Recording the basic information about a source (title/archive/call number) is the first step to properly organising your research. The next step is creating transcripts, or capturing information about a source. This was once very important, as the documents were always hard to access, and often it would be impossible to get an image of the source. In today’s world, where many sources are available online, it is still a great way to make sure you have understood all the information on the source, and make it available to your family, who might not be able to read the old-handwriting.
Source Text can be entered in the relevant section on the sources panel:
The source text can accept “Rich text”, such as bold, italic, tables etc. To access these features, click on the pencil icon above the Source Text entry box, which will show a fuller text editor—see section on Rich Text Editor for more information:
Many standard sources used in genealogy use common forms, for example, censuses, birth/death/marriage certificates and even later parish registers. You can create tables for these in the Rich Text Editor, but there is a simpler way to enter this kind of information, as Pedigree Forge comes with many built in source templates. For Charles Darwin’s death certificate, we can set the “Template:” to “DEAT1837”, selected from the dropdown list
Now, when the pencil icon button is clicked, a template based on the General Register Office’s death certificates, introduced in 1837, will be shown, allowing the information to be entered in a tabular format:
Note: we leave the top section blank in this case, as the image we have is the digital copy provided by the GRO, whereas the other information is if it were from a death certificate:
Clicking the “Close” button saves the transcript.
The benefit of transcribing sources in this way is that they can be included in reports. Below is how the transcript would appear in our report (see the section on Reporting for more information).
