I am curious how people are using tags to organise their data. I don’t use them a lot, but I have tags such as Unverified to tag relationships that I don’t have enough data to consider legitimate but I want to use as a place holder… I also have tags to indicate that I consider the person the end of the line rather than a tree I haven’t traversed yet. I also have one for special people like Filles du Roi, or people with bios/military heritage…
I am in the process of reorganizing my equipment: renaming of tags, filters and certain labels in order to apply a standard to them more in line with my workflow which itself is in reflection / repair or simply more practical and more sustainable.
About my tags, they are often in a hierarchical form - “theme | sub-theme | etc” - some are real tags - “Typology | Marital Status” - and others are more status tags - "Death | Found “,” Evidence | No “,” Evidence | Yes ", etc.
With ad hoc filters, they make it possible to build workflows in order to initiate actions.
I’m using a similar system like the one mentioned by @PLegoux.
My main tags are:
Event|ToDo: I search all birth,s deaths and marriages in churchbooks, so if I get an event date from another source I tag them, so I don’t forget to search for them
Event|Place: A placeholder for place events which I’ll add to places once it is possible
Place|Not locatable: For old place names which aren’t locateable
DNA Match|<person>|verified: People matching with <person> (=myself or other people where I have raw data files) with known common ancestors
DNA Match|<person>|unverified: People matching with <person> without known common ancestors
Research Note: I use this tag to highlight all objects with an attached research note e.g. about conflicting information or when I suspect something, but neither prove nor disprove it yet
shortcuts for commonly used filters (e.g. Swiss ancestors, German ancestors, found in a common source/book, etc.). Once individuals are tagged, searching tags seems to be far faster than the complex filters needed to build up the tag list in the first place.
to help keep track of completeness. For example, one of my uncles put together a genealogy on paper, and as I have been entering all the individuals, I not only attach the source, I also tag them. When I’m finished, I compare the number of tags, the number references to the source, and a hand count of the original genealogy to make sure they match. It sounds overly redundant and maybe a little stupid, but I’ve caught a bunch of mistakes that way. I’ve done this with six separate trees now …
I like seeing all the ways people use these things that I would never have considered!
The only thing I have tag for for now is “Not comfirmed” as I placed on everyone on the tree as I got the tree from a grandparent. The closest people I have removed it, but for other I will remove when I find info that confirm them. (the tree didnt have much sources in it, maybe the person that made it did it on paper I dont have or just didnt put it in)
Other than that I dont have any but will look at other people here for inspiration.
One idea I have had is that whenever I find people in a census, mark them with an tag for that census, so I can easier to see who I have found in a census for a spesific year. And who havent (and compare it to when they live ofc), but not sure if I am going to do that yet.
Among all the other Tag uses, I reserve one Specific Tag (like FilterPerson) for defining the reference person in a Custom Filter. Particularly with Multi-Stage Custom Filters, being rigorous in changing the <ID> in a custom filter is … complex.
So I set up a <Filter> using a rule that looks for Tags. Another Filter which leverage rules which use that <Filter> results as the reference rather than an <ID>.
This let’s me change the output of all the rules of a Filter in a single step… by simply applying a Tag.
As an example, I often want an Hourglass selection: the ancestors, descendant families and siblings of a particular family… maybe even including the other spouses so blended families aren’t so ambiguous. (Someone will give us a more efficient way to do this eventually.It is close to the contents of a 2-way fan chart.)
This filter leverages Tagging 2 reference people: the mother & father. Then applying the filter. The filtering runtime can get out-of-hand quickly, so tag only a Tag a few reference people.
Here’s that example filter. (This is quicker and less error prone than explicitly describing it in text.)
In the User Directory, paste the into <filters> chunk of: gramps\gramps51\custom_filters.xml