Having built up my Legacy database for the past couple of years, and learned a lot about sources and how to use and represent them, I decided it was time to audit to look for individuals with insufficient source citations. "There can't be that many, can there? I've been very good at recording them, after all." So I started to check using the Legacy individual report.
Ummm ... lots of people with no citations at all, because I knew them personally and put them in the tree; census citations from when I was starting which miss out part of the reference; some that make no sense at all ....
OK - to do this systematically what I needed was a report or a view that shows just the people and their citations (Source Master and entry Detail), without events etc, to avoid drowning in several hundred pages of standard reports.
I couldn't find a way to do this using Legacy so decided to take a GEDCOM extract and analyse it from there. I now have an Access database which lets me do the analysis so I can see exactly which people need better documentation and also which details need to be improved. From there I can either make changes within Legacy or re-generate the GEDCOM and create a new database - don't know yet. (I would have tried to import directly from Legacy but my Access 97 doesn't understand the Legacy .fdb format).
Anyway, although I've enjoyed the programming challenge and problem-solving, the exercise has made me realise that for me, at least, Legacy could be improved in terms of the tools it provides for reporting on and managing source citations:
1) A way of identifying people or marriages that are citationless or citation-light would be top of my list, along with
2) Some way of handling changes to multiple entries that have identical Detail sources that all need to be changed; and
3) A view that shows for each Master Source, each identical Details entry and where they are used
For me personally this would be of far greater value than the geographic location feature! How have other people tackled this problem?
Roy Ayres
Eltham, UK
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