Notes in family or person ?

[BL Samuel]

I put all my notes for an individual in the notes area, having set up a default "research notes." Each piece of research is entered in chronological order, with narrative of finding and citation.

So, here's my question: Say I enter the findings from the 1940 census for a person. This info pertains to all in the family. If I copy and paste to each member of the family, there will be redundancy in printed reports...right?

a. Should I put the info under family view for parents rather than each person?
b. If I put in family view, how does that show in reports?

thanks

[Michael Talibard]

Re: Notes in family or person ?

This may come too late, but wouldn't it be better to record narrative of research separately from the findings themselves?

[BL Samuel]

Re: Notes in family or person ?

This may come too late, but wouldn't it be better to record narrative of research separately from the findings themselves?

Crista Cowan, professional genealogist and columnist for Ancestry, wrote about this method. Rather than notes here for this entry,there for another, she suggests using one note field for persons. So, for example, you find info on an award for community service for person. Enter that info in notes, narrative form in the proper chronological order, then source it. Optionally, you could start the narrative sentence with identifier: "Award 1952, Des Moines, IA"

Then when you run a report, you have a flowing story line for person. Also serves as great way to see research results, ie research analysis, see gaps too.

After many years of research, I have found this a better way to write the "storyline" .

[Howard Fink]

Re: Notes in family or person ?

I put all my notes for an individual in the notes area, having set up a default "research notes." Each piece of research is entered in chronological order, with narrative of finding and citation.

So, here's my question: Say I enter the findings from the 1940 census for a person. This info pertains to all in the family. If I copy and paste to each member of the family, there will be redundancy in printed reports...right?

a. Should I put the info under family view for parents rather than each person?
b. If I put in family view, how does that show in reports?

thanks

I prefer to add a Census event for each person. The reason is that some children in a family will not have been born, or will have moved away during different Census years. Having one reference in a Family Note will not make clear which family members were present in each Census. In my case each individual's event references the same Source Citation, but I add a Detail field with the line number of the person. Yes, for events such as Residence this means that I will duplicate the information for each person, but if only a subset of the family was present that year it makes it very clear which members were present or absent in that Census. If this information was only in, say, the father's Note, then it would not be clear when looking at one of the children's records.

[rclrocco]

Re: Notes in family or person ?

I like your comprehensive way of recording Census info Howard. I do similar even if it means duplicating sources, but also add a simple spreadsheet style table transcript of the actual Census entry and attach that to the Source as a multimedia item. Where an entry is very difficult to read, i also attach the actual entry when that is available, either online or from personal research. I can then see after just two clicks who was present at a given census and this makes it graphically easy to track a family's movements and the children etc

I also add Census as an event to each person where there is a census so that at a glance I can see the situation.

Hope thats clear?

[BL Samuel]

Re: Notes in family or person ?

I like your comprehensive way of recording Census info Howard. I do similar even if it means duplicating sources, but also add a simple spreadsheet style table transcript of the actual Census entry and attach that to the Source as a multimedia item. Where an entry is very difficult to read, i also attach the actual entry when that is available, either online or from personal research. I can then see after just two clicks who was present at a given census and this makes it graphically easy to track a family's movements and the children etc

From BL Samuel: Thanks all for your comments and suggestions. From the census discussion, I assume Reunion does not allow attaching data to several people at once, i.e. entering census data and marking all that that info pertains to? At least I couldn't find such in the manual.

[theKiwi]

Re: Notes in family or person ?

From BL Samuel: Thanks all for your comments and suggestions. From the census discussion, I assume Reunion does not allow attaching data to several people at once, i.e. entering census data and marking all that that info pertains to? At least I couldn't find such in the manual.

No, you can't do that, but you can get all the data set up for one person as an event, or note and then copy that data and paste it in one block to all the others to whom it is applicable.

Roger

[rclrocco]

Re: Notes in family or person ?

I'm not sure exactly if this is what you meant , but as an example, I found in a Census a family with ten children, I made a source, say 1851 UK census, 49 Bloggs Road, Bristol etc. I then cite that source for each of the children. So yes, you can "mark" each one.