Hello,
i have a question,
i am busy with all my family ancestors a copy from the birth cirtificate, marriage cirtificate and death cirtificate, and what is the best place to ad these. they are as pictures.. must i ad this by the fact as media, of must i this ad with the citation and there you can also ad a media file ?
how do everybody do this, and if i ad this in the citation as media, can you import this citation then good in another program ?
Jan
you are likely to get a variety of opinions and options.
You should in most cases use the standard fact.
you can add the media to the fact (even if you do not use citation/source)
If you use citation (which you should there are many options) you should also add media to citation also. Depending how are the source are built (free form, template etc) might impact how they show in other software.
All the many different and diverse answers you are going to get are right. You just have to decide which answer is right for you.
You don’t really have to link images into RM. For many years, I just stored them on my hard disk without linking them into RM. Then I changed my mind in linked them in. Actually, I started when most “images” were just pieces of paper. So the most important question back then was whether to have a good paper filing system, or whether to scan them onto the computer, or both. These days, most of my images never existed as paper, or at least not at my house. Mostly I get them by downloading them. So the paper is pretty much a non-issue anymore.
With that as a background, it’s important to realize that images are never stored in RM. They are only linked into RM. So before you even begin to think about RM, you need to think about organizing your images on your disk. What are you going to name them? What folders are you going to store them in? One big folder? Or lots of different folders?
Some users name the images and store them as folders based on family, or based on date, or based on type of record (marriage vs. birth vs. death vs. census etc.) , or based on state and county. There are as many different ways to do it as there are users who do it. My system is hybrid. I organize things like census and deeds and tax records by state and county and year - not by person or family. The rest I organize by record type - all birth records together, all death records together, all marriage records together, and then I name the files by the person’s name. I make no claim my system is best. I do claim my system is best for me. My system almost certainly is not best for you. Develop a system that is best for you.
That was the hard part – organizing your image files on disk. I think in a certain sense, the linking into RM is the easy part. There are four choices.
The easiest option is option #1. If you actually have the images and have them well organized on your disk, you may or may not find much additional utility in linking them into RM.
The most logical option is option #3. For example, a death citation may have information about a person’s birth. So if you link the death image to the death citation, link the death citation to the death fact, and also link the death citation to the birth fact, then the image is automatically associated with both the death fact and the birth fact. The association is indirect because it’s via the citation, but the association is still there. And essentially, you are treating the image as the source your are citing, which I think is really logical.
If you don’t like option #1 and really do want to link images into RM, the easiest and most useful option is option #2. Even though option #3 is most logical, it makes it very clicky to be able to see the images or even to know that they are there when you are in RM’s Edit Person screen. Option #2 makes the images front and center and easy to get at from RM’s Edit Person screen.
Option #4 is for crazy people who want to be super thorough. I went from being an option #1 person to being an option #2 person to being an option #3 to being an option #4 person. So yes, I am crazy. I don’t know if it’s really worth going to all that trouble or not, but as a sample size of one that’s what presently makes me happy. And option #4 really is a lot of trouble.
I use Jerry’s #1 approach. I keep a computer folder with the images I may at some point in time add to RM to use in a printout. Research is hard enough without adding media to the database as one tries to add basic factual data. I keep the citations simple but do try to make them specific enough so that the reader of the document can look them up for himself/herself.
Option #5 
I scanned all the certificates and other documents I had in paper form to family named folders nested in a genealogy folder on my PC. All documents I download go in the same folders. Subsequently I uploaded all the images to the gallery tab in the Ancestry profile of the person concerned and then attach them to the appropriate fact (B,M,D, will, probate, etc).
When I treeshare back from Ancestry the images are then stored again in the default RM media folder in whatever format Ancestry & RM choose. Storage is cheap! Keep plenty of backups and you have redundancy in depth.
I know I’m the only one in step here but thought I’d share to give another option. I find having Ancestry as a sort of additional cloud store gives me peace of mind. BTW I still have all the paper documents in folders too!!!
I find it hard to know how to insure one’s hard work documenting certificates over time will actually survive. Some of us who are senior citizens do not have interested family who will want to continue our genealogy projects. I have both paper files and computer files, none of which are likely to be passed on, even when I have organized and sent copies to others over time. My direct line certificates may be scanned in DAR records that have been approved by that organization. For many of us lineage society records may be the most likely way to preserve some of our certificates for further generations. I am unsure how much of our Ancestry databases survive once we are no longer members.
there are other alternatives. there are ways to pass on Ancestry (brand) trees to others but I would not use that method although it could stay linked to RM db.
Is #4 supposed to read “link images both to facts and to citations”?
Images you upload to public trees certainly remain for others to download when they come up as hints. Ancestry help states:-
“Unless you delete them, your trees will remain in your account on Ancestry whether or not you have a membership. As a free registered guest without a membership, these tree features remain available:
Adding and removing people and photos
Adding, deleting, and editing names, dates, and other facts
Managing your tree settings
Inviting friends and family to view your tree”
So looks like they will stay there forever unless you delete them.
I am sure many people tought Sears and Blockbuster be around for much longer. I have had companies say feature would be available “forever” and was instead only 2-3 years. I’d rather be in control then bet on Ancestry
Yep. Fixed it. Thanks.
Whether it is items like birth, death certificates, photos or important documents I have never taken the time to link them to my large at home RM database knowing there is no sure way to keep the connection forever. I keep my total database minus living people on Geneanet. However, previously I thought WorldConnect would keep everything forever, and then it went away. A few years back I did treeshare my database with my RM one thinking it would stay forever on Ancestry and generate hints to others even being private. But there are continual discussions of Ancestry being sold. Is if frustrating to think that perhaps there is no long term solution to preserving one’s many years of research.
how so? if you can download the media (I do) – then you can link the media directly in RM (also citation etc). I have folders and a media naming convention – about 20K in my main db.
These include census, burials, Marriages and deaths etc
ps. The links and URL are likely to change or even not exist in any form. You can still maintain the media and cite them. In my view a census page is the census, does not matter where you found it (that much). Could be on Ancestry, on Fam Seach or even Peter Pan site (some sarcasm) the point is more about what you found not where as the same document could be on a dozen or more sites. You can choose how many to record – my goal would be record the media mostly.
The reference was from an earlier posting so likely my last comment was unclear. I was referring to what happens to ones database after ones decease and one has no one to pass the database onto. Now I have my data on Ancestry and Geneanet minus living people.
I remember an example. A number of years back the family of one well known, excellent researcher had placed this man’s database as a memorial on WorldConnect so that others could access his years of work. Many of us know how that played out. Ancestry bought out Rootsweb’s WorldConnect and a few years later discontinued WorldConnect and the mailing lists. I had always thought that FamilySearch would take an entire database when one was ready to submit everything. But this is no longer the case now, if ever it was.
FamilySearch now allows uploads of trees
you are referring to:
Your Own Editable Tree: When you upload a GEDCOM file now, it creates a dynamic, working family tree that you can edit and manage?
Yes, I just found it. It was under Labs as CET. You can now get to it by going to Search/Genealogies. Scroll down and you will see Upload Your Individual Tree.
Looking further the Upload available under Search is the old style Pedigree Reference File. CET is available to some users under Family Tree on the main menu.
@mscheffler as FYI for you–before Ancestry closed down World Connect on Rootsweb, everybody who had a family tree on there was suppose to have received an email telling them that any tree that they had on World Connect would automatically be moved to Ancestry UNLESS they contacted Ancestry and told them they didn’t want it moved-- well I didn’t get the email and by the time I found out, it was too late to do anything abt it… that said I do NOT know how you would find it on Ancestry’s public member trees-- most of the ones I had family files on have any where from 600- to over 3000 family files for that line