You would think that I had learned my lesson from Saturday (see Be Careful with the Publish button...), and would check the Help file in Family Tree Maker 2011 before I tried to fix all of my Repository listings. But, alas, no. I messed around trying to Edit the Repository in specific source citations and finally managed to crash the program... several times.
I had several nearly duplicate Repositories in my list, and many of them had been screwed up when I exported my database from FTM 2010 back to FTM 16 several months ago. When I imported the FTM 16 database into FTM 2011, the screwed up Repository listings were still there (of course). So, I wanted to fix them, and clean up the duplicates in the process.
I figured that there was a better way, so I broke down and consulted the Help files. I searched for "replace repositories" in the Help Search screen, and saw several results, including this summary about "Repositories:"
It gives directions for different Options - New, Edit, Replace, Delete and Usage. At the bottom is the key - "To open the Repositories dialog box, click Edit and Manage Repositories.
Okay, that's simple... I tried that and the list of my Repositories opened:
If you look closely, you can see that many of the Repositories in my database had the blasted "NAME" in front of many Repositories, and had "ADDR EMAIL PHON" after the name of the Repository. After about an hour of effort, I had edited the Repository items to eliminate those offending terms and had also eliminated duplicate Repository entries by using the Replace button.
Here is my cleaned up list of Repositories:
Now I'm not sure what the "standard" repository citation is - should I name the repository itself and the location of the repository, e.g., "Carlsbad Georgina Cole Library, Carlsbad, California, USA" or should I put the city, state, country in the Address field in the Repository dialog box?
What about online databases? I have adopted using the name of the database with the website in parentheses - e.g., Find-A-Grave (http://www.findagrave.com/) without a place name for the company. Is that appropriate?
I hear a little birdie telling me "you dummy, you should have looked in the Bible of genealogical source citations, Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills." Okay, I did, and see the same thing in the QuickSheet: Citing Ancestry.com Databases and Images. A typical Ancestry.com citation for a census record looks like:
" 'Washington Deaths, 1890-1907,' database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com/)" with an "accessed 22 January 2009), entry for ..." after. The Repository bit is the Item ("database") and the Website title and URL ("Ancestry.com, (www.ancestry.com"). I've been putting the access date and specific entry information into the source citation detail.
So I've messed up again - I need to edit the Repositories, and more importantly, all of the Source definitions to meet the EE and QuickSheet standards. Drat!
I will learn the right way, and the easy way, to do this sometime, I hope! Perhaps I should use the Source template function. But I have 640 Source Groups already and about 40 Repositories to Edit. Or I could just leave them alone and they'll serve as a bad example.
Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN! Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2024.
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2 comments:
I have a problem believing a source has to be in a "someone said it has to be cited this way" else it's no good. If a source gives enough information for the reader to locate the original document shouldn't that be enough?
Randy, you've said in several recent posts that you are still using FTM16 as your primary program. With all the (non-genealogical) changes you are making in FTM 2011, are you now committed to this version? Can you go back without losing all the modifications?
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