> 3. there are no canned Source formats etc, due to Item 1. Source > definitions are essentially free-form - nothing like the unchangeable rigid > formats forced on you by RootsMagic! > > RootsMagic's 413 built-in Source Templates based on Mills and Lackey are > uneditable but you are not obligated to use any of them. You can copy any > one to a custom template and edit that to suit your purpose. It also has > free-form, and that is the format I advocate storing a source in for a > variety of reasons while, optionally, using a template to help craft the > words and the order they are in to copy and paste into the free-form > fields. If I may add some additional comments to Tom’s with respect to RM’s Source Template feature: I think it’s a feature with great potential but numerous problems. There are certainly a lot of very savvy RM users who are very good genealogists who swear by RM’s Source Templates. So I don’t want to denigrate the feature more than it deserves. Nevertheless, I take a much more cautious approach to them than some users. Most of the built-in templates are based on Evidence Explained by Mills, and a smaller number are based either on Lackey or on Evidence by Mills. Despite being by the same author, Evidence Explained and Evidence seem very different to me. I actually like Evidence a lot better. Being against Evidence Explained is sort of like being against Apple Pie and Motherhood. Nonetheless, it often seems far too complicated to me. And worse than that, it frequently just doesn’t make sense to me. My favorite example of problems with Evidence Explained is obituaries as sources. It’s easy to search the 885 pages of EE in vain for how to cite obituaries correctly. That’s because Evidence Explained doesn’t tell you how to cite obituaries. It tells you how to cite newspaper articles, with the concept being that obituaries are just special cases of newspaper articles. I just don’t buy it. There’s the obvious fact that many modern obituaries don’t appear in newspapers at all, not even online. Rather, they appear online at the web sites of funeral homes. But more subtle and more important to me is that I think it’s the “obituariness” of an obituary that’s most significant, not it’s “newspaper articleness”. The net effect in RM is that if you are an adherent of Evidence Explained and try to use a built-in source template for an obituary, you will find yourself using a template based on Evidence instead of on Evidence Explained because Evidence Explained doesn’t believe in obituaries. So I always develop my own source templates. I only have about 15 or 20 of them, not the 413 that are built-in. Mine are simpler and easier to use than the built-in ones, I understand them better, and if I find a glitch of some kind in one of my templates I can fix the problem. The built-in ones are not editable. The conventional wisdom among savvy RM users is never to use the built-in source templates directly. If you like the built-in ones, you should always make a copy and use the copy, even if you are not going to make any changes to the template. That way, if you do find a glitch then you can fix it. If you use one of the built-in templates directly and find glitch in the template, then the only way to fix the problem is to delete the source entirely including all it’s citations and to re-enter everything about the source and all it’s citations by hand. Having said all that, I keep my copy of Evidence Explained by my computer at all times and I refer to it regularly. And I even cheat occasionally and peak at RM’s built-in source templates. But I don’t use the built-in templates, not even to make a copy. Each of my own source templates is developed from scratch by hand using EE for ideas. It’s really quite easy to do. Prior to developing my own source templates, I used only RM’s built-in Free Form source template as Tom suggests. It’s really a good solution. It’s only in the last year or so that I became persuaded of the value of developing my own source templates as compared to using the Free Form one. One of the reasons I waited so long is the sources built with RM’s built-in Free Form source template generally export to GEDCOM in a much better manner than do sources built with RM’s built-in templates that are based on Mills or Lackey (some of the Mills or Lackey templates produce sources that export better than others). Sources with my templates export just fine. Finally, if you create a source with one Source Template, built-in or not and even including the Free Form one, the source is stuck with that Source Template forever. If you want to switch to a different template for that source, your only alternative from with RM is to delete the source and all its citations and start all over again with that source. I will sometimes cheat and change a source to use a different source template using SQLite, but doing so exceeds the capabilities of most RM users. TMG is about the only genealogy program I’ve never played with, so I don’t know first hand how TMG’s handling of sources compares to RM’s. As Tom already reported, RM’s facility can be pretty flexible and you are not forced to use the built-in templates. But it’s very easy to use the templates in such a way that they are very inflexible unless you are very careful. Just to repeat, even if you like RM’s source templates, NEVER USE THEM DIRECTLY – ALWAYS USE A COPY INSTEAD. It’s trivial to make a copy. Jerry

Jerry, I’m with you 100% on all you’ve said. My original comment (which I think is still valid) noted RMs Sources were ‘rigid and unchangeable’, from which I had decided that the only way would be to do as you suggest and use them as templates, or build your own from scratch. Since you ask, TMG’s templates are similarly based on Lackey or Mills (your choice), but you can do 2 important things (a) change them, and (b) ‘hide’ the ones you don’t want – and of course, build your own. I wouldn’t mind the RM approach if I could delete the ones I will never use (like LDS and many purely US ones) and hide the ones I don’t want to see, as I think I will probably never use them. Even a pure ‘hide’ function would be OK, but I don’t see that in RM either. But your last comment about ‘the source is stuck with that Source Template forever’ frightens me – that is also way too inflexible, methinks… Don Ferguson From: Jerry Bryan [mailto:c24m48@hotmail.com] Sent: Friday, 5 September 2014 1:03 PM To: Tom Holden; Don Ferguson; tmg-refugees@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [TMG-REFUGEES] Family Historian (update) > 3. there are no canned Source formats etc, due to Item 1. Source > definitions are essentially free-form - nothing like the unchangeable rigid > formats forced on you by RootsMagic! > > RootsMagic's 413 built-in Source Templates based on Mills and Lackey are > uneditable but you are not obligated to use any of them. You can copy any > one to a custom template and edit that to suit your purpose. It also has > free-form, and that is the format I advocate storing a source in for a > variety of reasons while, optionally, using a template to help craft the > words and the order they are in to copy and paste into the free-form > fields. If I may add some additional comments to Tom’s with respect to RM’s Source Template feature: I think it’s a feature with great potential but numerous problems. There are certainly a lot of very savvy RM users who are very good genealogists who swear by RM’s Source Templates. So I don’t want to denigrate the feature more than it deserves. Nevertheless, I take a much more cautious approach to them than some users. Most of the built-in templates are based on Evidence Explained by Mills, and a smaller number are based either on Lackey or on Evidence by Mills. Despite being by the same author, Evidence Explained and Evidence seem very different to me. I actually like Evidence a lot better. Being against Evidence Explained is sort of like being against Apple Pie and Motherhood. Nonetheless, it often seems far too complicated to me. And worse than that, it frequently just doesn’t make sense to me. My favorite example of problems with Evidence Explained is obituaries as sources. It’s easy to search the 885 pages of EE in vain for how to cite obituaries correctly. That’s because Evidence Explained doesn’t tell you how to cite obituaries. It tells you how to cite newspaper articles, with the concept being that obituaries are just special cases of newspaper articles. I just don’t buy it. There’s the obvious fact that many modern obituaries don’t appear in newspapers at all, not even online. Rather, they appear online at the web sites of funeral homes. But more subtle and more important to me is that I think it’s the “obituariness” of an obituary that’s most significant, not it’s “newspaper articleness”. The net effect in RM is that if you are an adherent of Evidence Explained and try to use a built-in source template for an obituary, you will find yourself using a template based on Evidence instead of on Evidence Explained because Evidence Explained doesn’t believe in obituaries. So I always develop my own source templates. I only have about 15 or 20 of them, not the 413 that are built-in. Mine are simpler and easier to use than the built-in ones, I understand them better, and if I find a glitch of some kind in one of my templates I can fix the problem. The built-in ones are not editable. The conventional wisdom among savvy RM users is never to use the built-in source templates directly. If you like the built-in ones, you should always make a copy and use the copy, even if you are not going to make any changes to the template. That way, if you do find a glitch then you can fix it. If you use one of the built-in templates directly and find glitch in the template, then the only way to fix the problem is to delete the source entirely including all it’s citations and to re-enter everything about the source and all it’s citations by hand. Having said all that, I keep my copy of Evidence Explained by my computer at all times and I refer to it regularly. And I even cheat occasionally and peak at RM’s built-in source templates. But I don’t use the built-in templates, not even to make a copy. Each of my own source templates is developed from scratch by hand using EE for ideas. It’s really quite easy to do. Prior to developing my own source templates, I used only RM’s built-in Free Form source template as Tom suggests. It’s really a good solution. It’s only in the last year or so that I became persuaded of the value of developing my own source templates as compared to using the Free Form one. One of the reasons I waited so long is the sources built with RM’s built-in Free Form source template generally export to GEDCOM in a much better manner than do sources built with RM’s built-in templates that are based on Mills or Lackey (some of the Mills or Lackey templates produce sources that export better than others). Sources with my templates export just fine. Finally, if you create a source with one Source Template, built-in or not and even including the Free Form one, the source is stuck with that Source Template forever. If you want to switch to a different template for that source, your only alternative from with RM is to delete the source and all its citations and start all over again with that source. I will sometimes cheat and change a source to use a different source template using SQLite, but doing so exceeds the capabilities of most RM users. TMG is about the only genealogy program I’ve never played with, so I don’t know first hand how TMG’s handling of sources compares to RM’s. As Tom already reported, RM’s facility can be pretty flexible and you are not forced to use the built-in templates. But it’s very easy to use the templates in such a way that they are very inflexible unless you are very careful. Just to repeat, even if you like RM’s source templates, NEVER USE THEM DIRECTLY – ALWAYS USE A COPY INSTEAD. It’s trivial to make a copy. Jerry