Family Historian User Group

I have completed a project but now have hundreds of Census records in my Documents. Is there any way I can add these to my project? I obviously have incorporated the data from these records into my project.

Rosina, can you give a bit more information about what form these records are in please? A lot will depend on how they are structured today - organised spreadsheet table or a collection of arbitrary documents...?

If you have already incorporated the data, what did you use as source citations, or are the events/facts unsourced?

Hello Rosina, welcome to FHUG.

I have moved this topic from the General forum in the lower section to the General Usage forum which is for questions about using FH. (The other forum is for general discussions not directly related to FH).

I’ll assume that you mean you have downloaded images of census records from the web. The general principle with any document, whether it is a census return or a parish record or a birth/marriage/death certificate or anything else, is to create a Source record for that item and link an image of the document to the Source. You can also enter a transcript of the text in the Text from Source field of the record. Then cite the Source record as evidence for each fact you derive from it. You may already have done this with other types of document.

The process can be automated to a great extent by using Ancestral Sources, a free program developed by a user of FH, which creates the Source record and all the facts for you. However as you have already entered the data in FH you would either need to start afresh with Ancestral Sources, replacing the facts you have previously created, or create each Source record and link it manually to every fact derived from it.

Have you previously cited any sources for your census data? You may have used a single Source record for each census year, so that all facts derived from the 1901 census, for example, refer to a single 1901 Census Source. In that case you would need to link your census images to the citations of the Source rather than the Source itself. This is known as ‘Method 2’ or ‘lumping’ of sources and can also be handled by Ancestral Sources but would be tricky and time-consuming to do manually.

Have a look at this explanation in the Knowledge Base: how_to:recording_census_records|> Recording from a Census Record and ask again here if you need more advice.