Notes, Notes, Notes and more notes

As a follow up to an earlier blog post, I had to go look at some statistics about my file. That has caused me to go do some clean up work. Specifically, to get ALL of my Find-A-Grave Sources into the Template Format.

With 8,937 people in my file, with 448 Sources only 197 of them were in the Template format. That is a long term "work in progress". I have always thought that my 2nd most used Source was Find-A-Grave memorials. Sure enough, 55 of the 448 were Find-A-Grave sources accounting for 334 Citations and 2,572 Facts.

So I decided to spend some time evaluating how many of the Find-A-Grave Sources were in the Template format. Very quickly into this project, I realized that over time I had entirely too many notes. Actually, not enough notes, but the notes were not in the right place. That was caused because we didn't have some of the notes, and we were not always able to do anything with the notes.

We have the Person Notes, Sources Notes, Fact Notes, and Research Notes, to mention a few.

What I had been doing early on was the put notes from a Find-A-Grave Memorial into the Person Notes pages.

Some time AFTER I did this work I figured that these notes really needed to be in the Fact Notes field. In the Person Notes field I want the stories that I create or newspaper articles, letters, not "data" that I put into the database.

What I want to do, is to CUT (CTRL+X) from the Person Notes field, and Paste (CTRL+V) that information into the Fact Notes field. I keep my Find-A-Grave Notes in a Find-A-Grave Fact. I have talked about that here, but I created a Find-A-Grave Fact, that is Private, that only I can see them. They won't appear in a report unless I specifically ask for Private Notes. This information is helpful to me.

Because I had done some formatting of the information in the Notes field, so it looked nice, I will see a pop-up message on the way.

It's asking me if I want to keep the formatting of the information. I do, so I select the 2nd option.

I Paste (CTRL+V) (CMD+V for the Mac) that information into the Find-A-Grave Fact Notes field.

BUT, I still have something in the Person Notes field. It is a reference number that I had used for my Research Notes. This doesn't belong here. It belongs in my Research Notes.

Like before, I Cut (CTRL+X) from the Notes and Paste (CTRL+V) it into the Research Notes field.

The Research Notes is that 2nd ICON, and the Toggle Research Notes On or Off is next to it, or the 3rd ICON. Like the Fact Notes, my Research Notes are for my information.

I will take me a couple of hours to do this clean up, but it will be worth it "at the end of the day".

The Find-A-Grave project was put on hold, as I found some interesting issues that have come up, but will blog about that here shortly.
_______________________________________________________________
Copyright © 2014 by H R Worthington