Archiving the Sources -- Digitally

While reorganizing my data, I had found that, although my source documentation was pretty well organized during the time I was actively doing my family history, the things people gave me in the slow period of the last ten years or so, just kind of ended up in a box. Even the copies of the source documentation I had carefully filed was starting to show its age. So, I took some time to start scanning the copy of the source documentation into my database.

I would have preferred to keep things in PDF format, as they are a very common way to handle documents, but, as this post from the legacy user groups discusses, a "documents" button is still in the works. For now they recommend you attach the under the "sound" category.

A "documents" button is on the request list. In the meantime, using the Sound or Video button the workaround we recommend for non-graphic files.

Thanks for using Legacy.

Sherry

Customer Support

Millennia Corporation

However, legacy seems to have good support for pictures (and maybe even sound and video). So I scanned each document as a .tiff and linked it to both the source record and, if appropriate, the event it documents. Seems to work well and even prints out a thumbnail print on the family group sheets! But, makes large (3-4 meg) files. Not an issue for me as I have a lot of disk space (about 500 GB). The other problem is that I can only scan one page at a time. For death certificates and the like, this should be fine. But, I'll probably scan some of the larger documents (letters, etc) as PDFs and link them into the database.



Here's one of my favorites, a transcription of my Great-Grandfather's 1894 Baptism as transcribed in 1922 (in Italian, though the church is in Brooklyn, NY).