I have made my own source templates.
When source templates first appeared in RM4, I tried them and found then to be extremely hard to use - much harder than just using free form which is all we had before RM4. That’s ironic, because the whole point of source templates it that it is supposed to make creating sources and citations much easier to create.
I owned Evidence Explained version 1 at the time. I’m since then up to Evidence Explained version 3. I haven’t yet upgraded to Evidence Explained version 4. But my experience with Evidence Explained so far is that also is much too hard to use. It’s an 800 page book, and it’s almost like you have to have a Ph. D. in sources and citations to use it. Version 4 may or may not be any easier. I don’t know for sure.
In principle, it seems to me that sources and citations ought to be simple. They are just the way you identify your evidence. You have some sort of “document” as your evidence. There is a lot of flexibility associated with the word “document”. Your document might be a phone call or a text message from your cousin telling you about their new grandbaby. In that case, your “document” might just be a simple text file memorializing that phone call or text message. That text file becomes your “document”. Things like a marriage record or a birth certificate or a death certificate or a census page or an obituary or a tombstone inscription are their own document.
With that in mind, your citation simply needs to answer two questions: 1) what is your document, and 2) where did you find it?
There were two reasons I found RM4’s source templates hard to use. The first reason was that there were too many of them, and I didn’t know which ones to use. The second reason was that even after I found a suitable template, it inevitably has several fields to be filled in that I could not understand. It’s like the template was asking me a question where not only did I not know the answer to the question, I didn’t even understand what the question was asking.
So I developed my own templates. I have one birth record template, one death record template, etc. And the fields in my templates are all questions that make sense to me and which fulfill my goal of answering the questions “what is the document” and “where did I find it”.
Well, there was a third reason I found RM4’s source templates hard to use. It’s that the workflow you had to go through to use them felt very awkward and unnatural. So I came up with my own workflow to mitigate that problem. It’s not perfect because you still have to work within the confines of what RM will let you do. But mostly what I do is to make a copy of an existing source/citation and change it a little to make into the new source/citation.
After making my workflow for entering source/citations as easy as possible, two major problems remained. One problem was that I would need to memorize the citation and paste into other facts or other people. It can be very clicky to navigate to the people where the source/citation needs to be pasted. The other problem was that it was very clicky to add media to the source/citation.
The first problem has never been solved per se. But starting with RM11, for census records in particular it is now possible to copy a entire census fact including its citation to other family members, and it’s now easy to choose the family members. Just being able to copy the census fact was not enough to make the process easy. It was also necessary to make choosing the family members easy. That was what happened with RM11.
The second problem with it being too clicky to add media to source/citations has never been solved. In fact, ever since RM8 it has been harder than it was with RM4 through RM7 because of the new sliding panels in RM8. I just deal with it. Somebody is bound to suggest that you can do it from the media file itself without using the source/citation sliding panels. It’s correct that you can do it that way, but for me it’s even harder to do it that way than it is to do with the sliding panels.
