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.