Many times all of the reference information about a particular event/person/etc. is in the source. So I create an empty citation linking the source and the event/person/etc. However per Generate reports including photos? - #28 by GaryGriffin I’ve come to understand that the bibliography for Gramps reports ignores these citations as they don’t have dates or vol/page values filled in. How do others handle this?
Every citation I create has “today” as the date. Many do not have the page filled in, however there may be a note attached.
I do not have any citations without vol/page that have a media object.
I started using Gramps before citations were added and somewhere along
the way Gramps automatically added empty citations for all of the
pre-existing sources. I have since gone back and cleaned up some of the
citations, but not all of them, so I still have some empty citations
that date back to that time and that I may never get around to changing.
Incidentally, “today” is a valid date in Gramps. It causes the calendar to be polled and the current date to be inserted.
I have very few Media objects with my tree. But for those that ARE included, I use the citation for storing the Digital Provenance.
It tells where the object was sourced. A page number can be a URL with the date being a date of download. (Which helps if it disappears in the future and you need to relocate the URL in the Wayback Machine.) For scanned documents, I use the repository, source, and citation to catalog the location of the original as of that date.
I’m looking at this not just from the perspective of media, but also for sources and citations that don’t have media. I’d like to make sure my bibliography shows all sources of information. However if citations that don’t have a date or vol/page are skipped, then my reports are incomplete.
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I am not sure that I agree with the following:
From Gramps 5.0 Wiki Manual - Categories - Gramps :
Citations specify which parts of a source are relevant to the information in the database. For example, a Source may be a book, and the citation may be a particular page in the book.
Consider a death certificate. I use either ‘Death Certificate’ (If I have a copy of it) or the name of the index of the death cert (like California Death Index, 1940 - 1997) as the source. And the date and registration/page number from the certificate in the Citation.
Consider a Census. The Forms plug-in requires a Source for the census (like 1940 US Census) and generates a Census Event with a Citation mapping the forms Reference field to the citations Vol/Page field. And maps the date field.
Consider a Find a Grave website entry. I use ‘Find a Grave Website’ as the Source. And the Memorial ID as the Vol/page in the Citation.
Consider a family picture. I use ‘Personal Note’ as the source and the date in the citation. And include a list of the people in a note of the citation.
This is just how I do it. Others may do differently.
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@GaryGriffin thank you for explaining how you do it, this helps me understand other ways of putting this information into my records. For Find a Grave, I have been using a Repository to represent the Find a Grave website and a source for each entry, however that leaves my citation empty. Do you then put the name of the entry as the vol/page field?
For family pictures, you are saying you have a single source named “Personal Note” and then each citation is a particular note or picture, correct?
Similarly for an individual death certificate you have a single source named “Death Certificate” and the citation is the individual certificate, correct?
I have been treating documents (death certificate, pictures) as Sources as they have a title based on the description of the Sources category. However then the only relevant information in the Citation is how likely the evidence is correct.
I suspect there are many different ways that people enter and organize their date. My approach is few sources and many citations.
I do not use a repository for Find a Grave website.
Source
Title: Find a Grave Website
Pub Info: https://www.findagrave.com
Citation
Volume/Page: --Memorial ID–
Add Note with the text from the site
Add Media gallery if there is media (pic of memorial or person)
Yes, I have a Source “Personal Note” or a Source “Personal Note from name” if I have a lot of info from another researcher who has not specified the source. If I get a photo album from someone, I would use Source as “Photo Album from name”. Each photo is a separate citation.
I have few original B/M/D certificates, so most of my Sources are indexes like “California Death Index 1940-1997”. For those certificates I possess, then yes, I use a source “Birth Certificate” or “Marriage Certificate” or “Death Certificate”. Yes, each individual certificate is a citation.
I think of it this way - the citation info should allow someone else to reproduce my document. So I have few Sources and many Citations.
Other people may use a completely different system. Consistency to one system seems more important than the specific details.
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I also follow this process.
Source: 1861 English and Wales Census
Volume/page: ED, Folio, etc.
Notes: for births deaths marriages and other interesting sources, I copy the transcript into the note. I don’t for Census as they are usually too long.
Many times I want to check the citation, so it is handy to have it right there. I store very few images.
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I have:
Repositories: 33
Sources: 2039
Citations: 73192
I am adding 5-10 citations a day, maybe 1 source a month and if lucky a new repository each year.
Using your method I would have:
Repositories: 2039
Sources: 73192
Citations: 73192
In Gramps, a citation cannot exist without a source and it is the citation that gets attached to an event or person, etc. So for me, logically the most unique information become the citation. The individuals birth certificate in the citation that gets attached to the birth event. The Source is which database did I find the birth certificate, or do I have a personal scan of the certificate; in that case, I am the Repository, the Source is “Birth Certificate” with the publisher “Scanned document”.
The other consideration is how has Gramps been programed to access information in reports. For the most part, Repositories are NOT included in the report’s S/C and as you are finding out, Gramps is looking at the citation first in determining what to include.
So as I see it, you can manipulate the open source code to handle your S/C scheme or add information to the citation knowing Gramps wants to find some information here as its primary focus when building the S/C record for reports.
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I do it like that too, specially when i interview someone about it (the source is Analysis of picture x by someone). But I could also create a source for the picture itself. In that case, citations are often based on what’s back tells about the front of the image.
About the date of the citation. In the previous case, if the date is on the back of the image, I indicate it in the title of the source and in the field Date of the citation. Otherwise, if an analysis can help me determine the date of the image, I only add it to the Date field of the media with an explanatory note and the citations in an attribute of that media. As a result, this information from the media itself is also interesting to me in reports.
I also have a repository like Find a Grave but my source, linked to this repository, is the cemetery itself where the grave is. The citation indicates what the grave is and where it is indicated that it can be found within this cemetery. I do not necessarily put a date (possibly that of when the image of the repository was taken if it is indicated)
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Admittedly I haven’t fully tested this, but I have never seen the Repository show up in a gedcom upload.
The Source and Citations do come though very well.
The Repository record is part of the GEDCOM 5.5.1 specification :
And is slightly modified for the proposed 7.x :
My mistake. I did a test after I posted and I found the records.
I do most of my uploads to WikiTree and can’t say I have seen them there, but again, I might have missed it. I will have to look closer.
I created a gedcom of 13 people. I didn’t realize that the gedcom included a copy of many notes that were not associated with any of the 13 that I selected for the gedcom.
The Notes inclusion seems to be very liberal. Did you check for indirect associations?
Try using the Notes category CardView view mode (experimental) add-on. Perhaps you can trace back their connections with its features.
I did a “find” in the ged file using the note ID. There was no association found. Reading the notes, I know they are not associated with the 13 people I included. The notes are sequential in the file too.
Looking in the tree from which the GEDCOM was generated, what are the Types of the Notes, do they have any internal links, and what references do they have?
(I am curious if Notes with no references are included? They might be seen as potential ‘general’ notes about the Tree, rather than objects within the Tree. Or about Repositories, Sources or Media objects. None of those links would survive transfer by GEDCOM.)
My mistake again. Not having a good weekend. Should have guessed that GRAMPS always has an option that I missed. In the gedcom creation screen there is an option to include ALL notes (I found this means all notes, sources, repository, etc.) There is the option I should have selected, “include only associated records”.
My bad. Sorry folks. Only been using it 2 years and still learning 
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