Sourcing Problems

Discussion in Feature Requests Forum started by Carole Bannes, Dec 10, 2019
CB
Carole Bannes
  website
First, thanks for being here! I've spent more than 15 years researching and documenting families with an association to Knox County, Ohio. For the first 11 years or so, my data resided on RootsWeb World Connect, where it was free and accessible to anyone who found it. Unfortunately, that site closed down 2 years ago and, although they PROMISED it would be back, that hasn't happened yet. So I went searching for a new home! I hope I've found it here!

You successfully uploaded my 92,000 name GEDCOM, so thank you! All the links and names seem to be there, but my sources are really messed up! Most of my sources are primary, either from county, state or federal documents (vital records, burial records, census, etc), but some are from published histories of various counties. Can anyone look at my tree and tell me how to make the sources more clear?

B
Blumstein
  website
Hi Carole,

I need to point out that our trees are back online at Rootsweb Worldconnect, and have been for quite a while now, but Ancestry's new software is inferior and I am in the process now of moving all my trees from there to here.

About sources, nobody can check your tree as you require an access code! If you want to make your tree publicly available, go into the settings here and check the appropriate boxes so it is truly public. The default setting requires an access code to view your sources.

Then, about source entries themselves, studying your sources will not reveal the source of the problem, which will be how you have coded sources in your gedcom.

I had to study this carefully to make sure my sources displayed the way I wanted - TP: has some quirks and only recognizes certain tags in SOUR entries.

Here is what I have learned from my own experimentation.

1. I use PUBL rather than URL tags to indicate URLs.

2. I use TEXT rather than NOTE tags. NOTE tags are not recognized.

3. Only one entry per tag is allowed for each source. For example. if you have two TEXT entries, it will only display the second one, if three, it will display the third.

4. TITL tags are recognized, and shown in BOLD automatically.

5. ABBR tags are recognized.

6. HTML <BR> tags are recognized, so if I have two separate notes, then I code them like:

2 TEXT blablabla hello there blablabla

3 CONT more blablabla

3 CONT <br>

3 CONT <br> another paragraph

7. If I have two URLs I want to provide, I put the first under a "1 PUBL" tag, and on the next line, put '2 CONT <br>' at the start of the next line with the second URL on it.

8. Two or more sources with the same TITL will cause serious problems. TP uses the last one for all SOUR entries with that TITL. I solved that in my own trees by including the PID or source number as part of the title. If you have a lot of sources, which of course you probably have, that can be a huge amount of work. I am fortunate in that I know enough computer programming that I could easily use command line tools to run through the gedcom to automate the process.