Over the past three years, I have done much playing around with various software for genealogy. I made the transition to Reunion 14 several months ago, and I will stay with it. I absolutely love it. Previously, I was using Devon Think and Mac Family Tree, and I decided to try something different. I'm in the process of setting up Zotero, and again, like Reunion, I will stick with it. It is perfect for genealogy.
So far, I have set up paternal and maternal lines and subfolders with a subfolder for each person under that. I've also set up folders for main databases like census, death records, etc.
With the Zotero connector, I can grab an image of the web page where I found something. From there, I am using cite-builder.com (love, love love this!) to create my EE style citations. If they don't yet have a template set up, I use the book.
You can see in my screenshot on the right-hand side, in the notes field for that image capture, I have entered my citations plus the transcription. I can enter as many separate notes as I would like. (Research logs, obituary transcriptions, etc.).
I then download the actual image and attach it as well.
I'm also making sure to tag each entry appropriately, keeping my tags uniform. You can see the tags for this person in the lower left corner.
I have also color coded my direct lines in blue and red for paternal and maternal.
In Reunion, I exported a new copy of my database without any sources. I then went into Reunion settings and deleted all the source templates except for Freeform. Now it is a simple matter of cutting the first reference note from Zotero and pasting it into the freeform field of Reunion. You can see the very first field in my middle pane in Zotero are Reunion Source numbers. These match the source number in Reunion, obviously. This will take some time, but I will have a cleaner database and uniform source citations.
Should I want to do any reports or perhaps a book in Scrivener or a word processor, I have all the needed citations (First Reference Note
, Subsequent Note, Bibliography and Transcription already filled out in Zotero. To simplify much of this, I am using a text expander (Typenator), so I have minimal typing.
I don't know if this is of interest to anyone or not, but I hope you find it helpful. I feel like I have finally settled on the perfect workflow.
I have always preferred to keep all my documents and notes in a database separate from my genealogy program. This has served me extremely well when I switch to a different program, but it also serves as a separate backup.
So far, I have set up paternal and maternal lines and subfolders with a subfolder for each person under that. I've also set up folders for main databases like census, death records, etc.
With the Zotero connector, I can grab an image of the web page where I found something. From there, I am using cite-builder.com (love, love love this!) to create my EE style citations. If they don't yet have a template set up, I use the book.
You can see in my screenshot on the right-hand side, in the notes field for that image capture, I have entered my citations plus the transcription. I can enter as many separate notes as I would like. (Research logs, obituary transcriptions, etc.).
I then download the actual image and attach it as well.
I'm also making sure to tag each entry appropriately, keeping my tags uniform. You can see the tags for this person in the lower left corner.
I have also color coded my direct lines in blue and red for paternal and maternal.
In Reunion, I exported a new copy of my database without any sources. I then went into Reunion settings and deleted all the source templates except for Freeform. Now it is a simple matter of cutting the first reference note from Zotero and pasting it into the freeform field of Reunion. You can see the very first field in my middle pane in Zotero are Reunion Source numbers. These match the source number in Reunion, obviously. This will take some time, but I will have a cleaner database and uniform source citations.
Should I want to do any reports or perhaps a book in Scrivener or a word processor, I have all the needed citations (First Reference Note
, Subsequent Note, Bibliography and Transcription already filled out in Zotero. To simplify much of this, I am using a text expander (Typenator), so I have minimal typing.
I don't know if this is of interest to anyone or not, but I hope you find it helpful. I feel like I have finally settled on the perfect workflow.
I have always preferred to keep all my documents and notes in a database separate from my genealogy program. This has served me extremely well when I switch to a different program, but it also serves as a separate backup.
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