Monday, December 9, 2013

First Look at Legacy Family Tree Version 8.0 - Post 7: Source Quality Measures are a New Feature

Rather than do a comprehensive look step-by-step at Legacy Family Tree Version 8.0 - I did that for Version 7.0, and 8.0 is an improvement on Version 7.0 - I'm going to new (or old) highlight things I find as I work through the program screens.

Today, it's the "Source Quality" measures. "Now record the quality (original vs derivative, primary vs secondary, etc., direct vs indirect) of each source as you attempt to prove your conclusions." I saw a preview of this on the Legacy Family Tree cruise, and wanted to check this out for some of my ancestors.

1)  From the "Family" View screen for the selected person, or from the "Individual's Information" dialog box for the selected person, click on the "Sources" icon (three books) to open the "Assigned Sources" dialog box for the selected person:



The "Assigned Sources" dialog box shows all of the Events that have a source attached.  I highlighted the 1880 U.S. Census on the screen above.

To get to the Quality measures, you have to click on the "Edit Detail" button on the right-hand side of the screen above.

2)  After clicking on the "Edit Detail" button, the "Add the Source Detail" dialog box opens and there are four tabs for "Detail Information" (the source citation detail information), "Text/Comments," "Media" and "Overrides."

On the "Detail information" tab, there is an area "Optional" area (lower left-hand of the "Detail Information" tab) that has a "Surety Level" dropdown menu and a button for "Analye Source quality."



3)  I clicked on the "Analyze Source Quality" button and saw the choices for Source, Information and Evidence:


Legacy Family Tree Version 8 incorporates the latest source quality measures as defined by the Genealogical Proof Standard, and explained by Thomas W. Jones in his book, Mastering Genealogical Proof.  The choices are:

*  Source:

**  Original - the source is in its first recorded form
**  Derivative - An abstract, compilation, transcription, translation, index, database or otherwise derived from the original.
**  Authored - an original work of an author based on their study and synthesizing or compiling their findings
**  I don't know.

*  Information:

**  Primary - Information in this source contains details provided by someone with firsthand knowledge of the person, event, or situation.
**  Secondary - Information in this source contains details provided by someone with secondhand (or more distant) knowledge of the person, event, or situation (hearsay, trasdition, local lore, birth date on a death certificate, etc.)
**  I don't know

*  Evidence:

*  Direct - Information in the source seems to address the research question all by itself.
**  Indirect - Information in the source does not directly answer the research question, but helps to answer the question when combined with information from other sources
**  Negative - lack of information in this source infers an answer to the question.
**  I don't know.

I made my choices on the screen above for the 1880 Census "Event" for the question "What is the person's full name?"

I was done with this particular Event source, so I clicked on "Save" and was back to the "Add the Source Detail" screen.

4)  I wanted to pick a different surety level for this particular source, so I opened the "Surety Level" dropdown menu and picked the appropriate level for the question at hand:


5)  I think that Legacy Family Tree Version 8.0 is the first genealogical software that incorporated the revised source quality measures.  However, the third option for "Information" is defined as "Indeterminable" in Mastering Genealogical Proof. 

This is a welcome addition to Legacy Family Tree.  Now the problem is that I have 47,000 (or more) source citations to add the quality measures for, mainly because these quality measures are were not transmitted in the GEDCOM import from my other program (because I did not include custom GEDCOM tags in the GEDCOM export - see the Update below).

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/12/first-look-at-legacy-family-tree_9.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

UPDATE 10 December 2013:  RootsMagic made the comment:

"RootsMagic has both supported and exported the quality to GEDCOM since version 4 (2009).

2 _QUAL
3 _SOUR O
3 _INFO S
3 _EVID N "


Those are custom GEDCOM tags for QUALity, SOURce, INFOrmation and EVIDence that RootsMagic uses. 

I made an error when I noted that source quality measures were not transmitted via GEDCOM.  When I made the GEDCOM file for this Legacy 8.0 study, I did not include custom tags, which include the ones noted above.

I just tested a GEDCOM file, created in RootsMagic andi ncluded all custom tags, and the Source quality measures are transmitted via GEDCOM into Legacy Family Tree Version 8.0.

5 comments:

Mobisoft said...

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Great Info. Thanks for the your effort. Appreciate it.

RootsMagic said...

Randy,

RootsMagic has both supported and exported the quality to GEDCOM since version 4 (2009).

2 _QUAL
3 _SOUR O
3 _INFO S
3 _EVID N

Unknown said...

I will appreciate to this efforts, Nice info sharing.
Thanks Randy,
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John Parker said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
John Parker said...

Very good Article!!! Keep it up Randy...
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