Thanks to the people who wrote to me. This is my thinking so far and I would appreciate comments on any or all of it.
After reading the comments that were made I decided to stick with a census event for each individual. The master source is the 1871 (or whatever year) British census and for the source detail I am listing the PRO reference. I have been finding some of my ancestors indexed incorrectly and in that case I am including that information in the source detail comments. [I had to learn how to use the source clipboard which turned out easier than I expected]. I decided that the information about others living at the same address I would rather have with the event data not the source data. I decided to keep this information with the event and not the source detail so that it is readily available in the report section. I am also not transcribing the complete census data (basically lazy) since the PRO reference provides enough information to trace the original.
I have been pondering where to record the 'house no, street address' information. I notice that most often 'location' does not refer to individual addresses but only to the higher levels (e.g. town, county, country). I've decided I want the 'house no, street address' not in the source reference but more accessible and if I exclude 'location' then I am left with a choice of event description, event notes or event address. Another alternative is a 'residence' event. Which do you think is best and why? TIA.
As a retired data base designer, I firmly believe that data should only be recorded once. This means that ideally the repetitive census info such as 'house no, street address', location,date, head of household, household members should only be recorded once. I have started this trend by identifying the census event as: event: census date: year of census desc: 'name of head of household" location: census location. Then I add the 'house no, street address' somewhere and the household members as an event note. I use a separate 'occupation' event for each household member.
When I looked at printed output for an individual I decided that the census information is crucial enough that each member of the household should have the same census event, and so (reluctantly) I am using the event clipboard to record (exactly) the same census data for each household member.
One advantage of this method is that I no longer need a residence event for each individual and also the reference to the original census data is by PRO number and head of household, which may be redundant but matches nicely with my paper files.
cathy REDISH, PRATT, JARVIS
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