I’ve got several threads of emails with different family members, trying to put names to people in old photographs. Do people typically import these emails and letters as evidence? How do you categorize them?
I was thinking of creating a “Source” naming the person I got an email response from, and adding the email as a citation, and importing a PDF printout of the response as media linked to the citation.
I’d like to link the family member to the source, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to link the person record as a Source… but I can add them as a “Source Citation”. Would that be the correct linkage?
I think there was another thread a while ago about wishing for a way to somehow link the Author of a Source to a Person.
Meanwhile, any notes you have in any format can (and should, in my opinion) be treated as Sources. You can create Citations for those Sources, and also store transcripts of the Sources as Notes which you attach not only to the Sources but also to the People who happen to be the Authors, if you like.
As with all things in Gramps, try it out and see how you like the results (not only in the interface, but also in any reports you use, and any places to which you export data) to see if you like it, before investing a lot of time.
So just to put it in words I understand, you’d treat the email as a Source store the transcript of the email as a Note on the Source, import the image as a Media object and create a Citation to link the Source to the Media?
Sorry if I’m getting this wrong. I recently restored my late grandfather’s genealogy files and want to do this a bit more organized than he did (no offense, grandpa…)
If you want a link to another GRAMPS record, this can be done in a Note. There is a button in the Note toolbar for links (in my theme, it looks like >). The dialog allows to choose between internet and GRAMPS like. Selecting a GRAMPS object is easy.
Then, when you display this Note, Ctrl-click on the link warps to the designated record.
The link is also translated into a clickable link in Narrative Web.
Putting the relative as a Source is a good idea especially if they are providing ongoing information as opposed to a one-off email.
You can enter the relative’s name as the Source Title or put the Title as “Correspondence” as an example with the relative as the Author. It may depend on if you have other relatives providing information and if want to group them together with a common title.
The Citation under the Source could be “Email of 2024-08-08” with either a note containing the email text or printing the email out to a PDF and adding the PDF to the citation’s Gallery. Of course this would depend on the nature of the correspondence.
You cannot directly link the relative into the Source. You can link them in a Note. I have used this when an author has been a cousin for a regular published source. I will add a note with the relative’s name, highlight the name, then use the note’s link editor option. It helps if the relative in question is the Active person in the people list as you are adding the link to the source note.
The alternative is to create a note with the correspondence information and at the end create a source attribution where you link to the relative as described. Then you can add the note to the relevant objects in the database.