On 2011-05-24 01:49, Tom Wetmore wrote: ..... > > Note one very interesting thing about the five answers so far. No one > says they use their genealogical application to store their evidence. > Is this a failing of genelaogical software in general, or is handling the > evidence and handling the persons such two fundamentally different > things that we need two completely different programs for handling them? > > My answer is that genealogical programs should be able to handle evidence, > but no one has figured out how to do it yet. > > Tom I'm not sure I am responding to the strictly correct post here as your software is posting all your replies as new threads. However... You are perhaps wanting things to be all one way rather than another and are in danger of missing the point which is that evidence can be stored at a number of levels, physical and virtual, according to its perceived usefulness. I retain (almost) all evidence on paper, but selected evidence is then also stored on computer. It is simply too much effort to store all possible evidence in a useful form on computer, so some pre-sifting makes life easier, in fact it makes the job practicable. Now the interesting question is since you have the paper based evidence, how much of a particular item do you store on a computer? In practice, this computer data might be just a reference, or it might be all the relevant data. It could even be all the information in that piece of evidence and including what sort of paper, what colour, what condition and so on, but that would be unusual and remarkably keen. The amount will depend on what you want to do with it on the computer. Do you see the picture? Peter

On Tuesday, May 24, 2011 3:40:55 AM UTC-4, Peter J. Seymour wrote: > On 2011-05-24 01:49, Tom Wetmore wrote: > ..... > > > > Note one very interesting thing about the five answers so far. No one > > says they use their genealogical application to store their evidence. > > Is this a failing of genelaogical software in general, or is handling the > > evidence and handling the persons such two fundamentally different > > things that we need two completely different programs for handling them? > > > > My answer is that genealogical programs should be able to handle evidence, > > but no one has figured out how to do it yet. > > > > Tom > I'm not sure I am responding to the strictly correct post here as your > software is posting all your replies as new threads. However... > > You are perhaps wanting things to be all one way rather than another and > are in danger of missing the point which is that evidence can be stored > at a number of levels, physical and virtual, according to its perceived > usefulness. I retain (almost) all evidence on paper, but selected > evidence is then also stored on computer. It is simply too much effort > to store all possible evidence in a useful form on computer, so some > pre-sifting makes life easier, in fact it makes the job practicable. Now > the interesting question is since you have the paper based evidence, how > much of a particular item do you store on a computer? In practice, this > computer data might be just a reference, or it might be all the relevant > data. It could even be all the information in that piece of evidence and > including what sort of paper, what colour, what condition and so on, but > that would be unusual and remarkably keen. The amount will depend on > what you want to do with it on the computer. > > Do you see the picture? > > Peter Peter, I understand your point. I can assure you I don't want it all one way. I keep evidence in various ways depending on the type. What I am interested in is what is the best way to represent your evidence when you have lots of evidence about as-yet unknown persons, and you are going through the inference process of deciding who those persons are. I would have difficulty handling 100 index cards, or 100 pieces of paper, or having 100 image files open on my computer. I would want a way of putting, say, these five together in a group as a tentative person, and those 15 as another tentative person, and so on. It's hard for me to do this grouping and thinking with paper, cards, open windows. I need some other mechanism to help me. So I'll keep my evidence on paper or in image files, as we all do, but I'm looking for some additional "codified" form of the evidence as more or less similarly-formated records on my computer so I can easily compare and group them. We are getting some good answers about this on this thread now. Tom