Repository vs Source vs Citation: Spanish Civil Registry certificate & Diocesan baptismal record

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Probably this might be answered the best by Spanish genealogists.

After a couple of weeks using Gramps I am still a bit confused with the limits of Repository, Source and Citation.

I use to have these cases:

A) Birth certificate: In Spain, since 1871, we have had a Civil Registry in every municipality in the country. These register births, marriages, deaths… For example, if you need a copy of a birth certificate you have to request it at the Civil Registry of the municipality where the birth took place giving the full name, birth date, and parents names. In the copy they give you, they also specify reference data about the location of the certificate (volume, book, page). I can not access the books by myself.

B) Baptismal record: In Spain each diocese has an archive where they keep the books of baptisms, marriages and deaths of each parish. Many times I can access the baptismal books by myself.

C) I get a multiple page document where my relatives appears in some places.

Example of cases:
A) I obtain from the Civil Registry of Barcelona a copy of a birth certificate with references (volume, book and page).
B) I obtain from a Diocesan archive a copy of a baptismal record.
C) Census of municipality.

Until now for cases as A) Civil Registry I was splitting like:

  • Repository: Civil Register of Barcelona
  • Source:
    • title: Birth certificate of given person,
    • publication info: details about volume / book / page,
    • gallery: I attach the copy of the birth certificate I got.
  • Citation: In field volume/page I used to set like “full document” because this certificates are at most 3 page long, and I feel don’t need to be more specific.

So the given certificate is the Source, is this approach right?

But now I have baptismal records. They are very similar to Civil Registry certificates. I have the Diocesan Archive, I have a parish baptismal book, and I have a copy of the baptismal record.
Now I have the feeling that the baptismal book should be the source, and the baptismal record the citation. Then I should attach the baptismal record to the citation, and not to the Source.

I want to be as much consistent as possible.

That makes me think about I should change the approach about Civil Registry certificates, and the source should be the incomprehensible Civil Registry reference details, and the Citation the birth certificate itself and attach the media to the citation instead of to the Source.

How are you splitting that?

Thanks

Thanks for your

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Here in The Netherlands, most records are sent to archives once they are not needed by the church or local government. And that means that, after I moved from Amsterdam to a village in another part of the country, my data, as far as it was still in some fysical form, was sent from the Amsterdam city hall to the city archive, which is in another building, and has its own site.

For me this means, that there is a source, that I call the “Amsterdam index cards” (or its Dutch equivalent), from which I cite the actual card by putting the name (my own, or an ancestor’s) and the birth date in the citation. And when I want, I can also relate this collection of index card to the repository, the Amsterdam city archive, where I can specify a call number, which is the top level index number of the collection in their catalog. And in this scheme, I treat the collection of index cards as the source. I may do the same for the civil register, if that’s a single entity, of for the birth, marriage, and deatth registers, which are available in other cities and municipalities.

In most cases, I use the same scheme for church books, which often have different volumes, for which I speciy volume and page in the citation. Most of these books are sent to governemt archives too, when they’re full, so their repositories are often similar, but not always.

In a way this means that I always try to respect the fonds:

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It is hard for me to give specific answers. But I can point out things to consider.

In most cases, the Repository information is NOT included in the Source/Citation generated for reports. In 5.2, users have the ability to select how the S/C is displayed. Currently there is the Default. However, there is an Enhanced citation format addon option under Beta / Expert User that adds the Repository information.

As you described, it seems that you are setting up a single Citation attached to each Source. Which you can do. But if you have two birth records for two different people from the Barcelona registry, what information would be common to both records?

So maybe the source can be

Title: Barcelona Births
Author: Civil Register of Barcelona
Publication: 1888

Then the citation contains the specific information for the person.

Date: date of birth
V/P: Volume:## Book:## Page:## Juan Valdez

And put the text in the citation’s Note tab and any scans of documents in the Gallery tab.

As a test, create a new test database and add a person with a birth event. Then create a Source and Citation for the event. For the first test just fill in the fields with their Titles “Title”, “Author”, Publication" and the same for the citation. Then print the Complete Individual report to PDF. This will display how the S/C will appear. Create other S/C records for your test person trying various scenarios.

Just remember, that whichever S/C scheme you put into practice, your goal is to provide enough information so that someone else will be able to duplicate your efforts. That is the bottom line. There are as many ways to organize sources and citations as there are Gramps users. Find which works best for you.

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Thanks very much for your answer. Now that you mention it, it makes a lot of sense. Certificates should attach to “citations”.

About the sources:

Title: Barcelona Births
Author: Civil Register of Barcelona
Publication: 1888

In this case what is the meaning of Publication: 1888? Is the year the birth certificate was published? or do you mean the year that Civil Register of Barcelona started to register births?

I think I will set

  • Title: Barcelona Births
  • Author: Civil Register

So instead of getting the following citation in the report:
Civil Register of Barcelona: Barcelona Births

I get:
Civil Register: Barcelona Births
What seems to me less cluttered.

And put the text in the citation’s Note tab and any scans of documents in the Gallery tab.

I agree about adding the scanned doc in citation Gallery tab, but I don’t see the point with citation’s Note tab. I don’t use to add notes to citations. What do you use to mention there?

In case the doc is very rich of information, nothing stops me to add multiple citation referring same media object, right?
Like this:

  1. Civil Register: Barcelona Births

    1a. Date: 1885-10-07
    Page: 051/345/036 - Juan Valdez | header note

    1b. Date: 1885-10-07
    Page: 051/345/036 - Juan Valdez | left side note

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Yes. That was the idea and that there might be other published years.

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Regarding the Note tab. I make it a habit to create a Note and copy the text of the source record into it. I find many times I need to go back and review the information when researching inconsistent information. It is rare that I retain a copy of the image because generally they are too hard to read and serve little value over having the transcribed document. The exception are some newspaper articles or obituaries that have not been transcribed. However I do retain a copy of the URL so that I can go back to the original if necessary.

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Often the first few times I read a birth certificate I misunderstand something like the name of a grandparent’s hometown. Later when I have more context: maybe I already have other certificates from other relatives (uncles, cousins…) I realise that I had misunderstood the grandfather’s village. Besides, I usually find a lot of errors. For example: ‘the grandmother is a native of X village’, when in fact that is only her husband’s village, but she lived in other villages before she married you.
Therefore, I feel it is almost essential to capture a photo of the certificate. In order to be able to do a post analysis if necessary.

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True, the transcript is more valuable to ourselves as researchers but it the image of a document, or the document itself, that family members are interested in.

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