might seem to be simple question.
The various terminology and how to “lump” vs “split” and to what degree. Most of it matters to the individual as long as ones ends result is (mostly) correct that is likely what matters. Some software may group things differently based based off how the source is. Example 1940 census – might group everyone into the same bucket from all parts of the county. The TNG website software will do it this way. Maybe one might want to see all people who had CENSUS in town or county for all years. You might want the source “[CENSUS] Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States” (or maybe place in reverse Hiearchy) the choices are endless and dizzying .
Some sites such as Family search might allow you to copy their source info via Fam Search Central (FSC)
Thanks for taking the time. You have helped me to home in on what my problem is. There is a zillion of proposed templates of which I have no clue which to choose, inasmuch as most of the people in my database don’t come from North America - and second, whenever I copy information from Ancestry, the copy includes the sources. This is of course a good thing in principle, but it leaves me with double and triple sources attached to one and the same person and sometimes fact and no real overview that would allow me to prune and combine in a meaningful way. There is no single screen on which I can compare different sources and their content and choose, unchoose or combine them - at least not to my knowledge. The result is a blooming chaos in the background.
You have identified several valid problems. One is that the RM templates are very oriented towards American sources, or at least to North American sources. The concept is that you can define your own templates if none of the built-in templates meet your needs. And it’s often the case that you can define your own template by copying one of the built-in templates that’s close to what you need. Then you can tweak your copy just a little bit until it’s exactly what you need.
Another problem is this whole two level model for sources and citations. I subscribe to many sites that will provide you with a completed citation that you can just copy and paste into RM. For example, I subscribe to ancestry.com, familysearch.com, fold3.com, genealogyban.com, findagrave.com, newspapers.com, and myheritage.com. And there are many others. All of these will provide you with a complete and correct citation, but there is no real place to paste such citations into RM. That’s because of the two level model and the source templates. So at a minimum, you have to break the citation you have in hand into two parts before you can put it into RM. And if you are fully using RM’s source templates, you have to break the citation you have in hand into many parts before you can put it into RM.
Also, I don’t like those citations you can just copy and paste very much because they are heavily layered and often include URL’s. That’s fine for working online, but it’s terrible for the printed page.
By “heavily layered”, I mean that the online citations often tell you things such as that a census entry was found at ancestry.com in a particular collection at ancestry.com which in turn came from the National Archives and Records Administration which in turn came from one of their collections from a particular reel of their microfilm then within a state, county, year, page number, and family year and there will be a URL for ancestry.com. You don’t need to know anywhere near all of that to find the record again, plus you might find it more convenient to find it somewhere other than at ancestry.com.
I made the choice years ago to create source templates of my own. They were a bit of work to set up in the first place. But they are much easier to use than RM’s, and I only have one of each type - one for census, one for birth records, etc. I don’t do any of the heavy layering as to the online sites, but I still include all the information needed to find the record again And I don’t use the two part model. I put everything in the “big part” and I don’t use the “small part” at all. It makes things ever so much easier to deal with. Because of only using the “big part”, I actually could copy and paste the long and heavily layered citations directly into my database, but I choose not to. I prefer my much simpler citations.
You mentioned copying from Ancestry into RM. I don’t know if that means you copied and pasted from Ancestry’s web pages or if you used TreeShare. Using TreeShare is fine. But it has always seemed to that if you use TreeShare you should just use TreeShare. I can’t picture downloading sources from Ancestry with TreeShare and then manipulating the sources in RM in any way that wouldn’t totally confuse things between Ancestry and RM. But if you are copying and pasting sources from Ancestry into RM, it’s like copying and pasting from any other site as I have discussed previously. There’s no real place to paste such citations into RM.
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I follow a suggestion that came from Bruce Buzbee in one of the ‘learning RM’ videos, which was to use the ‘Favorites’ feature (under Sources), mark 2-3 templates as favorites to start, and use only those templates when adding citations. For example, I started with 3 templates in my favorites list - “Church Records (online databases)”, “Vital Records (state certificates, online)”, and “Grave Markers (online images)”. When you need to cite a source that doesn’t fit well into any of your favorite templates, then look for a specific template designed for that need and add it as a favorite. For example, if you need to cite a physical book or a ship’s manifest, then you could add additional templates to your favorites list.
This is not a perfect approach but it allowed me to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer number of source templates.
Also, you mentioned “whenever I copy information from Ancestry … it leaves me with double and triple sources attached to one and the same person and sometimes fact”. This sounds more like a workflow issue and I’m not sure what the exact issue is. If you treeshare an event and accompanying source from ancestry, then you want to edit that source/citation versus adding another one. For example, ancestry citations from some collections need editing; they don’t automatically include the necessary details to allow someone to find the record. Also, it’s not uncommon to have 2-3 citations attached to an event. For example, you could have a census, a death certificate, and a grave stone as evidence of a birth year. That’s all fine. Another scenarios is that there are times when I find the same information in a public database that I had previously found on ancestry and choose to cite it. In that case I do end up with 2 sources citing identical information. In those instances I need to decide whether or not to delete the ancestry source from the event. I’m not terribly consistent in how I treat that scenario, other than that I do cite the public source if it contains additional records that I might want to utilize in future research.
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The only thing I can add to the excellent suggestions already posted is that you should be prepared to change your source citation methodology as you gain experience. With that in mind, take time periodically to look over your sources and run reports to see how everything looks. If you see something that makes you think “This really isn’t the best way to be entering this source citation”, that’s the time to make a change before you’ve entered a gazillion facts with citations you’d rather be different. I’ve gone back and reworked source citations too many times. If you’re doing things you’ll later wish you’d done differently, figuring that out sooner rather than later will save you a lot of effort.
When deciding to keep my sources/citations simple, I checked standard journals such as the NEHGR to see the presentation of their sources and citations. My choices were made in part by the way I wanted my printed family group sheets and reports to look. Also I printed out a large report that took almost a ream of paper and found that even with fairly simple footnotes, some of the pages were half notes. Publishing one’s information should inform to some degree the format of the footnotes or endnotes one chooses to use.
For that reason, I always use endnotes instead of footnotes. I realize that footnotes are more convenient for reader than endnotes, But for most of my reports, more than half of every page is footnotes.
It might not seem like it, but endnotes often can also save a ton of paper. That’s because duplicate citations can be combined in endnotes but not in footnotes. You do have to turn on the “combine duplicate endnotes” feature in your reports. And you do have to Paste/Reuse your citations when you copy and paste them, or else you have to merge duplicate citations. But if you do that, it can save huge amounts of paper.
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