I have used gramps for about 10 years now and no matter what other programs I play around with I always end up sticking with gramps. There is one feature I have used in other programs that I would love to see incorporated into gramps, a separate field to allow a custom source name. I prefer to name my sources with the event type followed by the source information. It much easier to search for existing sources that way. I also know people that like to reference sources geographically and then by source information. I would like to have a name field that is not part of the actual source citation (and would not be included in a gedcom) it would only exist as a way to display sources in a way that makes sense to each of us.
Personally I use one source “xyz town’s civil registers” by town, so birth, marriage & death citations of each registers of that town are grouped but also mixed under their source. To make each type of citation record easily locatable I tag each type with one birth, marriage or death tag, each tag is colored with a different color like blue, green and purple. Tags don’t be exported into the gedcom and event types of citations are easily recognizable with their color and searchable.
One field to consider is the Abbreviation field. I have entered information for most every source consolidating the Title down to its basic components. However, it does not meet your needs to have it not export to GEDCOM and reports do use the field. The Family Sheet uses it as the default source name if it exists.
Some examples of my Titles; Abbreviations
- Ancestors and Descendants of Andrew Lee & Clarinda Knapp Allen; FAM:Allen:1952
- Harvard College: Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates; 1636-1920; EDU:Harvard:1920
- New England Historical & Genealogical Register, The; Volume 100; NEHGR:100
- U.S. 1930 Federal Census; USA:1930
- U.S. World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942; USA:WW2:Draft
- Vital Records of Brockton, Massachusetts, to the Year 1850; MA:VR:Brockton
The other problem with any solution would be the need to have the solution searchable in the source/citation selectors. If not, what good would it do you. The Abbreviation is currently not part of the selectors but it easy (I did it) and will file a Feature Request ASAP. If you had a field that was excluded from GEDCOM that field would not be be part of selectors.
Feature Request submitted
Looks interesting. Since you’re looking at Citations anyway…
I have been trying to add columns in the Sources tabs in the Edit Object windows… like you helped me add columns to the Addresses tab of Edit Person. (Adding a Citation Date column would support differentiating between issues of a periodical Source.) No luck so far. It is evidently more complex when the module is hit from so many places in the GUI.
It seems to blow up if I change ANYTHING in the .gpr.py registration.
I have never been successful with date fields. But, the files you would edit are \gramps\gui\editors\displaytabs\citationembedlist.py and citationrefmodel.py
The embedlist causes the displayed list but the fields it displays are set up with reference model. The problem, the date field is not readily available. So you need to get the date into citationrefmodel and then have it display with citationembedlist.
In my adding the Abbreviation column to the selectors, the Abbreviation field was already accessible in their needed model files.
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Hummm… guess I’m back to an enhancement request!
Would it be even easier to find sources and citations if there was a 3 leveled hierarchial view for Repositories where it listed both the Sources and the Citations related to that Repository… same way as the hierarchary viw for sources are today, showing citations?
i.e.
National Archives (Repository)
– National Census of 1910 (Source)
---- Census record for the “some state”, “some county”, “some city”, “some street”, “some family name” (Citation)
Or maybe also have the possibility to register Sub Sources…
i.e.
National Census for USA 1920
- Sub for State
– Sub for County
— sheet 1 for that county (the document as source for addr and fam 1)
— sheet 2 for that county (another document as another source for another addr and another fam)
And then the citations connected to the document level of the source… as many citations thats needed for the information thats in that source (depending on how each and one wants to register citations…
The top levels of the hierachy could be only for viewing in Gramps… and it could be concatenated to one text string for export…
I know I would have used a function with sub souces at full extend…
Same as I would have used sub-events…
A little more to register, but when you have 10-20000 thousand of sources a few hundred Repositories and maybe 90-100k Citations, it would help in the organization and finding them…
And those that don’t need it or don’t want to use it, they can do it as its done to day, as everything in Gramps it should be the choice of the user how to view and what to use…
Thats the great thing about Gramps contra a lot of other genealogy software, the freedom of choices…
Yes, that sounds interesting for when you’re working Citations from that direction.
But I’m thinking about the other direction.
Say that I have 4 newspaper articles from John Smith’s local newspaper & 2 newswire items in his hometown newpaper that all are supporting documentation for his death:
Chronologically - Accident report in the local paper & hometown paper, a death notice in the local, an obituary in both, a funeral notice in the local.
In the Event Source Citations, I can see the 6 articles and that only 2 were in the Hometown paper. I might be able to guess the order of the others since the Page number hints at how newsworthy the article was.
But I have to open each to see which date was for each… or redundantly key-in disambiguation detail in the Page/Volume field of the Citations.
The Citation Gramplet doesn’t help for this either.
So I submitted a request to add the Date & Confidence columns. (Privacy & Tags columns mentioned but not requested.)
(One of the ugly thing about periodicals as a source is how they can mess with the Repository framework. An aunt has a scrapbook with a bunch of articles, Newspapers.com has a subset covering certain years or issues. The LDS has some microfilm reels, my hometown library has reels for most, & the local historical society has only the early years. What a mess!)
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I agree with you in that to list and sort the Citations by the Date would have tremendous impact on the sorting of citations… no doubt… That is something I have missed for a very long time, actually since I started to use Gramps…
But that is another View, so the two will not in any way conflict with each other… so I second you on the date field for Citations in the Event View and any other place where Citations are listed…
The Citations can be sorted by Date under the Sources or “Sub-Sources” just by clicking the “Date Field Header”…
And if sorting on names, its just a recursive sorting, start sort order on top level, then next level and so on untill no more levels in the list…
PS. I know that is some coding to get it right, so its just a tips for an addition of feature, both the hierachial view and the sorting…
… But I think it might be of great help for some researchers to have that function… and maybe help some to find other ways to register and do research… ?
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Actually, If you use the Citation Tree View in Sources, you can already see the Dates for the Citations in the Tree… but not in the Citation List for each Source…
Just a Tips…
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