Thursday, July 25, 2013

Copy or Print Information From Some Collections in FamilySearch

One of the new features on the FamilySearch website, as listed in Search Gets Major Feature Enhancements (posted by Robert Kehrer on the FamilySearch Blog on 22 July 2013, is the "Enhanced Copy Function on Record Details" feature, described as:

"A common thing to do after finding an ancestor in the historical records is to copy all the data on the record to research notes. Researchers have requested that we enhance the copy function so that all the related people on the record and citation are included in the copy. When it is available, the related people and citation information is now included in the copy after the standard person data."

This is a very useful feature, so I wanted to see how it worked.  

1)  I went to the record summary for my grandfather in the 1940 U.S. Census, and saw:




On the line in blue, below the "Records" tab line and above the name of the person and the record collection, over on the right side, are links for "Copy" and "Print."

2)  I clicked on the "Copy" link and nothing seemed to happen (but it put the copied information in the Clipboard in Windows).

I opened my word processor, and clicked on "Paste" and the information went into the document with left justified formatting, which resulted in the data not being in columns:


Note also that it only includes the indexed information presented in the record summary, not all of the information in the record image.

The good news is that it provides a source and a link to see the record, although the link is not in Evidence Explained format, or even close.

The copy to a document page is not terrible, but it's not wonderful, in my humble opinion.  In order to make that presentable in a Research Note in a document, I would have to spend some time formatting it.

3)  I decided to see how it looked in an Event Note (like a Research Note) and pasted it into the Event Note for the 1940 U.S. Census in RootsMagic 6 and saw:



That is even worse, at least for me.  The line breaks did not copy into the Event Note field.  I would have to do even more formatting to make that readable.  

4)  There was also a "Print" link on the FamilySearch record summary page, next to the "copy" link.  I clicked that and the "Print" page for my printer opened:



That prints out with the proper format, but in two pages for this particular record.  I could also save the file as a PDF file or as a file on Google Drive.  

5)  My conclusion is:  Close, but not good enough.  I want to be able to save it to a Person Note or Event Note in my genealogy program without having to do a lot of reformatting.  

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/07/copy-or-print-information-from-some.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

1 comment:

T said...

I always select all the text I want then do a copy paste. Pasting into Word it stays. Pasting it into a "story" at ancestry.com I have to add a return at the end of every line or it prints as a paragraph with no columns. The citation lines print just like they look on the original.