18 replies to this topic

[sherrios]

I have been struggling with how to cite a source for relationships, for example, how do I source a parent-child relationship? I thought that if I highlighted the Parents from the Edit Person window and attached a source in the Parent Family Details section, that would do the trick. However, those sources carry over to each child in the family and I end up with a multitude of sources that have nothing to do with the other children. For example, I might cite the baptismal record for child 1 when highlighting Parents in Child 1's Edit Person window. Then I go to child 2 and cite that child's birth certificate. But when I click the Sources button when I get to Child 2's Edit Person window, I see Child 1's baptismal certificate as a source, which has nothing to do with Child 2. If I go ahead and add Child 2's source and move on to Child 3, I will see all the sources I added for each child's relationship to their parents (which is what I thought I was citing). Obviously, the Parent Family Details Sources is not what I thought it was.

 

So this brings me to 2 questions, really: 1) How do I cite my source for the parent-child relationship? 2) Please explain what the Parent Family Details sources purpose is.

 

Thank you for your help.

[Laura]

Open a child's Edit person screen.

Highlight the Parents line.  These are the Family notes, sources and medis that have been linked to the parents as spouses like a person's general note, source and media is.

Those Parent's Family notes and sources are displayed on all the children's Edit person screens and can be edited as a convenence because users in the past asked for it.

That data is not linked to the child and is printed as part the Parents records.

I enter any notes, sources or media concerning parentage or who raised a child in the Birth fact.
 

[Jerry Bryan]

That data is not linked to the child and is printed as part the Parents records.

I enter any notes, sources or media concerning parentage or who raised a child in the Birth fact.
 

 

Laura's advice is accurate and is extremely wise. The truth is that RM does not offer a good place to enter sources for parent/child relationships. And indeed, no genealogy program that I'm aware of does any better than RM in this regard. The underlying problem is that most genealogy software implements a lineage based data model that is very similar to the GEDCOM standard for file interchange of genealogical data. The GEDCOM standard offers no good place to attach sources for parent/child relationships, and most of the genealogy software industry jumps off the same bridge with the GEDCOM standard.

 

The single exception that I'm aware of (not to say there aren't any others) is the now discontinued TMG software. When RM developed support for importing TMG data, the solution to the problem was the creation of a user defined fact type in RM called ParentChild (or some such), simply to provide a place to attach sources for parent/child relationships that were being imported from TMG. Absent such a user defined fact, Laura's suggestion to attach such sources to the Birth fact is probably about a good as you can do. Well, the only other thing I can suggest is to introduce your own user defined Parent/Child fact as a place to attach the sources. Either way, the sources will be attached to the child and not to the parents - just the opposite of the problem you have now.

 

One thing I don't know about the RM solution for importing TMG sources for parent/child relationship is whether or not the user defined fact is set up as a shared fact between the parent and child. If so, that might provide a way to make sure the parent/child source is associated with both.

 

Jerry

[Gina]

How do I cite my source for the parent-child relationship?

 

Which report(s) are you going to use as output? 

 

For the Narrative report, I am testing out a custom Fact called Child because I want to keep birth and parentage separate. Child is a family fact, not an individual fact, with two child roles (FirstBorn and OtherChild).

• The sentence for the parents when the child is their first born is: Parents' names became parents for the first time with the birth of their son/daughter, child's name, on date in place.
• The sentence for the child is: Child's name parents were Parents' names. (By changing the sort date on the fact, you can make it appear before or after the child's Birth fact.)

For the Research Notes report, I haven't come up with a simple solution for documenting parentage. The Child fact doesn't work because "Shared" facts only show up on the Research Notes report for the Principals and not the Witnesses/Sharees. The "Family" sources also do not show up on the Research Notes report.

[Renee Zamora]

Gina's comment made me think of my custom Parent fact I created. It only has the description filed enabled. I added it so I had a place to note the parents for a spouse. I didn't want to add the parents to my database, but I didn't want to lose that information on their parents either. This is helpful in the narrative reports when it won't include the spouse's line. I suppose one could add the Parent fact to everyone and put the sources there. You could check if you want it private or not so it does or doesn't show on reports.

[Jerry Bryan]

Gina's comment made me think of my custom Parent fact I created. It only has the description filed enabled. I added it so I had a place to note the parents for a spouse. I didn't want to add the parents to my database, but I didn't want to lose that information on their parents either. 

 

This is remindful of an idea I have been kicking around to enable narrative reports in RM to include marriage events in timeline order. The idea is to create a new, user-defined fact called Marriage-In-Reports or some such. It would be an individual fact rather than a family fact. That would be the only way to get it to print in timeline order. But then the question becomes about the best way to list the spouse. Unlike the situation you describe where the people you want to reference aren't really in the database, the spouse I want to reference really is in the database. But there isn't a way to reference them with an individual fact, only with a family fact, but family facts don't print in timeline order which is the problem I'm trying to solve. The only solution I have come up with so far is to put the name of the spouse into the descriiption field, but doing it that way the spouse wouldn't truly be linked to the marriage.

 

As I understand it, TMG accomplishes this with shared facts (shared events), where TMG allows two principles. Indeed, this appears to be the way TMG handles marriages rather than the nearly all the other genealogy software handles marriages as family events. But I'm trying to stay away from RM shared facts for reasons of lack of portability, among other things, and RM doesn't allow two principles on a shared event, anyway.

 

So I still don't know what the best way to solve this problem is within the constraints of what is possible within RM.

 

Jerry

[Laura]

I share the Marriage facts with both the spouses. 

 

Role:  Spouse

 

<?[Date][Desc][Place][PlaceDetails]|<%[Husband] and [Wife:given] [Wife:surname]|[Wife:Given] [Wife:Surname] and [Husband]> married< [desc]>< [Date]>< [PlaceDetails]>< [Place]>|<%[Husband] and [Wife:given] [Wife:surname]|[Wife:Given] [Wife:Surname] and [Husband]>'s marriage date and place are not known>.

 

This prints the marriage in the Individual record part of the Narrative report and the marriage fact is still printed between the spouses also.

[Jerry Bryan]

I share the Marriage facts with both the spouses. 

 

Now that you mention it, I think you have posted this strategy before and I just haven't considered it seriously enough. It looks to be quite elegant, and I will certainly play with it. It's not portable, but the lack of portability wouldn't really cause any data to be lost if RM data were to be shared with third party software. The only thing that would be "lost" would be the report formatting, and report formatting is not very portable anyway. Much thanks for posting this.

 

Jerry

[Laura]

Yes, I have posted it before more than once probably with different sentences.

The fact that other programs will probably only be importing the fact for the Principle is the plus for me. Otherwise, I wouldn't do it.

It also works well for other Family facts like a divorce or childrens's births.

[Jerry Bryan]

I thought I would report that I have tried Laura's suggestion of sharing the standard Marriage fact (a family fact) with both spouses as a way to get the marriage into to timeline order for each spouse in a narrative report. I'm very pleased with the results.

 

The little sample report I posted in the "Birth Sentence Template Problem for Spouse in Narrative Report" thread incorporates this trick. Unless I change my mind, I'm going to adopt this approach for all marriages moving forward.

 

I regard the fact that this particular shared fact does not export in GEDCOM to be an advantage, not a disadvantage. It's just a trick to get RM reports to look better and doesn't add any real data to the database.

 

Jerry

 

[Don Newcomb]

This is a problem I've brought up before. Facts have supporting documentation. Relationships do not. For instance, one of my ancestors received land from his father in consideration of the natural affection between father and son. This is the only  proof I've seen anywhere that the two were related or their relationship. I can enter the fact of the land transfer and document that but there is no way to link that documentation to the actual relationship between the two. There are family notes and family sources but they apply to everyone in the family, not just the individuals involved. This land transfer would prove nothing about the relationship between the father and mother, brothers, sisters, etc. It is specific to the relationship between the father and son and only them.  Yet, RM gives me no way to document the specific relationship other than via facts. 

 

One of the improvements I've suggested many times is that RM needs ways to document relationships and then analyze the strength of the documentation for lines, finding weak points that need more support. 

[Gina]

Thank you, Laura, for the tip. Like Jerry, I want to see marriage (and other couple events) show up in timeline order on the narrative report. 

 

Also, I use the Note for nearly every fact, and, after I added the necessary roles to all my couple facts, I realized this means each person can have their own version of the Note (in addition to their own sentence). Bonus! 

[Jerry Bryan]

I can enter the fact of the land transfer and document that but there is no way to link that documentation to the actual relationship between the two.  

 

This is a major concern I have had with RM and its major competitors for a long time. So here is a (probably dumb) question.

 

FamilySearch Family Tree seems to have a pretty good mechanism in place to document relationships. I've been playing with FSFT a good bit lately, both using it natively on the Web site and using it through the RM interface. Even though I've been playing with it a great deal, much of how it really works is still very mysterious to me. Most of the documentation I can find is very mechanical in nature: do step #1 followed by step #2 followed by step #3 to accomplish this task. But I can't find very much in the way of deeper "how does it work" documentation.

 

So here's the question. Suppose you enter your land transfer documentation into FSFT as evidence of the son and father relationship between your ancestors. And suppose you then use the RM interface to transfer the information into RM. What does the documentation look like at that  point in RM? Of course, it doesn't have to be these particular two individuals and this particular document. In general, how do relationship sources from FSFT transfer into RM? And if you then transfer the information from RM into a GEDCOM, what does the information look like in a GEDCOM?

 

Jerry

 

 

 

P.S. Tom has pointed out that transferring sources back and forth between RM and FSFT has some interesting implications for the source lumping vs. source splitting debate. But my question here doesn't have anything to do with source lumping and source splitting. It has to do with places in the data model for genealogical data where relationship sources can be attached.

[Renee Zamora]

When you add a person from FamilySearch Family Tree to your RootsMagic database no sources come over. You have to go into the FamilySearch Person Tools and on the Sources tab copy the sources you want. You are given an option of where to place the source for your RootsMagic person.  The same happens when you move your RootsMagic person to FSFT. No sources go over automatically.

 

This video may be helpful.

 

Sharing Sources Between RootsMagic and FamilySearch Family Tree

[Jerry Bryan]

When you add a person from FamilySearch Family Tree to your RootsMagic database no sources come over. You have to go into the FamilySearch Person Tools and on the Sources tab copy the sources you want. 

 

I didn't ask the question very well. Suppose you enter a source for relationship directly into FSFT using the browser interface into FSFT. Can such a source then be pulled back into RM? If so, how does it work and how does the source look in RM? I'm really fuzzy on how relationship sources work in FSFT.

 

Jerry

[TomH]

Jerry, I'm really fuzzy about your question. What is relationship source in FSFT? I thought you were onto something as I added a death cert source to someone and FSFT offered to attach it to the Father. After having done so, I reviewed the Father's Source details and see that it was auto-tagged to Name, Gender, and Birth. Why Birth? But more to the point, you attach a source to a person or couple and can tag it to only a limited number of facts or properties. There is no relationship fact nor relationship source that I see in FSFT. Evidence for a relationship still has to be attached as a source to both parties in the relationship and cannot be attached or tagged to the lineage-link itself.

In the other direction, a source attached to a person in FSFT can be cited, attached, linked, tagged to the matching person in RM and to any existing fact/event for that person. As an ultimately-split source. ;-)

[TomH]

In response to the relationship tag supported by TMG, the RootsMagician designed the direct import to add a custom ChildParent fact to each child. I forget what it contained but was a place for sources for the relationship tag to be attached so that they were not lost in transit.

[Jerry Bryan]

Tom, I think I can now answer my (admittedly pretty dumb) question. I make reference to the following

 

https://help.familys...ng_sources.html

 

which includes the following sentence.

 

Each person, couple relationship, and parent-child relationship can have up to 1,000 sources.

 

I'm particular interested in sources for parent-child relationships - exactly how such a source would be entered into FSFT, and then how it would be moved to RM.

 

Here is an example which  I think ought to qualify as a source for a parent-child relationship in FSFT. A death certificate typically includes the names of the parents of the deceased when those names are known by the informant for the death certificate. That seems like a Child-Parent relationship to me.

 

Suppose there is a death certificate in FSFT for an individual, and suppose that individual and his or her parents are already in FSFT. Suppose there is a record hint in FSFT for the death certificate (or equivalently, a WebHint in RM), and suppose I confirm the record hint. There will be three confirmations, one for the deceased and one for each of the parents. I believe it is the confirmations for the parents that FSFT could be calling a "source for a parent-child relationship". So far so good, unless I do not understand what a "source for a parent-child relationship" is in FSFT.

 

Further suppose that I have the same three people in my RM database and they are appropriately "matched" using the FSFT API. So I click on the FSFT icon in RM for any one of the three people, and then click on sources (I'm still in RM, not in FSFT). For the deceased, I will find the death certificate tagged to the name, gender, death, and birth. For either of the parents, I will find the death certificate tagged to the name and gender. But nowhere will I find the death certificate tagged to anything called "parent-child relationship", even though that's what the source is attached to in FSFT (or at least so it seems to me).

 

So let's go back to FSFT.  From the User's Guide, I find the following sentence.

 

Or if the source is attached to a parent-child relationship, hover your mouse cursor over the child’s name. Click the Edit Relationship link that appears. 

 

The screen doesn't say Edit Relationship, but it does say Edit Parents, which I think means the same thing. Indeed, sort of a "Relationship Screen" comes up if I click on Edit Parents even though the screen doesn't really have a title. There are a bunch of boxes, including one for sources. But the death certificate I have not already confirmed is not listed for the person I'm looking at, and indeed it appears that there are no relationship sources at this point. So my theory that attaching the death certificate as I described would create a parent-child relationship apparently is not correct.

 

Let's try to add a parent-child relationship anyway in FSFT, so I click on New Source from the relationship screen. A screen comes up asking me to give a name for the source and a URL. Since I happen to have the death certificate in question posted on my own Web site, I provide that URL. I answer a bunch of other questions, and it seems to take the source.

 

So now I go back to RM, and for each of the three individuals I click on the FSFT icon and then click the Sources tab. For all three of the people, it is the case that my newly added source is not visible on RM.  Indeed, my newly added source does not appear in the "list of sources" screen on FSFT, either. The only place my newly added relationship source seems to show up is on the aforementioned "Edit Parents" screen, the place where I entered the information in the first place.

 

So the answer to my question appears to be (unless I'm still doing something wrong or still not understanding correctly) is that sources for parent-child relationships in FSFT are not visible in RM, and they really are not even visible in FSFT, either, except in the most indirect and hard to find way. Perhaps this is an area where FSFT plans some enhancements in the future, but it appears to me that right now the feature for sources for Parent-Child relationships is implemented so incompletely that it might as well not even be there.  Maybe I'm wrong, and I hope I am. But that's the way it appears.

 

Sorry to have been so fuzzy with my question. I clearly didn't quite understand what I was asking. I'm still not sure that I do.

 

Jerry

[TomH]

It's FSFT that is fuzzy!