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NOTES in FTM 2012

Re: NOTES in FTM 2012

Posted: 31 Jan 2014 4:10PM GMT
Classification: Query
Edited: 31 Jan 2014 4:25PM GMT
@silverfix, your comment: "The bottom line is that, in my opinion, the source footnote should only contain the info for the reader to find the info - not a transcript of the source itself"

In general I agree with you. However, In the historical books that I have edited over the years footnotes come in three forms:

1) A full citation. Which includes Author, Title, Publisher, Pages, (and other stuff so you can find the source). (Probably what you want)

2) Author-Date. Basic information so that the reader knows where the data came from but not necessarily find it directly. The citation is then amplified with additional biographical information as a list of references at the end of the chapter or end of book.

3) Quoted Reference. In a few cases where the author paraphrases another individuals comment, Some times if the actual quote is short the quote is cited at the bottom of the page so the reader has direct access to the quote and where they can find it if they want to read "in context".

The problem is not with the recording of the data but that FTM does not provide a very good report/book creation program. They should allow us, the writers, to control the way we use and generate the document including the footnotes, endnotes and in some cases in-line notes.

I originally purchase FTM because they created report and read GEDCOM. I stopped using it because they did neither function very well. I now generate books and reports from a GEDCOM centric MS-Access database and a report writer.

Re: NOTES in FTM 2012

Posted: 31 Jan 2014 4:17PM GMT
Classification: Query
Edited: 31 Jan 2014 4:22PM GMT
@silverfox asked: "BTW, I would be interested to know if these publishing houses and journals use their own genealogy software to construct these books, or if they have people who take the genealogist's work from some generic genealogy software and put it into a Word Processing document. "

My experience is that it is all done using the database information as a reference and much of the data is either copied out by hand or partially built using software and edited later for footnotes, endnotes and bibliographic information.

But I have not worked on anything like your references. The two similar to your reference were all done by hand, with only a little help from software.

Re: NOTES in FTM 2012

Posted: 31 Jan 2014 6:12PM GMT
Classification: Query
This post was deleted by the author on 2 Aug 2015 12:18AM GMT

Re: NOTES in FTM 2012

Posted: 31 Jan 2014 8:27PM GMT
Classification: Query
And why I kicked FTM to the curb.

Re: NOTES in FTM 2012

Posted: 1 Feb 2014 12:18AM GMT
Classification: Query
There is no right or wrong way about where to place notes as long as the notes are relevant to where they are put. With one exception I put all my notes in Person notes in chronological order. For me this puts everything in one place so I don’t have to go searching through different facts to find my notes. If I print a book everything for that person is in one place.

I have a few people with complicated life histories that required a lot of explanation. Part of this explanation was to explain why accepted family history was wrong, to document why it was wrong, and what I believe to be the correct family history.

The one exception is marriage. Since notes about a marriage affect two people I put marriage notes with the marriage fact.

Curt

Re: NOTES in FTM 2012

Posted: 1 Feb 2014 12:46AM GMT
Classification: Query
Curt said: "There is no right or wrong way about where to place notes as long as the notes are relevant to where they are put."

It is interesting the way you say this. I would say: The right way to put your notes is to place them in the relevant location.

Let me just point out to clarify that:

Notes about a fact go in the fact notes area, notes about a citation go in the citation notes area. General Notes about a person go in the person notes area. This is very simple.

When I run a report that returns information about a source and where that source is used (i.e. All source citations) notes about the citation of that source had better be in the citation notes area or the report will miss all of the citation notes that have been placed in the person or fact notes area.

The same would be true if I ran a report asking for all the birth information on people in the database. Any notes about births had better be in the birth fact area or nothing would be returned.

So, yes there is a right way, but you can choose to do whatever you want since it is your database.

Re: NOTES in FTM 2012

Posted: 1 Feb 2014 12:37PM GMT
Classification: Query
KJ

I just ran a Source Usage Report for an extended family. It took 21 pages. The information I put in the Citation Detail and Citation Text fields clearly states the purpose and relevance of that source. I can always attach an image of the document as media. Adding a lot of text to the fact notes field would expand the report to the extent it would border on useless to me. If I want to see more detail about a particular source I know where to go.

Curt

Re: NOTES in FTM 2012

Posted: 1 Feb 2014 2:37PM GMT
Classification: Query
Curt,

You have a lot of notes. I probably average one many be two sentences per note. Things like "the date could be 5/1/1795 or 6/1/1795" or "the location is spelled Nöstdal here, not Naustdal"

But as I said before it is your database and you can use the fields however you want. I'm just pointing out to people who search this forum in the future that the fields do have a specific use and if they choose to follow the use as spelled out in the data dictionary as opposed to doing it in a vacuum here it is.

I realize that most people don't search these forums, since I know I've weighed in on this topic before, and people generally don't care about the data dictionary definition of a field. So I will stop answering.
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