Genealogical Citations

Most of us learned how to write term papers which included citations and bibliographies. Citing your genealogy work is just as important. Citations should be added as soon as you add a new fact/event into your tree. That is a major mistake we made. We have piles of documents which we used to compile our  tree. We just didn't write the citations. Also, make sure to link your citation to the source whenever possible. 

There are some main purposes of citations in genealogy:

1. It gives credibility to the conclusions in your research.

2. It lets other researcher know where your research was found. This allows other researchers to decide the veracity of the sources used in your conclusion. It also shows the wide range of sources you used. 

3. It gives credit to the authors of your evidence.

4. It protects you from plagiarism. 

The best site I have found for guideline in writing citations from a wide variety of sources is found at Progenealogists. 

Evidence Explained has Sample QuickCheck Models which give visuals examples for the different types of sources.

There are a few tricks I use in gathering citation information from books:

1. If the material is printed in a library, I use my phone to take a picture of the title page inside of the book, and the back of the title page which contains the date of publication and other information. I do not take the time to write the citation at the library. Since I have all of the pertinent info in the pics, I can easily write the citation.

2. Google books! I type the title of a book into Google books. When the result comes back, I scroll to the "Create Citation" button. I copy and paste that info to the correct fact in my software program.

3. Another source I like is the online citations makers. There are quite a few different types of citation styles. My different schools wanted particular styles to be used. I haven't found that the style matters in genealogy just a long as you keep it consistent. 

It cannot be stressed enough, learn from our error. Do the citations at the same time a fact is added and attach the source. It really is tedious to go back through a few thousand entries to add citations and sources. 

Happy Hunting - until next time.