Tom Wetmore <[email protected]> wrote: >I wasn't clear enough. The idea I was getting at is this. You have found >an item of evidence that you either copy onto your computer as a file >or you have as a URL text string. You are pretty sure this evidence refers >to a person you are interested in, but you haven't gotten enough info >yet to be sure of this or to know exactly what person it refers to. > >Cheryl made the point that she would keep a link to that file or URL in >a person record in her database. My question was directed to the >situation where you don't yet have such a person record to hold the link. > >My preferred approach is to codify that evidence into new persona >records and let them be sit in the database while you collect more data. >These persona records are indexed and searchable and manipulable >and editable as easily as regular person records. Thinking about this, one simple solution would be to have a genealogical data base of evidence personas only, and a second genealogical data base of (generally linked) persons. I suspect that most genealogical software can import from another data base created by the same program fairly trivially. (It is drag and drop in split-screen mode in Legacy). Putting a persona record into your persons database (and linking or merging them with some other record there) does not affect your persona data, so destroying an erroneous merged record isn't a problem (assuming that you have created all your persons from personas). It isn't quite as useful as the separating function on nsf. But I think it fits what you are describing. lojbab --- Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist [email protected] Lojban language www.lojban.org

On Wednesday, May 25, 2011 9:42:46 PM UTC-4, Bob LeChevalier wrote: > Thinking about this, one simple solution would be to have a > genealogical data base of evidence personas only, and a second > genealogical data base of (generally linked) persons. I suspect that > most genealogical software can import from another data base created > by the same program fairly trivially. (It is drag and drop in > split-screen mode in Legacy). Putting a persona record into your > persons database (and linking or merging them with some other record > there) does not affect your persona data, so destroying an erroneous > merged record isn't a problem (assuming that you have created all your > persons from personas). I agree that this approach would prevent you from loosing you personas when you decide what person a persona belongs to. It would seem that you would still have the unmerge problem (that is, the difficulty of undoing the addition of a persona's data to a person), but with the original personas still around, I bet clever software might be able to figure out the undo. If a new software application were designed to support this idea you wouldn't have to have two databases. I think this ranks as a new answer to this thread's question. Tom