I started out, 25 years ago, as an extreme lumper. Then I discovered that I couldn’t do a good search for specific citations–at least in TMG. That’s when I switched to splitting. I probably have 400 obituaries myself. And I have a census source for each head of household. As I’m learning RM10, it appears that I can do a citation search, so maybe I can cut back on the splitting a bit. Maybe split on the newspaper rather than on the actual obit. If I name the obit correctly, I ought to be able to find them easily since I can search by name. Another question: Have you ever thought of creating a fact for the obit full text? Maybe a bio or memo fact/tag? Or even an Obit fact? And then share it with the people named, creating roles such as survivor, pall bearers, etc?
Thanks for listening!
K
Yes, I do precisely that.
I started out storing the obituary text in the note for the Burial Fact. But I changed over instead to having a separate Obituary fact containing the text of the obituary. That gives me a lot more flexibility. For example, I can include or not include the Obituary fact in reports, depending on how verbose I want the reports to be. At the present time, I’m not sharing a role for the Obituary fact, but having the Obituary fact as its own free standing fact gives me the flexibility to do so.
The text of the obituary also goes into the citation for the obituary. And obviously the obituary citation is applied to several facts, such as the Obituary fact itself, the Death fact, the Burial fact, sometimes the Birth fact, etc.
You make me feel sane!!!
That probably deserves a little more discussion. My second great grandfather Will Bryan was one of 14 children. All of them lived to normal adulthood, all them died in the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s, and all of the had obituaries. Each obituary mentioned all the other 13 sibling, whether deceased or still living.
I dutifully recorded the obituaries for each of the 14 siblings and I dutifully added a note (not a shared role because they didn’t exist yet in RM) for the other 13 siblings that they had appeared in the obituary for the sibling who had just died. This didn’t even get into pallbearers and officiants and individuals like that who might have been mentioned in the various obituaries.
The result was printed reports that were so overwhelmed with all the cross correlation of all the obituaries that the printed reports became unreadable. So I went back and removed all the notes that mentioned the siblings. So aside from Obituary fact itself, the only real use I make of the obituary is the obituary citations. And even there, I tend to curate the citations to include only the most important citations that provide all the evidence I need. So not all the siblings have citations from the all the obituaries of all the other siblings.
But there can be exceptions. For example, 13 of the 14 siblings spent their whole lives living within 5 or 10 miles of their birth in Tennessee. The exception was the youngest, a man named Steward Bryan who worked for the railroad and who lived all over the country. So all those obituaries for the older siblings provided a paper trail for Steward’s various residences (like “survived by her brother Steward Bryan of Denver, Colorado”). Therefore, Steward has many citations for the obituaries of his siblings.