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!
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!
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