Reunion Sources

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dale Emery on July 23, 2009 at 9:53pm

Go to File->Preferences.

Then click the Sources icon (looks like a shovel).

From there you can add and edit source types. And if you need to, you can add and edit fields.

Permalink Reply by Sue McCormick on July 23, 2009 at 10:00pm

Ben Sayer has a screencast about this technique (I'm sleepy, so can't exactly remember the title. It's about multiple use of a source, but in the screencast he forms the citation in the pattern of Elizabeth Shown Mills.) Once you have planned your citation fields in the way you prefer, you can save it as your default "Census" or other type of source.

Also, take heart about the manual. For the first six months I just floundered — it is so full of information I just kept loosing my place. And the search engine terms aren't always intuitive. But believe me the information IS in there.

And places like this discussion t Genealogy Wise and Reunion's own ReunionTalk are full of folks happy to help you.

Permalink Reply by Roger Moffat on July 23, 2009 at 10:10pm

George I'd urge you to join the ReunionTalk discussion forum at http://ReunionTalk.com/ - there's a lot of information there already, and help is sometimes just a few minutes away if you post there - depending on just who of the users, or sometimes Leister staff, stop by after you've posted.

Roger

Permalink Reply by Linda Thomas on July 24, 2009 at 4:53am

Let's start with the second one.

Start reunion and open the preferences. Select sources from the preferences dialog.

You'll see two tabs: types and fields.

From the types tab you can add new types and then add existing field types to your new type. From the fields tab you can add new field types that you can then add to types from the types tab.

Caveat: Few other programs will be able to cope with the structured source definitions Even if you export your gedcom telling it to flatten structured sources, you'll probably have trouble (at least in the limited.

Your best bet for successfully transferring structured sources is to carefully define your field types to use standard gedcom source tags. Even then, reunion produces oddly formatted source entries in the gedcom so some info may be lost on import.

Regarding the first problem:

I'm not sure there is much you can do. You can inspect the original gedcom to see what source tags it's using and try to define your fields in reunion to match those tags but if they have much nesting reunion may not like it. I'm basing the latter on reunion producing pretty flat source entries in it's gedcom exports (flatter than the spec defines) but I haven't tried this.

Hope that helps!

Permalink Reply by Scott van Pletzen-Rands on August 30, 2009 at 9:09am

Hi George--

You can change the source type by opening the individual source edit screen, then selecting the corret type in the drop-down at the bottom of the window. You may need to readjust what information is in what field (which can be labor-intensive and part of the reason I'm resistant to changing programs anymore), but it will at least give you the types you want rather than "Free Form".
scott