Portal:MySource

MySource Portal

Also known as "personal sources", MySources are sources of a personal, rather than a general interest, relevant chiefly to one WeRelate user's own research. Sources that would be considered "personal sources" would include birth certificates, family bibles, family documents, and the research of others provided via letter, email, gedcom, or personal websites.

Primary Portals
Community · Maintenance · Person · Family · Article · Place · Repository · Source · MySource · Image

Things To Do
Help Files & FAQ's
What is the difference between a
Source and a MySource?
SourcesMySources

Community sources are publicly available and are of interest to a wide variety of individuals. Think of them like cards in a card catalog.

  • Books
  • Periodicals
  • Microfilmed government/church records
  • Online collections of transcribed records
  • Paper records at a county courthouse
  • Census records (at the county level and above)
  • A personal journal of a prominent community member, or which contains substantial information about the place, other individuals, or historical events.

Some sources are so specific to a particular family that they do not belong in the general collection of Sources.

  • A birth certificate
  • A family bible
  • A personal letter from Uncle Harry, dated 11 Nov 1970
  • An interview with grandma Bertha, conducted 15 Apr 1959
  • Cousin Betty's family tree website, viewed 4 Jul 2007
  • A personal diary, with little information of interest to a wider audience

Also, for reasons of economy, transcriptions of individual cemeteries do not get Source pages. Cemeteries have place pages, and the location of online transcriptions may be noted there.

When considering whether the source you are using should be stored in Source or MySource, ask yourself if this source is likely to be used outside of your family and if it is easily accessible by others. If not, place it in MySource. If it's likely to be useful to the broader genealogy community-- such as a book of wills that happens to include your ancestor's will -- then it should be a Source page.

Note: When you upload a GEDCOM, all of your sources with title fields are listed as MySources, whether or not they meet the above criteria. You have the option when you review your GEDCOM to link your sources to the community Sources and to edit your MySource pages.

Featured MySource
Converting MySources to Sources

MySources are automatically created upon GEDCOM upload for any of your sources that have a title field. There may be many instances where these MySources are actually Sources. Census records, books, and passenger lists are all examples of Sources. It is by far the easiest to match your MySources to Sources during the GEDCOM review process. If you fail to do so, there are two more work-intensive options for converting your MySources to Sources:

  1. Search for a Source that matches your MySource
  2. Choose to either:
  • Edit your Person or Family page to reflect the title of the Source page. This option works best if your have relatively few MySources to convert and only a few people/families that link to the MySources.
  • Redirect your MySource to the existing WeRelate Source page. If you have a MySource to which many Person or Family pages link, this is faster, because you need to edit just the MySource page, not the people/families that reference it.
    • In the text section of your MySource page type #REDIRECT[[Source:title of Source page]]
WeRelate Portals
Community | Maintenance | Person | Family | Article | Place | Repository | Source | MySource | Image
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