Regarding sources in Legacy 8.

As it’s been said before, genealogy without documentation is mythology. Sourcing with documentation is very clearly the best and only way to truly prove one’s lineage. But I’m struggling to come to terms with how best to do this within Legacy, and I’m hoping someone can help me see the light on this and possibly explain the methodology behind the way that sources are contributed within Legacy.

I’m relatively new to the product and began using it with Legacy version 8. I’m struggling to come up with a “best” way to do it, but my questions are not so much the steps involved, but more of the methodology behind it.

As I began my project to document my family, my goal early on was to collect all documentation that I could find. Birth/Marriage/Death certificates. Census records. Obituaries. Newspaper articles, etc. This means that I spent a lot of time making copies and scanning them to PDF, taking screenshots, etc. I became a COLLECTOR of information and was hungry to find all that I could find. But I have a very particular way of doing it, and this probably comes from the past 20 years that I have spent working in the IT field. I have my Sources file structure broken out by record type, country, state and county. I have a server in my house and I back it all up each night. Legacy is loaded on my laptop and desktop workstations and I have the file paths pointing back to my server.

But where I feel like I have a fundamental difference, is that to me, each document is proof in literal black and white. I capture images as JPEG files and documents as PDF files. I use those two file types because I feel as if they are prolific enough that they are somewhat future-proof, or at least common enough that someone in the future will invent a converter tool that can change them to whatever file type is going to be common in the future. I am doing my research for generations AFTER me, as I look to the generations BEFORE me.

For this reason, I struggle with sourcing in Legacy because it seems to use the clipboard and Master Sources to glean the information into a common format that is extracted from the original source. When I get to places that ask for a roll number of a microfiche image or a specific web address, I freeze.

Website links get broken all of the time. They also get changed. Companies go out of business and governments combine departments and revamp their websites. Is it crazy to think that Ancestry would not at some point purchase and merge with MyHeritage? Or Find A Grave merge with Billion Graves? As I write this, some small county records department has gotten a grant to digitize their old records and are feverishly working to get those musty books, microfiches, and ledgers online. Photographs too. Inks fade and wash out and I am 100% in favor of preserving those records digitally at least at the quality that they are today. That is vitally important I believe to preserving the past. But as I wrote above, the back-end location of those records is almost certain to change in the future.

So for me, my goal is to capture those records as a digital file and store them locally. I just don’t know how to properly cite those in Legacy. The options in Legacy always seem to be to link to a website or cite a repository of some sort. And that just seems silly when I am looking at an image or PDF written in the handwriting of my ancestor. Can someone please tell me how I can accomplish this in Legacy? Sorry this was so long!