Citing sources - how to clean up my Legacy files.

So that slayer of all documentation efforts, citing sources, is really a drag for me right now. Can anyone direct me to a good reference for cleaning it all up? I really took a hit due to Ancestry adding multiple citations. For example, I have three citations for my grandfather's name, two for his birth and still other facts all from the exact same census.
So I have been going through every one, checking to see if any have images or extra details, and erasing all of them except one. But how do I relink all of the facts back to the same source citation? And is there an easier way?
Any insights appreciated.

Comments

  1. I am doing this now. The more I learn about the hows and whats that legacy citations can use/do the more I have to go through and add information and then verify that the correct version of the citation is now attached. I am currently using the source clipboard and reciting each detail and removing the older ones while on the detail screen.

    So yes if there is an easier way please let me know.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It sounds like you imported a gedcom from an Ancestry tree or Family Tree Maker into Legacy. I'm currently converting from FTM 2014 to Legacy and I have also had a lot of cleanup to do with my source citations. Legacy doesn't handle citations the same way as FTM. In FTM a single citation can be linked to multiple facts in a one-to-many relationship, but in Legacy it's a one-to-one relationship. So if you import a gedcom, you will now have individual citations linked to those facts you mention, where in FTM it was a single citation linked to many facts. Just like Johni said, when I need to replace a FTM citation in Legacy, I create the citation, copy it to the source clipboard, and then paste it to each fact one by one. I then remove the old FTM citation from each fact after I've linked the new one by clicking the "remove" button. It can be a lot of work, but I'm taking the opportunity to carefully review each citation and the facts it was linked to, and I'm finding lots of things I missed the first time around, so I hope I'm ending up with a better product in the end.

    Hope this helps.
    Karen

    ReplyDelete
  3. I keep going back and forth on things like a census, I create the master source citation but then I flip flop on the detail part of the citation do I just create a family of type citation and just highlight the specific detail or do I create individual detail citations. I think I'm going to do both so for the 1900 census I will create the master source and a generic family of detail and use that for each member of the family for the event Census, then go back to each member and use the same master source but do a residence detail with just the address and the visitation information, and cite that for a residence event....But then I'm lazy and that seems like a lot of work but it might be worth it when generating the reports....

    ReplyDelete
  4. Johni LeRoy thanks for the breakdown. Yeah, wishing for a better way. Karen Jaquish, I'll admit that I would not have gone to legacy if I knew I was going to have to have about 5 separate citations for one line of one census!!! Name, dob, occupation, what a mess!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Grandma Deb But to be fair each of those items are a different detail and potentially be more or less accurate when analysing the "source and validity" of each of those bits of data which is why I go back and forth on the "single entry" or the "multiple entry" methods.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment