Genealogy from the perspective of a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon, LDS)

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Use the sources you have!

I have recently found a number of examples in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree where sources are listed for individuals, but the information in the sources has not been transferred to the details section of the individual or tagged to the entries. The process of adding sources to the entries in the Family Tree is admirable and important, but it is just as important to complete the process and extract the pertinent information to the details and then tag that entry to the specific event. Here is an example of an entry in the Family Tree that has been tagged to its sources:


In this case, anyone who questions the accuracy of the birth date can easily see the source references supporting this conclusion. Where do these tags come from? They are part of the process of entering in the sources in the first place.

Here is a screenshot of a source with an arrow showing the link to a tag:


When you click on the Tag Event, you get the following options:

In addition to tagging the event, be sure to extract the information and update the entries in the Details section about the individual.


3 comments:

  1. I noticed that with all the automation, like creating persons from the source, and adding events from sources, there is no way to overwrite existing event information like a calculated birth year, when a source has more details for that. It would be nice if FamilySearch can do that, because there is no way to do that now, except for putting the detailed data in notepad, and edit and paste the information into the person after attaching the source. My experience is that when there are more sources waiting to be attached, I forget this important step, which is why I really like to have the option to overwrite event data right away, just like one can already add new events from the source. I put this in the feedback somewhere, and hope that FamilySearch listens to it.

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    Replies
    1. I agree, you should be able to add more correct information when adding a source.

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  2. Using Source Linker to attach sources automatically tags the data on the source to the appropriate places on a Person Page. Like birth to birth, death to death, and for residence information and info like that, those go into Other Information automatically.
    For estimated census birth dates, right now one has to go to the person page and add "about" to the year given. But R Kehrer is aware of this flaw and mentioned that something needs to be done to tweek the process for census dates automatically adding about. Not sure when this will happen though.

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