This post was deleted by the author on 2 Aug 2015 12:21AM GMT
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FTM has the following notes:
Person Page > Person notes and Research Notes Facts > Fact Notes Source Citations > Citation Note tab and/or citation text Relationship Notes - for couples only
(Note Citation Notes are not printed in any report.)
Alternatively, you can enter data in a Notepad file (or any word processor) and attach it as Media to the Census citation for the census. But, items attached as Media won't print in an FTM report.
If you are an ancestry subscriber, you can click on Printer-Friendly and and paste into a Note of your choice. You will also be merging the actual census media item itself, so the transcription is a redundancy.
My preference is the Fact Note for the Residence Fact to which the census is posted. It is your choice as to whether to copy n paste (or type) to the head of household or all members of the house that you post into your file.
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Open the media from the tab just like you are doing. Then click on the "file name" to the right which will open the media item itself. Close the media tab, then you can size the media to where you can read it and the FACT notes tab will be ready to receive your transcription, since the media tab itself is now closed.
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This post was deleted by the author on 2 Aug 2015 12:20AM GMT
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I use Research Notes and Fact Notes because my mother did research before me and her notes are all in PERSON notes, in order to keep her notes separate from mine. And I use Fact Notes just because I like them.. and, well, when I was syncing I didn't have to worry about their going anywhere.
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I think I read in your comment above "I'm transcribing what the media says and cutting and pasting that into the Notes for that particular fact. "
If your saying that you have a source of information that is for example an audio tape and you have written down what was said in that audio and are now placing those written words into a NOTE then IMHO you are using the wrong field.
Source text be it from a book for a transcription of an audio or video recording should go into a source text field.
Source text fields are in two places. 1) in the source record. 2) in the source citation of the fact.
I use 1) to record the text of the entire conversation, while I use 2) to record a snippet of the conversation that is specifically associated with the fact I am recording.
Sorry if I misinterpreted what you said or complicated your world with yet another place to put stuff. In general notes are comments by you about the thing they are attached to, I generally think of them as "for my eyes only" while text is additional data from the source.
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This post was deleted by the author on 2 Aug 2015 12:19AM GMT
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You said: " have a question about that though, would that text show up in any report? I want to be able to print out whatever I've written in reports if I wanted to. I'm thinking about what silverfox wrote in his comment above. Can these "notes" that are written in the Source Text: be printed in any reports?"
In my opinion, the citation text is absolutely the WRONG place to put textual material from your research.
You should be guided by your question: Where will it end in a printed Report, particularly the report most often used in genealogy journals, the ascending or descending Register-style report - called by FTM: Genealogy Report
As you gathering your material, there is some material that you want to appear in the BODY of the sketch you are building for the person. Then, there is some stuff that you only want to put into footnotes as additional material for the reader.
1) Material entered as a Person Note, research note, and fact note can be used in the sketch of a person in a Genealogy Report, but citation text cannot. 2) Citation text will appear in the report, but because FTM does not have page-by-page footnotes (the industry standard), but rather end-notes, you may be footnoting something for the reader with note 1056, of a 1,000 page report, where the sketch is on page 397 and the footnote (and the accompanying transcribed material) is on page 802. That is a big no-no for a professional presentation - or even for grandma reading the report in her Lazy-boy.
So, absolutely do NOT put stuff willy-nilly into citation text. You should be guided by whether or not you wish the material to be in the main sketch of your subject or "just a footnote".
Footnotes, for the most part, should ONLY show the source, ie the source name and page number, and NOT the material that is being cited.
If you want further guidance, I suggest you visit your local library and look at sketches in genealogy books and in genealogy journals, like the NEHGR, TAG, The Genealogist, and etc. Review what the authors are putting in their sketches and in their footnotes and compare to where you need to put the material in FTM to get it into the place that YOU want.
As an example, I am attaching a single page from a sketch in The Genealogist from a few years back. Note how the contents of the source are contained in Quote Marks in the sketch of the person. The sketch is taking up something more than half of the page and the footnotes something less than half of the page. If you put all of your text from the source into the Citation Text field, your sketch will only be "just the facts, maam, just the facts" of a few lines and the footnotes will take up well over half of the page.
You should also consider other places where you may be putting material. If you are putting up web pages at ancestry for example, stuff put into notes are typically not shown to the casual visitor to your page and must be put into "stories" or "*doc" attachments.
I will occasionally put "notes to myself" in the citation text by unchecking the box to "include this citation text in a report".
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This is where @silverfox and I always disagree.
I think that:
1) Data should be placed in the correct location based on the definition of the data that you have. NEVER put the wrong data in a place because it is convenient or because it is your standard but not the standard of the database.
2) If the report does not use the data correctly based on the definition of the data, THE REPORT IS WRONG, not your use of the field. Open a bug with FTM and tell them they are using the data incorrectly. If they don't know the report is wrong, how will they ever get it right.
3) Work a rounds only fix the problem today, what if they begin to use the data correctly in release 2014 or 2015. Then your data is incorrectly placed and it will end up on the 2014/2015 report in the wrong place.
@silverfox said: "So, absolutely do NOT put stuff willy-nilly into citation text."
I agree 100% the data dictionary for the TEXT field is very specific: "A verbatim copy of any description contained within the source. This indicates notes or text that are actually contained in the source document, not the submitter's opinion about the source. This should be, from the evidence point of view, "what the original record keeper said" as opposed to the researcher's interpretation. The word TEXT, in this case, means from the text which appeared in the source record including labels."
As is the NOTE Field: "Comments or opinions from the submitter." NOTEs are for your opinion. TEXT is for a transcript.
For example: Your SOUR.TEXT would contain the quote from your conversation with Uncle Ben about his late mother. Your SOUR.NOTE would contain your impression of the quote. If Uncle Ben said that his mother was "A witch." This would go in the SOUR.TEXT field. Where your comment that "Uncle Ben was drunk at the time" would go in the SOUR.NOTE field.
Using the data correctly is also important when you decide that you have had enough with FTM and decide to go to another program, that program may (or may not) honor the data dictionary but if they do you will be in a better place than if you went you own way.
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Well, we agree that we disagree! Ha...
I attach another example. Note the reference in the sketch to an excerpt from John Howell's will that left legacies to children. The footnote 55 only shows:
55 WYNSO, Liber 7, 568: (II. 36-37)
Note the economy of space achieved by brevity and abbreviations. This is what I hate about ancestry source citations - nothing is abbreviated, things are repeated, and citations are unnecessarily way too long.
At any rate, this illustrates putting the citation text into the sketch of the subject. You could either construct the sketch in the Person note, or the Research Note, or a FACT Note. You could also transcribe the WHOLE will and put that into a Notepad file and attach to a citation (where it won't show in any report) or make a separate fact for Will and put the transcription for the whole will into that Fact Note and mark it Private - meaning the whole will wouldn't be printed. Then copy and paste the pertinent excerpts you want to put in the person's sketch whereever you want it to show in the report.
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 - that info should be as brief and abbreviated as possible - and only notes that are an "aside" or a comment about the source, are made.
See the attached for the example of a will with footnote 55. This is from a book, not a journal: A Genealogy of the Family of Richard Howell..", compiled by Thomas H Donnelly.
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. Note also the use of opcit and id and those kinds of shortcuts referring to previous footnotes - none of which FTM can do and which would have be achievable before (and if) FTM were to move to page-by-page footnotes.
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