Creating a Source Citation for an Online Newspaper Collection in Legacy Family Tree 7.5 - UPDATED

By popular demand (well, Michele Lewis asked for it in a comment to Creating a Source Citation for an Online Newspaper Collection in RootsMagic 6), posted 9 July 2013), I tried creating a source citation in Legacy Family Tree 7.5 for an image from an online newspaper collection.  

This post is about creating a source citation using the source templates in Legacy Family Tree 7.5.  
For this study, I chose an obituary for my grandfather, Frederick W. Seaver, from Ancestry.com which was found on a newspaper page image.

UPDATED (11 July):  I made a significant error in the original post, and readers Doug Williams and Monique Riley saw it and commented.  I thank them for pointing out my oversight...I have corrected the post so that it reflects the true capabilities of the Legacy source template.

1)  Here is the page image found by an Ancestry.com search:

The obituary is from the Fitchburg (Mass.) Sentinel newspaper, dated 13 March 1942, on page 9, in the "Deaths" section, and headed "Frederick W. Seaver."

2)  In Legacy Family Tree 7.5, I clicked on Frederick Walton Seaver (1876-1942) to bring up his "Individual Information" page, then clicked on the "Sources" icon which brought up the "Assigned surces" screen, and then on the "Death" Event, and then on the "Add a New Source" button:

On the "Add a New Master Source" screen, I scrolled down the left-hand list of the types of sources and chose "Newspapers," which opened the "Select a medium" section, and I chose "Online images (issued by unrelated content provider)" because that was appropriate for the source material.

3)  After clicking on the "Go to Step 2" button on the screen above, the "Fill in the fields below" screen opened:

I entered information into the "Source Info" Tab, which has "Source List Name," "Location (state)," "Location (City)," "title," and "Format" fields as shown above.

/There are other Tabs on the screen above for  "Text/Comments," "Repository," "Multimedia" and "Overrides."

4)  After clicking on the "Save" button (upper right) on the screen above, I saw the "Edit the Source Detail" screen and entered data there also:

The fields for data entry (the "Detail Information" tab) include "Author Last Name," "Author Given Name(s)," "Author Suffix," "Article," "Issue Date," "Page," and the Optional fields of "Surety Level," "Recorded Date, and "File ID."

There was no data field to enter the website and URL for the online content provider, so I added that information to the "Format" field in the Master Source screen.

Updated: The upper portion of the "Detail Information" screen above has a scroll bar (and that's what I missed seeing in the initial issue of this post).  Moving the scroll bar down reveals more fields for "Column," "Website title," "URL," "Date Accessed," and "Collection."  I added content to these fields.

There are other Tabs on the screen above for "Text/Comments," "Multimedia," and Overrides."

After a bit of editing, the source citation (called "Footnote/Endnote Citation") in Legacy Family Tree 7.5 looks like this:

"Deaths: Frederick W. Seaver," Fitchburg (Mass.) Sentinel, obituary, 13 March 1942, p. 9, col. 2; digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 10 July 2013). 

That looks pretty good, I can use that citation to find the specific page and article again, assuming Ancestry.com is still extant and still has the newspaper collection.  Or, I can use it to find the specific page at a Fitchburg library or historical society.

I did have to add the word "obituary" to the date field, and added "ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com)" to the "Format" field because there was no field for it in the source template.  The "Ancestry.com" term should be italicized.  The "Page" field puts an automatic "p." in the citation, so I started with the page number in that field. There was no field for the access date, either.  If I put the access date in the parenthesis with the URL, then it would have made the Master Source unique for this specific citation.  I could have put the website name, URL and access date in the "Page" field, I guess.

5)  The Ancestry.com source citation provided by Ancestry.com looks like this:

Ancestry.com. Fitchburg Sentinel (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005.

This source citation, like all Ancestry citations, is very non-specific, and it would be impossible to use it without searching on Ancestry.com for the person again.

6)  For comparison purposes, I created the same obituary in RootsMagic 6, and it is:

"Deaths: Frederick W. Seaver," obituary, Fitchburg (Mass.) Sentinel, 13 March 1942, page 9, column 2; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 17 November 2006).

This is the same as the Legacy Family Tree source citation (with small differences).

7)  I will do the same source citation in Family Tree Maker in a future post.  I want to compare the process across the three programs I use - RootsMagic, Legacy Family Tree, and family Tree Maker.

One of the reasons I did this exercise in the three programs was to see how well source citations created by proprietary source templates transfer into the FamilySearch Family Tree.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/07/creating-source-citation-for-online_10.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver