Elizabeth R. wrote: >I cannot tell you what a breath of fresh air this post is to me. Much of my frustration with my understanding of EE has to do with the handling of census records.
Elizabeth, I wish you had posed this question to me earlier. As I mentioned in one or another message yesterday, it's nigh onto impossible for me to answer each individual inquiry that comes into my mailbox, but I do answer all the related questions posed on two other open forums, APG-L and TGF-L, because a question that's asked in a group situation usually helps many people at once. (Incidentally, no one has to be a professional genealogist to subscribe to these and probably most of the subscribers are lurkers who aren't professionals; they're just there to "learn.") >I think the strict construction I observed in Evidence! has been my source of rebellion. The software I had at the time made it difficult to emulate that construction, This has been a problem for all of us. For most of the past three decades, software was the tail that wagged the dog, where source citation was concerned. The software has been an incredible boon to genealogy and the organization of all our research and findings; but in order to do citations that met standards, we had to move our "reports" into word-processing software and manually edit. Once done, then, we could not put the genie back into the bottle. Fortunately our software, like our hobby and our field, has greatly matured. Now, where documentation is concerned, most programs are truly becoming tools that actually enable us to meet standards--which means the proper balance to the dog-and-tail act is very much in sight. It's not a painless process for any of us, but we're getting there fast now. Of course, what we'll need next is for all our software to 1. Let us document our ancestor charts, as we do our group sheets; 2. Work on the word-processing capability, so we don't have to import into other software to create readable biographies, adequate discussions of problems, and proper punctuation--after which we still have the problem of stuffing the genie back into the bottle. >so I recorded as much information as I needed (or thought I needed), and worried less about format than content. The Legacy basic source system - so far - has enabled me to write well-formatted sources, but I freely admit that some of that early stuff lacks enough information to come up to par. Ah, yes. We've all been there and done that, and most of us still have files left over from those days! Elizabeth --------------------------------------------------------- Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL, FASG *** Holiday discounts on Legacy 7.0, add-ons, books, and more. Visit http://tinyurl.com/65rpbt. *** Legacy User Group guidelines: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp Archived messages: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup@legacyfamilytree.com/ Online technical support: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Help.asp To unsubscribe: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/LegacyLists.asp
