This thread is an offshoot from the Linux thread that is going off on a number of tangentsl. How should we store evidence in genealogical databases? You get a marriage record in the mail; you find an image of a census record at Ancestry.com; you find the record of an event on a page in a book you found on Google books. What are you going to do with those three records? Here are some possible answers. First, if you are careful genealogists, you're going to record the source of the records in your database as source records. Got that out of the way. Second, as far as the "physical records" are concerned, let's say you carefully file the paper marriage record away in your paper filing system, and you go to your big ancestry folder area on your computer and keep copies of those two images. Dandy. Now, what are you going to do with the information in those three physical records (let's say we can call those image files "physical" for sake of argument). Here's the "normal" answer in my opinion. You look at the physical records, you decide who the persons were who are mentioned in those records, you go you your genealogy program and you find the appropriate person records, creating them if need be, and you edit in the new information. In other words you extract information from the physical records and you add that information directly to person records. Note that the information from the physical records only enters into your database as items inside person records. Here's another possibility advocated by some genealogists. After you create the source records for where the physical records came from, you edit those source records, adding to them the information that you got from those sources that you believe is important. You probably have to do this as "unstructured notes." Then you link persons to those sources and you also "copy up" from the stuff you added to the source records into the person records. Here's another possibility advocated by programs like Gramps for Family Tree Maker. You first create event records from information in the physical records, say a birth or death or marriage events, and then you add a link from some person in your database, creating that person record if need be, to that event record. The events really don't stand alone; you have to link person records to them. All these techniques work fine while you are in the realm of "person-based genealogy" or "conclusion-based genealogy". When in this realm you either already know whom the people are that you are researching, or you have such a solid vital record and other record trail back to them that you can be sure whom you are researching. You know whether any particular record belongs to a person you are researching or not; you ignore the records that don't, and you simply copy information out of the records that do. In my opinion 98% of the genealogical software is devoted to people working in this mode. Eventually every genealogist reaches the point when he or she has delved far enough back in time that the solid, firm trail of records has dried up. When we reach this point our task changes from one of simply elaborating persons we know or can learn about easily, to one of true historical research. We embark on the chore of trying to find whatever sources we can, from whatever creative recesses of our minds or experience takes us. From the sources we manage to find, we have to keep whatever information that mentions people that might eventually be of interest to us, and we must record that information somehow so we can continually be able to refer to it. We have faith that at some time in the future we will have found enough records that we'll be able to figure out who all those people are and how they are related. At that time, maybe far in the future, maybe after many serendipities in our record searching, we'll be able to finally create new persons in our database and add the hard fought information to them. When we reach this point we are in the realm of "record-based genealogy." This has been described as "crossing a chasm." We are now true historians. We must collect lots of records, but we don't know yet whom they belong to. What are you going to do with this evidence? If you use some of the approaches above you're kind of stuck. You can add paper copies to your files, or images files to your computer, but what else are you going to do? There are no people records around to stick them to. You can bloat source records with notes, but how can you find any of that unstructured info in the future? To do your research effectively, to be able to reason about the data you've collected, you have to have some way of finding the information and arranging it. Are you going to do this by spreading sheets of paper on your desk, keeping lots of windows to image files open on your computer, taking lots of notes on 3x5 cards, sketching out possible family groups with paper and pencil? Wouldn't you want all that evidence information codified somehow inside your genealogy program so you can search for names, search for dates, search for places, see the relationships mentioned in the evidence, and so on? How would you want your genealogy application to support you after you have "crossed the chasm?" I have my answers to these questions, but I'll stop at this point. I hope you'll think about this. What would your dream software system to do support you? Say you collected 100 records that mention people with interesting names, that is, names that might be those of persons you are interested in. Because you are so far back and time, in the fog of uncertainty, you don't yet know who the real persons mentioned in those 100 record are, but you have reason to believe that some of them will be the persons you are looking for, and that some of those people are probably mentioned many times in those records. How do you want to record those 100 records so you can work with them to decide who the real persons were? Do you want them somehow in your genealogy program? Do you want that information not to be in your genealogical database until you feel you know who they were? What features or requirements would you want your genealogical software to have or meet to handle this evidence and facilitate your ability to work with it? Tom