Building with the end in mind

[j2sacks]

While I've dabbled before, I've recently gotten more serious about wanting to systematically record my family history in Reunion because I enjoy it. But before I get too far, I wanted to ask the forum a couple of questions which may impact my configuration and preferences:

So you've spent a lot of time collecting, how have you shared or plan to share the information? My wife and I have no children to pass the work to. Maybe a relative will show interest. A website (think TNG) may die with me. Publish a book? Who would be interested? Put it on Ancestry?
How did Reunion help you?

Has there been some aspect of setting up Reunion that you'd recommend that "I get right" (whatever that may mean to you) early in my journey in order to save me time later?
Sources: organization/workflow?
Multimedia: organization/workflow?
Setting preferences?

I realize that my questions are wide open and invite unique perspectives, but I'm counting on the wisdom of the group to point out sound patterns and/or blind spots due to my inexperience.

[Michael Talibard]

I have similar thoughts about who is this for. I have a son, but he shows little interest. One answer is maybe it's for yourself in ten years time when you want to recall the details.

One thing to get right early on is sources. There are (broadly) two approaches, both of which have been fervently espoused in this forum, and you should choose. One is to have as few sources as possible—say, for example just one for a whole census, and therefore to differentiate in (say) the Detail field. The other approach, which I strongly recommend is to have lots of sources, each with its downloaded and cropped image attached—so, for example, typically a single page of that census. Then you won't ever need to revisit that online.

[eventide]

I'm in a similar situation and quite frankly most of the relatives aren't that interested. I had a website up for a while and had some interest here and there, but I realized that I hadn't done the work of documenting close relatives. I am in the process of doing that now so I may put up a site again once things are in order. Since I can document some ancestors in pretty specific locations I may try and donate some information to local historical societies although I haven't figured out in what format just yet.

But listen to Michael! Sources is one of the main things to get right. Personally, I wish I had listened to him years ago when I was deciding between few sources and many. I went down the road of few and now am doing my best to pull away from that. Fixing that mess is now causing me a lot of grief. That method I am sure works for some, so you will want to think about the pros and cons before deciding what to do. You just need to pick what's right for you.

While I am here, I have a question for Michael. I'm curious how you structure your source templates - or do you use free-form text? As a beginner, I didn't really know how to form citations so I just used the templates as given and later as I learned more, I tried briefly to formulate them as Evidence Explained suggests and the only way I could think of doing that was to use free-form text. Both have their pros and cons, but I am at a crossroads and need to decide how to move forward. I'd love to hear your feedback on this - and of course from anyone else who wants to chime in.

[Michael Talibard]

Eventide—I feel flattered by your interest in my methods. I must confess that my copy of Evidence Explained sits on a bookshelf and very rarely gets an outing. It may have had some influence on me once, but I never wanted to follow it closely. I have source templates for Book, Burial Record, Census, Directory, Electoral Roll, Email, Family Bible, Free Form, Funeral, Gravestone, Indenture, Interview, Letter, Newspaper, Occupation Record (Jersey), Parish Record, Personal Note, Probate, Published, Registrar, Report, Tree, War Service and Will. By far the most often used are Census, Parish Record and Registrar. Most of these I made, or adapted, years ago.

My fields for Census, for example (designed around the UK Census) are, in this order: Date, Country, County/Island, Volume, District/Parish, Folio & Page, Schedule. When making a new source, I minimise the typing by navigating the source list to the nearest look-alike, duplicating and tinkering: typically only the last two or three fields will need altering, and of course the image attachment.

Hope this helps. If you'd like to discuss it without cluttering up this forum you could email me: michael at talibard dot com.

[Rcljersey]

J2sacks, Interesting question which is right at the heart of why we use Reunion and why research your family history. Any answers will of course just be personal opinions, there is no one right way of using Reunion , you use it for what YOU want. But can I suggest the following:
Use it particularly to record your sources, photos, multimedia, taped interviews with and movies of your oldest relatives etc. The quirkier the better, e.g. 100th birthday movie clips, special family events etc etc. With sources, do as Michael suggests and record them all so that they are with anyone in your database, and readily visible without needing to go online. ( I met Michael a few years ago and he helped me sort my source recording out - take up his invite and email him !)
Reunion is just a customised database and is exceptionally good at storing, collating and presenting your research.
Use the Logs feature in particular to record ALL your research ideally in chronological order as you go. You'd be amazed at how useful detailed lists of many years of what you actually did and "when you did it" is. Its saved me many duplicated efforts.
use the Flags feature and personalise it to your own particular needs.
Enter as many different families e.g. your parents, your wife's parents etc etc all in the one database, rather than individual ones for different surnames families.
Use the features of the program, e.g. churn out different reports and charts, even if you don't always need these. That way you'll find out what is really helpful to your particular needs. Experiment, you won't break the program, press all the buttons and see what happens !
Back to your original question: Building towards the end....I would encourage you to have a goal in mind of WRITING your family story. Use Reunion as your data storehouse but plan to write the complete story as a narrative, using Reunion's outputs as inputs to the story. In this way you will have something to leave behind as a result of your years of research and, you have a way then of beating the ongoing trap of media obsolescence. Eg since I started some 40 years ago, floppy disks, cassettes, VHS tapes, and CDs have all become extinct media on which my various databases have been stored. If you want to leave behind a record of what you've done, remember paper is king. A bound document or privately published book is an ideal way of leaving a record of what you've done for posterity. Put in online if you want but remember that is only useful if you commit to keeping it up to date as the years roll by
Initially I took pride in producing hand drawn family trees, but keeping these up to date over time became way too much work. I'm currently writing my family story and even though not many in my immediate family are that interested, i have approached various places where they will take paper versions of your manuscript: e.g. local library, national Society of Genealogists, Family History Societies , local or County Record Offices, specific local interest societies
Finally, keep Reunion and your Mac OS up to date. Use Time machine to make backups and make specific backups of your Reunion database, but practice disaster scenarios, Your backups are only any real use to you if you know how to , and have restored them . Sorry to go a bit but hope this helps?

[eventide]

Michael Talibard. Thanks, I am going to take you up offer. I think that next to deciding if you are going to use few or many sources how you structure them and if you use free-form text, citation details and/or form fields is part of how to get sources right.

[CAshbridge]

As a professional genealogist, I highly recommend going the many sources route. For example, you may have 3 different families on one census page and each should have it's own citation. I use a combination of free form and templates, which I have adapted to mirror Mills' EE. For more complex ones, like the census citations, I use free form because I can control the punctuation in them. Not every field should have a comma after it, which Reunion tends to do. It is easy to duplicate a source and edit it in the

[Reiner L. Sauer]

Eventide—I feel flattered by your interest in my methods. I must confess that my copy of Evidence Explained sits on a bookshelf and very rarely gets an outing. It may have had some influence on me once, but I never wanted to follow it closely. I have source templates for Book, Burial Record, Census, Directory, Electoral Roll, Email, Family Bible, Free Form, Funeral, Gravestone, Indenture, Interview, Letter, Newspaper, Occupation Record (Jersey), Parish Record, Personal Note, Probate, Published, Registrar, Report, Tree, War Service and Will. By far the most often used are Census, Parish Record and Registrar. Most of these I made, or adapted, years ago.

My fields for Census, for example (designed around the UK Census) are, in this order: Date, Country, County/Island, Volume, District/Parish, Folio & Page, Schedule. When making a new source, I minimise the typing by navigating the source list to the nearest look-alike, duplicating and tinkering: typically only the last two or three fields will need altering, and of course the image attachment.

Hope this helps. If you'd like to discuss it without cluttering up this forum you could email me: michael at talibard dot com.

Dear Michael,
I fully agree with your approach of many different source templates. I use about 100 different source templates to manage some 30.000 sources in Reunion, each one of them with a different set of source fields. I'm doing One Place Studies. Nowadays, different source templates are very useful, because books, archives and services like Ancestry suggest how to cite their source properly. Structured source templates help in manually capturing this data. Hopefully in the future, Reunion will allow importing source data from a .csv or .xls files into such structured templates. Rather than attaching sources to individuals or families, we should attach individuals and families to the sources.

Always remember one rule in genealogy: At the beginning, there was the source. The individual and/or his family, were derived from this source!

Please continue the discussion about this topic in this forum. Please, Don't take it off-line. We all wish to benefit from it. I may also provide the developer with some ideas how sources-management could be improved.

Regards
Reiner

[j2sacks]

I appreciate the dialogue. This is what I'm learning so far: Getting sources right is foundational. Reiner's rule really resonates with me because that's how I already think. I've got a lot of stuff that I've collected, now I need to get the facts contained in each document in the database and annotated where the fact came from. Straightforward, but tedious. I'm also hearing a clear bias (so far) for being specific with sources rather than general.
I appreciate the encouragement to play with Reunion, but I wish there were some recent YouTube videos to give me ideas for what I could do with it:
Flags: Great. I can read the manual, but how do all y'all use flags in practice
Logs: Great. Same thing. What does it mean to log all your research? I need an example.
Source templates: I would love to see examples of more robust sets
I haven't heard much on multimedia. I totally agree with the value of printing my work eventually, but paper works best for static things (facts, photos) and not for home movies or audio recordings.

[Rcljersey]

Think of the Logs feature as a diary: in the left box, enter the surname you want. In the right box, enter the date and record what you did that day. This is basic common sense and may seem dull to start with but is invaluable in years to come when you need to check what you did. It makes a great record of how you went about your research over time. You can always add new entries and edit what you've written. Use coloured or bold text to highlight particular people. If you have many people with the same name, add their Reunion number or other number so that you always who you're writing about. If you're not sure how it all works, write somewhere else, e.g. Word, or Pages, and copy and paste into the Log when you're ready. Logs are a great way of avoiding doing the same thing more than once ! The manual has a simple example of this.
Flags: many options: I have added
Birth Certificate
Marriage Certificate
Death Certificate
Not linked
etc
If its your thing, you could enter DNA details etc
I use these so that a glance I can see what I have for any person, without having to go even one click further
Another good feature of Reunion is the Smart Lists feature. This enables you to customise how a persons entry appears. Its excellent for recording multiple occurrences of the same thing e.g. Occupation, census, home, etc Google on Smart Lists in Reunion for Mac and you'll find examples.
There are many places where you can see tips and tricks and how others have used Reunion. try Ben Sayer tutorials; Genealogy Tools; Heartland Graphics etc etc.
We can't tell you how to use Reunion , only you know that, and it sounds like you need to get stuck in and try these features for yourself. Best of luck

[Rcljersey]

Screen Shot 2020-05-08 at 11.33.03.png Logs in use example attached

[Rcljersey]

Further example of how it works, I've now gone back into my Log entry above for Spring 2013 and corrected the typos !

[j2sacks]

Rcljersey, Thank you! Your examples really help! Once I read your example and searched for Logs in the manual (they're not listed in the TOC), I could see their use. The same for flags, great idea. With the vision in hand, I can extrapolate and set up for myself what I'm willing to do. I even found the user examples included in the manual.

[B Jansen]

Not wanting to sidetrack the discussion, but definitely add a genealogical codicil to your will specifying what you want done with your research and materials. I have no kids, but I have a nephew that's interested. Otherwise some local genealogical or history societies and libraries might want them. And definitely start publishing while you can!

[Lawrence E Moore]

I posted this back in June 2019 about my use of logs and notes:
I use Notes and Logs as follows. My notes are for specific findings about a person or couple. I have note categories for Personal Accounts, Transcribed Records, Transcribed Letters, Military Service, Medical Info, etc. Also a note titled Narrative, where I write my account of this person's life. I can add special notes to an individual if needed.
My Logs are of mainly two types: 1) Research Needed logs for stuff I need to research in specific places, libraries, and court houses; eg. GA research, NC research, SC-Horry research, SC Columbia research-USCLib & SCDAH, TN research-Knoxville, TN research-Clarksville, VA research, etc.; these are my To Do lists when traveling. 2) Family logs for findings not yet analyzed. When researching in a particular library or court house, findings go into general family logs such as Adams family, Barnhill family, Dickerson family, Dozier family, etc. Later, I can analyze these findings and update the appropriate person card and person notes. I currently have about 10 place logs and 18 family logs active.
I also use logs for miscellaneous general reference information that I might need when in a library (eg. Charleston proprietary, colonial, parish, district, & county date ranges).
As you can see, I create a log whenever I need it for general notes, and (hopefully) update person records and clear the log promptly. Reunion is commendable for its flexibility. I'm always interested in how others use its features.