Perhaps it's something in my personal psyche or a misfire in some important brain synapse, but for the LIFE of me I cannot wrap my mind around the notion of *intending* to collect bits and pieces of "evidence" and leaving them lying about, unconnected to one another. The question of WHY keeps intruding -- WHY would I wish to draw a reasonable conclusion from the facts on the ground? WHY would I wish to go through the conclusion-drawing process each time I looked at a "Real Person"? WHY waste that much time? WHY do I keep rising to the bait here ... tms wrote: > On Jul 20, 7:27 pm, Tom Wetmore<[email protected]> wrote: >> Breathing life into an old thread! > > It was a thought-provoking thread. > >> I don't see combining the date from one persona with place from another to be a problem. When you decide that this is the right thing to do you have made a conclusion. The "higher level" person that "sits >> above" the linked personas is the perfect place to record this conclusion. In my view the higher level >> person record that links the lower persons should inherit the info from the lower persons whenever >> that is possible, but that any conflicts or ambiguities or negative evidence should be resolved >> explicitly by information that is added at the higher level. Here the lower level presents the evidence >> and available information, and the next higher interprets that information as necessary with the >> necessary conclusions to resolve any issues. Isn't that what "conclusion persons" are? > > But if you do that, then you lost the ability to do automatic undos, > which I thought was one of the specs. > >> Likewise, I believe you can solve the conundrum you have described for the gentleman from the Eastern >> Shore. > > Hey! That's no way to talk about my gg-grandmother. > >> You link together all the hard evidence you have, and in the records that hold those links, you >> give your conclusions and your explanations. You make the higher level person records hold the >> facts as you believe them to be, with whatever notes you need to add, and simply let those records >> link together the records that have the evidence that you have physically found. > > But doesn't that break the model of building conclusion-people out of > evidence-people? What I mean is that not all of the evidence is > people. Or perhaps I didn't understand your model. What you say here > is, as I understand you, a better model, with the bedrock being the > sources, the personas built on the sources, and the conclusions built > on both. > > BTW, despite your disparaging comment earlier, I think LifeLines is > great. It isn't perfect, but its flexibility, its principal asset in > itself, allows work-arounds for most problems, and its use of Gedcom > allows workarounds for the rest.