I'd like to thank Arthur and Pauline for raising this issue and also thank them and Alfred for their attempts to find a satisfactory work-around. I've posted my desire for a reliable way to privatize sources in the past, both here and in the Forums, and appreciate their reminding Bruce that this is an important issue for some of us. For varying reasons, people are sometimes willing to share genealogical information--often of a sensitive nature--but don't want to be identified as the source. As genealogists, we users of RM need to cite our sources in order to document our information but do so in a way that doesn't betray the confidence of any sources who wish to remain anonymous--and who may have shared information on the condition that they not be identified as the source. Without a way to privatize sources, we can't utilize RM fully so long as we have to keep private sources separate from and outside of the program. Any help from Bruce or inventive fellow users would be most appreciated. Linda Johnson

Thank you, Linda, for your thoughtful response to the question I raised. I've given this some more thought, and I think there are a number of separate issues - though behind the scenes there may be some connections. 1. Free Form sources (This is my preferred source type, and I understand that others prefer them because they transfer more reliably to other programs.) There doesn't seem to be any way at present of incorporating privacy options in free form sources, either with the privacy switch that can be used in source templates, or with the {curly brackets} that can be used in notes fields. 2. Using a source template and including a privacy switch such as <![Public]|[Private]> seems to work in RM reports, but it is not without its problems: 3. GEDCOM output When a source template includes a privacy switch, the source name, which is taken from RM's Footnote, is corrupted in the GEDCOM output (see the TITL tag). Everything between and including the ! and the | is apparently removed, so that, for example, out of what appears in RM as <![Public]|[Private]>, what goes into the TITL tag is whatever has been entered in the [Private] field. There doesn't seem to be any way of showing the [Public] field instead (or as well). This may give the appearance of having been privatised, but if you open the GEDCOM with a text editor and look at the source (a section beginning with the line "0 @Sxxx@ SOUR" where xxx is that source's unique number) you can see that this is not the case: (a) The line beginning "1 ABBR" shows the name you gave the source in RM (the one that appears in the pick list), which may be identifiable. (b) There will also be a section with lines something like: 1 _TMPLT 2 TID 10000 2 FIELD 3 NAME Public 3 VALUE yyy where yyy is the contents of the [Public] field that would appear in a RM report with the source privacy option switched off. In other words, any source that is exported to a GEDCOM will include all its fields, both public and private, even though in some places it may appear that it includes only the privatised version. 4. RM's Master Source List When a source includes a privacy switch, what appears here in the footnote field seems to be the same as in the GEDCOM TITL tag, ie [Private] field only. To see the [Public] field you need to click Edit. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but I find it a little annoying. To sum up, I do still feel it should easier to make sources private within RM, including free form ones, and having a Public/Private switch on each one would make it possible to select which sources to privatise on a case-by-case basis, rather than the current all or nothing approach. Alfred's suggestion, which I misunderstood and he has now explained to me, was to have public and private versions of the same fact, with one showing and one hiding the private sources. This ought to work, but it might involve quite a lot of work to add the extra facts. Putting details of private sources in {privacy brackets} in fact notes would also work, but again it might need a lot of user input, and the sources would no longer appear in the source list. However, now that I've looked at this again, I think the most urgent issue might be to enable source privacy in GEDCOM exports - though I can see that this might be a by-product of a wider implementation. Living people who appear in a file as individuals can be privatised, but if they happen to be sources as well, their names will appear regardless. Arthur On 03/01/2013 20:38, Linda Johnson wrote: > I'd like to thank Arthur and Pauline for raising this issue and also thank them and Alfred for their attempts to find a satisfactory work-around. I've posted my desire for a reliable way to privatize sources in the past, both here and in the Forums, and appreciate their reminding Bruce that this is an important issue for some of us. For varying reasons, people are sometimes willing to share genealogical information--often of a sensitive nature--but don't want to be identified as the source. As genealogists, we users of RM need to cite our sources in order to document our information but do so in a way that doesn't betray the confidence of any sources who wish to remain anonymous--and who may have shared information on the condition that they not be identified as the source. Without a way to privatize sources, we can't utilize RM fully so long as we have to keep private sources separate from and outside of the program. Any help from Bruce or inventive > fellow users would be most appreciated. > > Linda Johnson