PAF 3: Documenting Sources

(last updated 01 March, 2003)

PAF 3 Advancements

In PAF 2.31, a large text field called a free-form Notes field was used to record all notes and sources on an individual. PAF's version 3, however, reserves the Notes fields for notes alone, while offering special fields to record Sources.  These bibliographical Source fields can be linked directly to each piece of information found in a source.  For example, if you find your grandmother's birth year in the 1910 U.S. Census, you can record the year in PAF, and attach the Source information directly to the birth event.  Thus, when PAF prints a report, it can cite the source of each of Grandmother's life events.

These new Source fields are helpful not only when it comes to printing reports, but also when it comes to entering the Source's bibliographical information.  Since the Source fields include the author, title, publication information, call number, etc., they allow the reader to easily enter complete source data.  As users are prompted to record sources properly, the genealogies produced will become more reliable, which will prevent genealogists from having to redo searches already completed by others.

In addition to making proper source citation simple, the linking of Sources to Events also allows the user to quickly assess the reliability of each "fact" he has recorded for an ancestor, for he can quickly determine which source each life event came from. Since such judgments are made constantly during the research process, the linking of Sources to Events now saves researchers a great deal of time.

PAF 3 Shortcomings

Although PAF 3 allows for Sources to be linked to the "big five" life events (birth, christening, marriage, death, and burial) it does not allow them to be linked to many others, including military, education, residence, immigration, emigration, court, naturalization, biography, mission, land, probate, or alternate dates, like an alternate birth date, for instance. Although these are not the events needed to submit an individual for temple work, they are often found before the "big five" events, and are almost always used as tools to find the "big five." Thus, they are crucial to genealogical research. Until the PAF data structure is modified to allow these "additional" events to be linked to Sources, researchers need workarounds which will accomplish this goal, if crudely so.

PAF Manual's Instructions

The PAF manual says that to record these non-standard events, the researcher should enter them into the Notes field.  To record their sources, it adds, put the cursor in the Name or Title field and press F4.  This opens a generic "Sources for the Life of [Individual's name]" field.  Any source entered here is merely attached to the individual, not to any one of his life events.

Unfortunately, this recommended method of source citation is inaccurate.  If, say, the researcher has found five or ten non-standard events for an individual, there is no way to tell which event in the Notes field came from which Source.  This is why many users, including nationally-known genealogical lecturers, do not use PAF's new Source fields.  Instead, they cite sources the old-but-reliable way, using the Notes fields and variations of the Silicon Valley PAF User's Group citation format.

Although this method is reliable, I don't agree with it.  As an eternal optimist, I'm convinced that someday, PAF will will catch up with every other program on the market and allow the linking of Sources to custom events.  When that happens, users who have recorded sources in Source fields will have an advantage:  Their sources' bibliographical information will have already been entered correctly, and all they will have to do to conform to the improved data structure is to attach those sources to the proper events.  Meanwhile, those who currently cite bibliographical information in the Notes fields will have to either transfer all the bibliographical data to Source fields, or simply keep using the Notes fields.

Workaround

If recording source data in Source fields will someday be advantageous to PAF users, then an ideal workaround for the current data structure problem would be to make some notation in the Notes and Sources fields which would link them.  Here, then, is one such solution.

1. For each non-standard event, create a separate Note.  Sort these Notes any way you want, either by source type, by event type, or chronologically.  Follow each note with a short parenthetical reference, which should include the number you assigned to your photocopy of the source.  (For instructions on numbering your documents, see the lesson on Organizing Your Files).  This allows for easy cross-referencing of Notes and hard copies.
2. Create a Source record by placing the cursor in the individual's name field and pressing F4.  Record the source's bibliographical data.