Greetings: I’m trying to set-up a source list for Funeral Home Obituaries. I have many from different funeral homes (Sansone, Smith, Jeffries & Keates, etc). In creating the source, would I use a template from the list or create by free form? In the source list would the source be listed as “obituaries” or by the Funeral Home?
Thanks for your suggests and advice,
Hugh
Personally I use a generic source named obituary when I add information I take from an obituary like a birth or death date, parents, etc… Then I put in the detail section, the name of the newspaper or online source. I do believe that many of the online obituaries are copyrighted so the information should not be used word for word. Rather than cutting and pasting an entire obituary from any source where I use several details, I try to rephrase the information in the general note for the person, That is where I might say that the information came from a funeral home created obituary,
I pretty much treat a newspaper obituary and a funeral home obituary the same. Namely, the obituary is the source. The newspaper is not the source. The funeral home Web site is not the source. Rather, the newspaper or the funeral home Web site is where I found the obituary. Plus there is the case that even newspaper obituaries are often found online. In that case, I try to include information about the original newspaper publishing of the obituary as well as the current Web site where I found the newspaper obituary.
I use an custom source template of my own design for obituaries. I’ll show it later, but it’s easier to see how the template works if you first see some examples of footnotes generated by the template. The first one is a newspaper obituary found online. The second one is a funeral home obituary found online. The third one is a newspaper obituary where I have the actual clipping rather than having found it online.
Obituary: Abner, Thurman Keith; Knoxville News-Sentinel [Knoxville, Tennessee], 3 May 1997, page C7, viewed at newspapers.com on 2 February 2022.
Obituary: Ailey, Robert E. "Bob"; Farrar Funeral Home [Dandridge, Tennessee], viewed at https://www.farrarfuneralhome.com/obituaries/robert-ailey-1 on 26 February 2023.
Obituary: Akers, Mrs. Mildred; Citizens Tribune [Morristown, Tennessee], 30 January 1977, page A5.
Here is the RM footnote sentence from my obituary source template.
<?[ObitMissing]|No obituary:|Obituary:> [DeceasedName:Reverse]; <<i>[FuneralHome]</i>|<i>[Newspaper]</i>>< /[[ObitPlace]/]><, [ObitDate:plain]><, [NewspaperPage]><, viewed at [WebSite]< on [Viewed:plain]>>.
That funny <?[ObitMissing]|No obituary:|Obituary:> thing at the beginning is just a way to start the footnote either with Obituary: or No obituary: and it’s nearly always Obituary: However, I do document when a very thorough search has revealed that the person likely did not have an obituary.
The rest should be pretty clear. I leave blank the [FuneralHome] if I found it at a newspaper and I leave blank the [Newspaper] if I found it at a funeral home Web site. I leave [NewspaperPage] blank for funeral home obituaries. I use /[[ObitPlace]/] and [ObitDate:plain] for both newspaper obituaries and funeral home obituaries. The /[[ObitPlace]/] variable looks funny but it is correct. It looks funny because I had to escape the [ character and the ] character. I leave [WebSite] and [Viewed:plain] blank when I find the obituary somewhere other than online.
Even if you don’t want or need to get into the minutia of my footnote sentence, I think it’s useful to consider the idea that it’s the obituary that’s the source, not a newspaper or a funeral home or a Web site. Those things are just where you found the source, with the source being the obituary itself.
On the copyright question, I think that if someone monitored a funeral home Web site, captured all the obituaries, and published a complete book of all the obituaries that they would be in copyright trouble. But copyright has a Fair Use exception. Even for exact quotes, if the quotes are for commercial or nonprofit educational purposes, or if it’s for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research and is less than about 10% of the total information, then you are ok with exact quotes under the Fair Use exception. That’s especially the case if your use is non-profit.
WOW that is detailed. Thanks Jerry.
SO, I’m pretty new at the source(s) and RootsMagic. I create a new source in Free Form, "Source Name: Obituary " Where do I enter the sentence script for the Newspaper/Funeral Home?
Sorry, still stuck.
I’m going to answer your question very literally - just the way you asked it - in terms of a free form source. For a free form source, the sentence script for the citation is the combination of the Footnote field and the Page Number field. But I wonder if you might really be asking about using RM’s source templates. That’s because using RM’s free form source template is sort of the absence of using a source template. I created my own source template for obituaries, but RM also has one built in. In any case, here is where you will find the Footnote field and the Page Number field in the free form template.
