Documenting Sources

When I first started using Gramps, I was intimidated by what seemed to be a confusing array of (to me) conflicting ways to document a data source (Sources, Citations, Media, Notes, …). Now several years and 500 people into my project, I’m still confused. My current practice is to simply attach an image in the gallery related to a Person or Family. It works, but it doesn’t seem very rigorous or consistent. I recall seeing some guidance in some wiki on the Gramps site with advice on this subject, but I can’t seem to find it again. I also see some post in the Gramps Discourse site that relate to this question.

So, is there some sort of standard best practices for documenting to document data sources?

Thanks for any advice,
John

Gramps 5.1.2.
Linux kihikihi 5.4.0-144-generic #161-Ubuntu SMP Fri Feb 3 14:49:04 UTC 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Well, it does sound consistent at least. Personally I usually attach media to sources or citations (attached to events) rather than other objects. But instead, you could attach citations to your media, and keep the media attached to the people and families.

Your choices will impact not only how you enter, view, and search for the data in the Gramps GUI, but also how it appears on reports and charts, in generated web sites, and in other sites or programs that you feed by exporting GEDCOM files (if you do any of those things). So try different ways and figure out what works best for you.

Regardless of how you do it, you should be able to use your data to answer questions like “How do I know this to be true?”, “Where did I get this information?”, etc.

Hey John,

Can you elaborate on the types of sources that you use? It makes it easier to give examples adapted to your situation.

Also, have you ever used Ancestry? Even a free account may give you some hints.

Regards,

Enno

P.S. your Gramps is a bit old. You can download a newer version from our site.

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