Notes and Comments
Where do I put notes and comments? |
| New customers often ask how to manage to many notes and comments fields available in iFamily for Mac. Following are some helpful descriptions of these descriptive fields |
The Personal Comments Field |
| The Comments field is for text that is work in progress. It is a scratch pad. It is for information that you do not want to include in reports - because you are not sure of its validity or because it is "sensitive". Other genealogy applications will probably ignore the Comments field if you include it in a Gedcom file. |
The Personal Notes field |
The Person's Notes field is for storing information that you believe is true and that you are willing to see published in the iFamily reports OR in the HTML web pages that you generate.
Other applications allow the user to add multiple Notes to a Person and then to add Source References for each individual Note. In iFamily the approach is slightly different. In iFamily, if the text has been extracted directly from a Source, then that text should be entered as a Note attached to the Source Reference not as a Note attached directly to the Person. |
Event Notes |
Event Notes are handled in a similar way to Personal Notes. If the text belongs to a Source Reference then that is where it should be entered, leaving you more freedom as to what you enter into the Event Notes field.
Event notes include birth notes, marriage notes and death notes, which are also duplicated in the personal and family panes and dialogs as well as the events table. |
The Story Pane |
| The Story Pane is simply a word-processor-like tool for preparing information akin to a personal report, (for trasfer to an external word processor), OR for capturing an entire web page. (Use Command + A (All) on the webpage then drag and drop it into the story pane). It is another scratch pad and once again it will not be included in any of the iFamily reports. Nor will any of the data be exported to a Gedcom file. |
Source Citation Notes |
| If you are copying and pasting (or transcribing) text from a Source then it should not be pasted into the Person's Notes field - it should be pasted (verbatim) into the Notes field for the Source Reference (Citation). If you want to edit or paraphrase the text, then that edited text should be pasted into the Person's (or Event's) Notes field. |
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Tips
Both the Notes and Comments tabs on the personal panes will have an asterix appended if there is content available
Both the Personal Notes and Personal Comments Panels are duplicated in the personal details pane, and on the personal dialog.
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