If there is one thing guaranteed to get 2 or more genealogists gathered together in a fankle, it's debating the rights and wrongs of how to construct correct source citations!  Whilst there are academic texts to help (Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills of course being the first that springs to mind), people will inevitably come up with their own favourite way of citing evidence.  I use a pattern that I learned from my Postgraduate course which has proven to be reasonably robust and flexible, but evidently needs more work in some areas (see below!)  The various software packages we all mostly use to hold our data often have helpful "templates" for constructing particular types of sources, but a frequent criticism I have heard (and uttered myself) is that these tend to be biased towards American sources and are not always as helpful for sources from other parts of the world.

So, having recently enjoyed learning from several very good videos posted from Rootstech 2018, I am pleased to recommend one in particular that tackles this thorny subject well - "Source Citations - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" by Diana Elder is well presented and nicely illustrated.  It certainly made me think more carefully about how good some of my source citations were.  I thought that layered citations was an interesting concept and one that would have helped solve a retrieval problem I had early this week when I was compiling my military research pages. 

I had some evidence from a source on Ancestry for a relative but when I tried to find the record again online to recommend the record collection, I could not locate it or indeed the collection?  I had failed my own test for a good source citation - it must contain ALL the necessary information in order to locate the EXACT record again.  Although, in my defence, I'm wondering if the record set has been absorbed into one of the other similarly named sets?  Nevertheless, I can see how I can improve how I cite the online evidence I gather, in particular that gained from the increasing number of microfilms that have been digitised for browsing - who wants to have to step through hundreds of pages again when you omitted the image number from your source citation?!  

Remember, for it to be a good source citation, you have to be able to find the same record again or tell someone else where they can find it - anything else is apparently bad or ugly!

The sport of genealogy means forever being in quest of evidence that you know is there, believe is there or just hope is there.  Finding aids abound to help us and arguably, the most common finding aids we all use every day are indexes.  However, all indexes are not created equal as any indexer is as prone to making mistakes or interpreting atrocious or faded handwriting in a myriad of ways as you or I would be.  All of the big online data companies outsource the indexing of huge data sets to the lowest bidders around the globe and so we get various degrees of frustration or hilarity creeping into the data.  

So, let's take the Civil Registration Indexes for England & Wales (E&W) and for Ireland as 2 separate examples - both places you would expect to find lots of your Irish kin.

I recommend that you watch Audrey Collin's recent talk to Rootstech 2018 on how the E&W Civil Registration Indexes came to be created and you will appreciate just how easy it was for many errors to have crept into them well before any 20th century digital fingers started flying over keyboards to create the online indexes we all use today.  FreeBMD is a great free resource whereby volunteers are transcribing the GRO secondary indexes but did you know that there is also another volunteer project, UKBMD, that is focusing on local registrar indexes from which the GRO indexes were originally compiled (are you keeping up?!)  Find My Past (FMP) and Ancestry have then subsequently bought in some of these indexes and / or compiled their own.  That's a lot of different indexes starting to proliferate for the same records, so my advice is, if you can't find what you're hoping to find in one index, try out another one.

The free Irish government website, Irish Genealogy, has their own indexes to the Irish Civil Registration records, whilst I believe both FMP and Ancestry both bought in the index compiled by FamilySearch for the same records.  But it would appear from a recent story on Claire Santry's Irish Genealogy News blog that FMP have now created their own indexes to Irish civil births and marriages but there does seem to be some quality control issues.

Incidentally, I gather that perhaps somewhat unusually, FMP and Ancestry actually collaborated on the creation of new indexes to the Irish Roman Catholic records released by the National Library of Ireland - presumably to keep costs down rather than try to race each other to be first to publish?   So, if you are searching these records in either of these sites, I presume the results should be the same?  I haven't tested this one out for myself yet.

So, the moral of the tale is don't rely on just one index that happens to be accessible via your favourite free or subscription site.  If you want to be thorough and "reasonably exhaustive" in your research, then use as many different indexes as possible in order to compile your candidates.

I recently went to the fabulous Harry Potter - History of Magic exhibition at the British Library with my lovely niece, (also Ruth!)  Perhaps you saw the documentary which highlighted the beautiful manuscripts and objects that helped inspire JK Rowling to create the magical world of Harry Potter and Hogwarts?

Also exhibited were her original handwritten and typed notes, showing how the she developed the plot, for example, what was happening to various groups of characters as the chapters advanced forward month by month through the school year.  Near the end of the exhibit, simple grids literally scribbled on ripped out sheets of ruled A4 paper illustrated graphically how the Order of the Phoenix took shape - chapters set in particular months with how the main plot lines were to be advanced and what was happening to particular groups of characters or individuals (even if they were waiting "off stage" to come into later chapters.)  Being a bit of spreadsheet diva, of course I loved this idea! 

However, another idea took root in the genealogical corner of my brain.  JK Rowling has famously said that she always knew how the entire saga would end and she wrote each book with a view to advancing her characters towards that goal.  A bit like your own personal family history story, if you play if forward rather than advancing ever backwards as we usually do.  You know how it (currently) ends with you and your immediate living family.  Through your research, you may have found quite a large cast of characters whose lives play out in parallel until the paths of some them cross and you move down the "branch" closer to you on the "trunk" of the tree.

So, if like me, you have wanted to get creative and get down to writing your family history story for a long time but have gathered so much research evidence that it all seems too daunting, then perhaps JK Rowling's methods can inspire you.  Design a series of books - the Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian years perhaps or maybe your story revolves closely around particular places, say a group of villages from which your ancestors migrated towards a major town or city where you now live?  Pick a layer to start working forward from e.g. all your known Great Grandparents (that's 16 characters.)  Plot each chapter within a relevant timeline, say a few decades, which will allow you to weave contemporary historical events into all the extant characters lives at the same time, plus show how local events helped create the opportunities for them to meet and marry.  Conclude each chapter by introducing the new characters who will play their part in the next ones.

OK, your narrative won't be exotically littered with dragon eggs, Golden Snitches or Deathly Hallows, but I'll bet you have your own treasured objects and tales that will illuminate your story.  Get scribbling!