If you recall, back in December of last year, I began "cleaning up" my Legacy database. By the time I left on my travels at the end of January, some progress had been made but not much was done on it again until I returned to Indiana five weeks ago.
In the process of moving information from notes into events and sourcing it, I came to the disturbing realization that my sources were an absolute mess! There was no consistency in how the citations were entered and none are even close to "the standard" or any standard for that matter. I could come up with several excuses for this sad state of affairs, but what good would that do?
I have so many documents from my several visits in the last two years to Salt Lake City that need to be reviewed, analyzed and entered... but I made the difficult decision to not enter any new data until the "old" source citations were reviewed and standardized. All of them. So, yes, I must be crazy. Especially after I found out how many sources I have entered and how many individuals use those sources. Rather mind-boggling actually.
The other "big" decision made on the first of June was to begin using Legacy's SourceWriter. I understand there may be some issues with transferring sources via GedCom but using that feature would (hopefully) force me into a standardized format. That and I finally purchased the digital version of Evidence Explained. I figured it might help me to understand why a source had to be cited in a certain way ;-)
As might be expected, I had a few questions. I had recently joined the Legacy Virtual User's Group Community (LVUG) on Google+ (G+) so posted a question there. You can find it as well as the responses by clicking on the "Sources" link on the left hand side of the G+ LVUG Community landing page.
Some good ideas and information was offered by JL Beeken, Tessa Keogh, Monique Riley, Marla Larson, Richard Hallford, Melanie Armstrong, and Linda McCauley, all of whom I would like to thank for their ideas, suggestions, and input. It really helped me make a few decisions as to how I wanted to do the sources.
With over 7200 people and more than 700 sources in the database this is a monumental undertaking. But it really needs to be done. The number of individuals using a source varies considerably. Quite a few (probably more than half of the sources) are used by under 10 people while about 35 are used by more than 200. The source used by the most people is the Social Security Death Index with close to 1500 people - and each of those individuals has 2-3 citations for the SSDI (birth, death, and the event). Thank goodness for the source clipboard and Legacy's tagging feature! It would be an impossible task without those features.
On June 1st I started working with the source citations from Ancestry.com and FamilySearch databases and have gotten about 2/3 of the way through that list, eliminating about 15 duplicate sources. I've been working on the SSDI source citations for most of two days and am about half-way through with it.
I will be holding off on updating sources for census records until the Legacy team releases version 8 sometime later this year. It seems they may be implementing a feature for "shared" events such as census records that sounds rather intriguing. I sure am looking forward to the new version of Legacy!
Blog posts will be few and far between for the next month or two, as if they haven't been already this year! Most of my time for the next month will be devoted to this project. I will be attending G.R.I.P. the week of July 21st and (very optimistically) hope to have much of it completed by then. And, sometime the end of July or first part of August I'll be moving into my new apartment! And then there is the FGS Conference in August, which I am also looking forward to attending.
I hope that when this project is completed (or as complete as it can be) that I will still have a few faithful readers left. Thanks in advance for sticking around... and wish me luck!
At the end of the day, what's done is done.
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