Week 43: Brush up on your knowledge of citations. The most detailed element of genealogy is also the most important. Take some time to review articles, books and web sites on the subject. If you have a copy of Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Evidence Explained, you can read it as part of this challenge. If you do not, consider getting the book, then review some of these pages and the links they contain: Genealogy Source Citations Quick Reference by Thomas MacEntee at Genealbloggers.com (this is a PDF file), Citing Sources at Cyndi’s List and Documenting Your Research / Citing Your Sources at About.com. Bloggers, do you have a favorite book, web site or tool for helping you craft quality citations?
This is something that I really need to work on right now.
For a while, I was entering so much information into my database, so often, that I had no problems doing my source citations. I rarely had to look at my cheat sheets to remember the proper way to do it.
I kind of took a few years off of genealogy research though. I would work on it here and there, but didn’t really get a huge amount done. Having babies and more babies and a husband deploy for a year left me with little free time.
Here I am with my research back in full swing and I find that I’m having difficulty in doing my source citations. It’s taking me much longer to get them done (even with the Source writer in the Legacy program). I still have a Rubbermaid full of papers to go through and re-enter into my program (I started my database over from scratch a number of years ago because I wanted everything properly entered and cited and still haven’t completely caught up). I think I need to devote a couple of weekends to data entry and then I will be up to speed again on my source citations. 🙂
I have a copy of Evidence!, but I’m considering purchasing the Source Citations Quick Reference to keep close at hand while I’m entering my data.
