Saturday, April 9th, 2005 at 2:08 pm by hippy

I have been thinking that there is more that we can do with Sources if only we recorded more information about them.

For instance:

UK 1901 Census (Ancestry)
Url: http://content.ancestry.co.uk/iexec/?htx=List&dbid=7814&ti=5538
Date: 31 March 1901
Place: England
Information: Person.Name, Person.Address, Person.Age, Person.Occupation, Family.Relationship, Person.PlaceOfBirth, Person.Medical

If we recorded all this information, then a research tool would be able to identify all the people that should be alive during the period are point out what information is missing.

Some sources have ranges of dates that they cover: e.g.

Birth Index (FreeBMD)
URL: http://freebmd.rootsweb.com/cgi/search.pl
Dates: 1837 – 1983
Information: Person.DOB, Person.Address, Person.Age, Family.Father, Family.Mother

I am not sure how this would be handled in a research tool but capturing the correct information about the Sources would be a good start.

It might also be useful to be able to share these Sources, maybe through the web site. It would save a lot of time if you could just import all of the UK Sources that anyone knew about and then have a research tool tell you which people should appear in each Source. Obviously the Sources would be different for each country.

It may even be possible to get Gramps to open a browser with the results of a search on any of the online searchable Sources.