I’m a new user working on structuring my genealogy research, and I’ve encountered a challenge regarding source citations of complementary or incomplete information about the same event. I was not able to find an equivalent post on this, so I hope I am contributing something new here. Otherwise I’m of course happy with a link to an existing discussion.
(Version 5.2.4 on Windows 10)
Problem:
Gramps allows me to create an event (e.g., birth) and attach multiple sources or citations to it. However, it does not support linking specific information within the event to particular sources. But I want to track not only which sources support an event, but also which specific details of the event derive from which source.
Example:
Source A: Say, by interviewing my father I got to know that his Aunt “X” was born in Town “Y” and I create a corresponding person with an birth-event (still missing the birth date) and I link this event to a source citation, lets say “Interview Dad”.
Source B: In my further research I find Aunt “X”'s birth certificate including her name “X”, birthplace “Y” and additionally her birthdate “Z”. Of course I could then add the missing information “Z” within the existing birth-event mentioned above and link it to a new source citation.
But if I do so, I would (as stated above) not be able anymore to differentiate which specific details of the event derive from “Interview Dad” and which derive from the birth certificate. So what I am missing here is the possibility to directly link a source/citation to details of an event rather then to the whole event, to document, “who knew what”.
Feature Request / Suggestions?
If anyone has a good idea for this problems and/or could give me some thoughts about the workarounds I have tried to think of so far, I would be grateful. So far, I will probably have to go with my approach using individual attributes. (see bel.)
Possible Workarounds:
I already thought of possible workarounds but none of them are very satisfiying, because they are time consuming or because they would not be machine readable and thus not suitable for applying bulk changes later on:
Attributization: I could add an individual attribute (e.g. named “event detail”) to each source citation with some stardardized value-option (“full”, “date only”, “existance only”, “place only”, etc…) and make sure that I don’t link this source citation to any other primary object.
Individual Notes: I could add individual notes to each source citation describing which details are provided by the source. This would make my dataset unstructured in terms of latter conversions/ computational editing.
Multiple events: I could simply add a new event for each source of information about this event and hope for some feature which solves my problem in future versions, then try to merge the events, if possible. Could be the least time consuming way but seems a bit risky…
There are as many ways to create, organize and use sources and citations as there are Gramps users.
The S/C for the Birth Certificate is primary as it “proves” the event. For me, this is the only, or similar, citation to the event. Others will share a S/C that gives clues to the event. An example is a Census citation will give information/clues about the person’s birth. An interview of your father or other relative, I would classify as clue information but not proof and add it to the person’s tab for S/C’s. But as already stated other users share S/C’s throughout a person’s record and events.
Your father or other relative is the Source. What information they provide is the Citation. So the citation could specify something like: “Information on Aunt Mary’s birth” with a date. If you have a transcript of the interview or an email, that can go into the citation’s Notes tab. If you have an audio recording, that can go into the Gallery tab. Then you can create a second citation for the same relative source “Information on Aunt Mary’s death”, etc. Each of these citations can share the same notes or audio file.
There is also the Confidence level for each citation. It can give you an indication of how sure your source of the information provided. If you share the citations with other events or people, etc, the same confidence will apply for the citation wherever shared.
All of the people type views can have the Citations gramplet that can be place in the view’s bottom bar. This citation aggregates all of the person’s citations from all of the various locations.
Thank you for your detailed response. Regarding the way on how to structure the sources and citations this is very helpful and I am now planning on doing it similar to the way you described it. Still, I am having trouble doing it in a “data first” style.
I could describe the content of a citation by linking it to an additional individual note, media file or url to make it clear, what kind of detail of the event derived from that specific citation/source. But these would be in the end unstructured information and of course still human but not machine readable data, which could lead to problems such as information loss when migrating the data.
Why not use an event attribute added tonm that Birth Event. I associate this kind of citations with an attribute of type Information Origin and a value of Place. I then put the citation there, in your case what your father would have said about this event.
That sounds great. I didn’t realize that there are some attributes with an additional citation option, (the attributes of citations/sources itself don’t have them).
Do you first add the sources to the event itself and use the attribute citation for the clarification about the ‘Information Origin’ only or do you generally limit yourself to the attributes and leave the sources tab unused?
What about an option of, for the event, add the relevant sources / citations and then use the Note section of the event to give a brief description of what detail is given for each source / citation for example:- 1921 Census= DoB 1901, Dad Interview=DoB 1902 etc?