Thursday, December 16, 2010

Adventures in FTM 2011 - Creating a Source Citation

I've had Family Tree Maker 2011 for a few weeks now and have it installed on my new desktop computer running Windows 7 and on the laptop running Windows XP. 

Over the past two weeks, I've been happily standardizing my place names and am almost finished with that task.  The next task is to "fix" more of my sources before I create many more of them. 

I wanted to practice creating a new Source, and a newly-found distant cousin (yep, he found me through my Genea-Musings blog posts!) sent me pages from a family history book for one of his surnames.  So I wanted to enter the new information from the book for his family line.  This gave me the perfect opportunity to Add a Source to my database using the much-heralded Source citation templates that follow Evidence! Explained standards. 

From the Person workspace, I wanted to add a Source citation to the marriage Fact, so with the Fact highlighted I clicked on "New" on the Sources tab in the right-hand panel.  The "Add Source Citation" box came up, and I clicked on the "New" button in that window to get to the Source Template shown below:


I had to select a Source Template, so I chose the "Publications - Books, CDs, DVDs, Maps, Leaflets and videos" from the "Source Group" dropdown list, then selected "Print Publications" from the "Category" dropdown list, and then "Book - Basic format" from the "Template" dropdown list.  After clicking "OK, I  entered all of the information in the template fields:


After clicking "OK" I then entered the page number in the "Citation Data" field:


So what does my source citation look like for this Fact?  Here is the Person screen with the Marriage Fact highlighted and the citation in the Source area of the right-hand panel:


The source citation reads:

"Marjorie E. Doctor, Descendants of Alexander Doctor & Catherine Powrie Doctor: Scotland & Scotch Plains, Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas, USA: M.E. Doctor, 1987), page 479."

Now I wanted to see if it shows up in the list of Sources, so I clicked on the "Sources" workspace tab in the top menu, and scrolled down the "Source Groups" list on the left and highlighted this source:


The middle panel shows the Facts attributed to this source, and the source information is in the right hand panel.  It says:

"Marjorie E. Doctor, Descendants of Alexander Doctor & Catherine Powrie Doctor: Scotland & Scotch Plains, Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas, USA: M.E. Doctor, 1987), page 479."

However, in the list of "Sources Groups" it is listed as:

"Doctor, Marjorie E., Descendants of Alexander Doctor & Catherine Powrie Doctor." 

If I want to seek it out in the Source Group list again, I need to remember that it is listed with the author's last name first.  I did that for the other Facts that I added or revised in my database.

Why does it list the Source with the author's last name first? All of the other Source Groups that imported from my Family Tree Maker 16 file are in the "Source Group" listing by the title, not the author's name.  So to be consistent, I have to go back and change the other 640 Source Groups to use the template forms to standardize my source citations.  Or I could just leave them alone, since they print out perfectly well right now. 

But what will happen if I export the file and import it to another software program or to Ancestry.com?  I'm going to experiment a bit with this before I take the time to convert the Source Groups to the Source Templates.  I'll probably convert a number of them - different Source Group types, and see how they translate through the export/import process.  

The devil is in the details, isn't it?

That was really pretty easy.  And it didn't take very long, as long as I had the pages from the source document on my desk. 

UPDATED 7 p.m.:  One paragraph was out of place, and one figure (the third one) was wrong - corrected and now it makes much more sense, even to me!  sorry for the confusion.  Did anybody really see the problems?

3 comments:

Cousin Russ said...

Randy,

Might I suggest that you take a look at EndNotes (Source options to be reported in Charts and Reports) between Version 16 and Version 2011 when using a Template.

Also, take a look at the Bibliography.

As I have been transferring my Master Sources (Version 16 term) and associated Citations, to the Template for the Source and those citations, one of my reports was 3 pages fewer after cleaning up a couple of Sources.

My EndNotes look so much better in Version 2011.

Russ

Eileen said...

In FTM 2011, how you know what should take precedence? I have a book of cemetery records. I selected Cemetery Records, then Derivatives but my only choices for a template were office records, tombstones, memorial plaques or online database. A print compilation of cemetery records was not an option.

So I selected book, like you did, and I ended up with a template that does not have all the components necessary to record cemetery records.

It seems to me that in addition to office records, etc. it should also offer a compilation.

This is a problem I have been running into since FTM added the templates. I never seem to find a combination that fits the source I am trying to record.

Cousin Russ said...

Ellen,

What is the Title of the Book?

Who wrote or compiled the book.

Start with what you have in front of you, then start by entering a Key word for a new Source, using the Template. The Key word you would enter are the first 3 character of what you are looking at.

Russ