There might be a section that explains the best way to organize documents of different types in the Gramps program. This can be done in various ways. I want to share the inconveniences I’ve encountered. I’m sure you’ll find a few constructive flaws in my solution. How would you do it?
So, I have several years of revision lists and several years of confessional records. Each type of document, for each year, has several pages where my ancestors are mentioned. Each page can contain a long list of ancestors, and there are many such pages. In total, these documents mention almost 700 ancestors with the same surname.
Firstly, I created two types of events: “revision lists” and “confessional records”. Now I have doubts about this decision because I recently learned about the existence of a native event type called Census. But I still don’t understand whether it can replace both of my types or if it’s suitable for this purpose… And what if it’s some other list, like a list of Cossacks, a military list, a list of village council members, etc…? What advantages will I have using this type instead of any others?
Secondly, the problem… Each person has several events, for example, let’s take one “confessional records” event for the year 1792. It contains several Citations. Each Citation contains one or more media and a note with a digitized list of ancestors that I’m interested in these media documents. It seems well-structured. But imagine that I need to find a record for a certain person in 1792. I would have to open each of the Citations for that year and go through each list to find this person. And if I’m doing some analytical work, I would have to do this for every year. If I divide each Citation into a separate “confessional records” event, finding the data would be easier, but then the structure is lost because, in reality, the event was one - the execution of a census for a certain year. And I’m dividing it into many events, which seems illogical. How would you do it to maintain the structure and also make it convenient to use?
Thank you.
Additionally, as a result, web reports with events that include all citations for the entire year appear uninformative on an person’s HTML page due to the excessive number of irrelevant citations that do not contain information about the person.
If the Confessional Records and Revision Lists are documents, then they are actually Sources, not Events. You can create Citations of them as evidence of various Events, such as Residence.
Read the background for Confessional Records. Was appalled by their use: recording compliance with mandatory Easter Confession for confirming Protestant purge of the Counter-Reformation.
So essentially, they WERE a Census… but for persecution rather than tax purposes.
I agree, if the list is governmental rather than religious or other i Would make that the primary list to try to keep the information more uniform and unbiased. But of course at times various countries had persecution lists which really makes them historic and relevant to a time and place. If your source documents are scanned images I would load them into Adobe Acrobat to convert to a PDF and run the OCR option over it so it can convert the image to text that can be searched and copied. Its not so great for handwriting but generally multigeneration photocopies work fine and also non English documents too. There is an option called searchable image. this leaves the original image as the source page but overlays invisible text so you can copy and search the document. these documents I attach to my individual profiles so anyone in the future has a better document to use and work with.
So, everything I add to Person is based on the existence of some documents. Even the fact of birth and death are documents also. If I were to handle all of this as citations, then what’s the purpose of events? Please explain the distinction between using events and citations. You’ve really highlighted an interesting point, as I don’t use the Citations tab at all except for when it comes to memories from relatives that I’ve recorded on a voice recorder. I always wrap citations by events and then add events to people. I think its because event has place property, but citation doesnt.
I’ve thought about this, but haven’t tried it yet because I’m skeptical about achieving satisfactory results with the recognition of handwritten historical text. In your opinion, which of the existing tools delivers the best result? Finereader? Or is there something more suitable for historical documents? Perhaps there’s a third-party API?
Your confessional Records are Sources. You can attach Media documents to them, e.g. your digitised copy (or simply a link to it). In case, you have a reliable OCRed version, this OCR can be a Note for the media. A Note is searchable.
From the source (confessional records), you conclude that on such date the person lived at this place. Then you have a residency Event (or some other convenient event type). This event is annotated with a Citation (year, line number) referencing the Source (confessional record).
IMHO, don’t mix events and sources. This will make your database messy and logically inconsistent.
