Can I have two versions of the same original live in separate projects?

Question

I am not an Aperature or photography expert.
I scanned in a ton of old family photos with multiple snaphots on a page and in a single file. Then I imported into Aperature, created new versions, one for each snapshot, then cropped each snapshot, so each snapshot is seperate in Aperature. (I could have learned Spanish with all the time that this took.)
Then, I tried to organize the ton of photos into projects and it won't let multiple versions of the same original photo be in separate projects. I found a way to change the filenames through Batch Change, but that didn't fix the problem.
I would like to organize the ton of files, but from what I can tell my only option would be to go back to the scanned files, make copies from Finder as needed, once for each snapshot, reimport into Aperature and recrop each individual snapshot.
Oh my, I have kids and a job and a husband and I like to sleep at night. Is there any easier way to organize the photos?
Thank you for your time.
Carol

Answer 1

Carol,
William Lloyd said it all, but perhaps Kirby Krieger's User Tip will explain a bit more the different uses of albums and projects:
                   The Well-Trod Path: a Beginner's Guide to how Aperture's major parts inter-relate
Then I imported into Aperature, created new versions, one for each snapshot, then cropped each snapshot, so each snapshot is seperate in Aperature.
You want to find each snapshot separately in Aperture? Perhaps you could explain more, how you want to organize your photos. William pointed out albums to group versions of an image. You could also assign keywords to mark special occasions like birthdays, weddings, etc.  You could assign faces to find photos of persons by name. You can use the search field in the browser to search for photos by face, date, keyword, etc.  Aperture is really great for accessing images in many different ways. There must be a way to access the images in your Aperture library just like you want to.
Then, I tried to organize the ton of photos into projects and it won't let multiple versions of the same original photo be in separate projects.
That is, how Aperture works. All versions of an image need to be in the same project, because they are sharing the same imported original image file. Aperture tries to save your disk space, by by not creating image files for the edited versions. Versions are just a set of instructions how to produce the rendered image, when you want to edit it or to export it. Unless you are working with the version, it will live in limbo and it will not exist as an image file. So all versions are kept together in the same project with the original image file that is necessary to render them as an image.
Léonie