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Archiver > TMG > 2000-02 > 0949767558


From: Lee Hoffman/KY <>
Subject: Re: TMG-L: source type for misc. documents
Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2000 11:19:18 -0500


John O'Neall wrote:
>I have a number of photocopies from various archives of different types,
>e.g., a written declaration that an ancestor claimed a government pension
>under such-and-such an act, signed at the end by him; or a form somebody
>filled out, granting power of attorney in case of any litigaition with the
>govt. (imagine that!) over his father's pension. I have two problems,
>which may be related:
>
>(1) What is the best source type to use for such stuff? Nothing seems to
>quite match it. What's the best catch-all source type (Mills, of course)?

As I mentioned in another posting, I first look at who owns the original
and/or who did the filming. But most of the sources that you discuss are
what I would categorize as "manuscripts" and would use one of those Source
Categories.

>(2) I have temporarily chosen "Photo, Portrait, or Illustration (Archival)
>(With Annotation)", because that seemed to be pretty close. Curiously, the
>TITLE field is printed in none of the report forms (full or short footnote,
>biblio.), so my choice is maybe not so good. (I find that one can spend
>literally hours looking for an appropriate source type, which I also find
>very tiring.)

The Title Source Element is not included in some Source Category Templates
because to do so would be redundant. Either there is no "title" as such
and/or the description of the document or record type or some other Source
Element(s) would suffice for a title.

>For the subject, I enter the subject of the document is,
>i.e., the act, not the person. Otherwise, I don't know where to enter this.
>The result is that the "act", as I call it, gets treated like a name in the
>full footnote form:
>
>"O'Neal, George or O'Niel or Neal", number "W. 284" and "Elizabeth"
>
>has its first word transposed to the end, and the double quote with it and
>the result comes out as
>
>George or O'Niel or Neal", number "W. 284" and "Elizabeth" "O'Neal
>
>which is quite horrible.

I am unsure of what "act" is be referred to here. I assume the Subject
contains multiple persons and maybe uses commas and/or semi-colons in the
entry. Due to the way TMG treats Authors and Subjects, it might be best if
you can eliminate any use of commas or semi-colons in the entry. Thus the
entry would not be manipulated by TMG during print time depending on
whether the citation is a Full or Short Footnote or a Bibliography. This
may be one of those times when you would want to "hard code" the
citation(s) in the Output Forms tab of the Source Definition Screen.

>So I guess it boils down to one question: What source type can I use for
>these miscellaneous things which pretty much have to explained completely,
>without having to rewrite all the sentence formats?

If you are constantly modifying the Pattern(s) in the Output Forms tab,
then it may be that you want to create your own Custom Source Category for
these documents.

Hope this helps -


----------
Lee Hoffman/KY
E-mail:
TMG Tips: <http://www.tmgtips.com>;
My website: <http://www.tmgtips.com/lhoffman>;
--------------
A user of the best genealogy program, The Master Genealogist (TMG)

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