Long Narratives

[alpalmer 0]

We have a relative that gathered a great deal of information on some of our family members. She prepared it before the advent of computer genealogy programs. It is a mixture of factual and narrative descriptive data. I have been working through it, entering what I can into regular tags, e.g. moves to new towns under the tag "residence," report of a job as "occupation," etc.. Some of the long descriptions of events and experiences do not fit any of the tags. I have entered some as "anecdotes" and created a tag called "narrative," for others. Is this the best way to handle these kinds of data? Would be interested in any suggestions or observations.

[Rob Roy 0]

I use anecdotes for such information. This also useful for recording obituarys etc.

[Terry Reigel 0]

I think what you are doing is a fine way to handle the issue - I do much the same.

 

Add parts to standard tags where it makes sense, then but the rest in Memos of one or more tags. The advantage of using a custom tag type rather than the standard Anecdote tag is then it's easy to exclude them for a particular report, should you care to later.

 

I typically break up such narratives into several tags, so I can position other tags between when it makes sense. Also, I put parts that I can verify with other sources into separate tags so I can show multiple sources for those parts.