Document images, citations, and sources

[rcpett2]

I think I understand Reunion's philosophy of citations being brief pointers (like page numbers) within a broader source to tell where this particular data comes from. I have many sources where there are multiple (dozens or hundreds) of citations to different facts in events in my tree, each on a different page. I want to save an image of the cited page with each citation (e.g., an image from the 1940 census for my paternal grandfather's entry and a different image from the 1940 census for my maternal grandfather's entry). Yet there is no way to add images to citations that I have seen, only to sources. Am I missing something? What is the best practice?

Thanks
Rob

[Blaise A. Darveaux]

There are two ways, that I know of, to do what you want to do. One way is to make a new source for every little snippet image that you are extracting data from. The second way is you could make one source, but then you would have the issue of attaching all those snippet images to the one source and each image would need to be uniquely named.

A far easier way that I have found to do things is to make one source for the entire document and then, when you make a citation, record the page number in the source detail field that you found the data. You could also add a paragraph number, or even line number, if you wanted more precision.

As an example of what I am doing now, my source is a 7 volume work. Each volume has 500 to 600 pages. I have 7 digital documents (named Vol.1, Vol. 2, etc.) that I have attached to the one source. When I cite data, I put the volume number and the page number in the source detail field. From this one source I have extracted names and data for about 40,000 people. Adding volume and page numbers in the source detail field is a whole lot easier and faster than scanning thousands of snippet images and attaching them to one source or thousands of new sources.

[Michael Talibard]

My advice—but maybe it comes too late—is to do what Blaise first mentions: to make a new source for each page of the document, so as to attach the image. By the way, I don't think Reunion has a 'philosophy' on this: it facilitates both approaches.

[Blaise A. Darveaux]

I think what Michael suggests is excellent for census images (and most images) -- it is exactly what I do for that source type. One page (or two if the family starts on one page and continues to the next) for each source. After all, census images have a limited number of people on them and I don't think it is too much to ask for someone reviewing the data to find an individual on one or two images. If you think it IS too much to ask, include a line number in the source detail to zero in on an individual person's data.

When I originally read the OP, I thought he wanted to attach scanned images of only individual lines from the same census image. That can me done, but IMHO that takes a lot of time.

Of course I am aware that some people want to keep the number of sources as low as possible and have, for example, one source for all pages of the 1940 census. That would be akin to doing the second approach that I suggest above.

The third option that I suggested above is used for very large documents and extracted data for hundreds or thousands of people. The document is already digitized. All a person has to do is navigate to the volume and page number that I give in the source detail. I have already done the hard work of FINDING the people in the source.