James: While I lean toward lumping where sources are concerned, I'd tend to go the other way with events. If I understand your question correctly, you're saying that, with a census record for example, you'd simply show that as a single event rather than extrapolating other events from it such as perhaps a marriage or immigration date (if included in the census listing). If that's your intent, I believe you'd miss some important event points. I don't routinely use events myself, but I certainly do use them extensively when heavily investigating an individual or family group. In those cases I want to be able to break out and examine every possible data point. So perhaps the answer is, as is often the case, It Depends. It depends on what you want for a final output and how you expect to use it.
Kirsten -----Original Message----- From: James Cook [mailto:jc1...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2011 1:52 PM To: LegacyUserGroup@LegacyUsers.com Subject: [LegacyUG] What are the pros and cons of splitting or lumping facts? Not talking sources here. I've not been consistent, and am working on doing some cleanup of my data. For example, it's important to me to keep track at an event level of an individuals appearance on the census register. I use a census event, but a residence event would serve my purposes just as well. As long as I have an event every 10 years I can see in my time lines and such, I'm good. The census can give more information though, such as birth or alt. birth, name or alt name, occupation, veteran status, etc. Some times I've added separate facts and sourced with the census record, other times I just add notes to the census event. This is true of various sources, I'm just using census as an example here. I'm leaning toward lumping what I'll call these secondary facts in the notes going forward with my cleanup. Before doing so, I was wondering if I'd cut myself off from some useful ways to slice, dice, chop, mesh, share, search or otherwise much with my data. Maybe I'm not seeing a downside here that I should be. TIA Legacy User Group guidelines: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp Archived messages after Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup@legacyusers.com/ Archived messages from old mail server - before Nov. 21 2009: 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
