Do you have a particular way you name images and other files saved while doing your genealogy research? Or, do you let the program create the name?

Now as I’m moving to RootsMagic 8, I’m faced with the need to decide how I’m going to answer that question in regards to naming my citations. Having worked with the preview version of RM8, I was aware of the need for a citation name. I was also aware that the importing of my data would automatically create a citation name for my existing citations. These imported names are based on the ‘Source Details’ in the RM7 source.

So, some of my sources imported with these weird citation names, many starting with “viewed online”.

Since playing around in the preview version, I’ve been thinking about these citation names. I know that I won’t be going back thru my existing citations to rename them.

So, I started looking at various types of sources to see what would happen if I let the program generate the citation name.

I found that most of my citations have the person’s name included in the citation name. The one exception that I found to that was my newspaper citations. Since these use the article title to build the citation name, they often don’t include the person’s name.

Since I can easily find out who the citation is attached to, I’m not sure that this is an issue.

Based on this brief study of the citation names in my file, I’m going to give control to the software and let it continue generating the citation names.