Documenting Your Sources

Documenting the source of your information is imperative. Although your immediate family may not care to read pages of endnotes and citations, fellow researchers will not be so generous. Your work will be judged by its documentation, not by the number of names you have found. Thousands of genealogies exist in libraries or online which contain no bibliographies or source citations. It is impossible to judge the validity of the information they contain. Did this critical birth date come from a family Bible, a tombstone, or the author's estimate? Where was this maiden name found? No family of that name lived in the area at the time. Did the author make it up? Serious family history researchers examine any genealogy very critically. Make sure your research passes muster.

When beginning your research, it seems that you can remember every source you examine. My earliest sources were the memories of my father and grandmother. It did not seem necessary to note this after every event. However, this situation does not last long. Documenting your sources will save you hours of repeated searches and will help you avoid long journeys down false research trails.

To summarize, citations are necessary in scholarly works for several reasons.

• Citations inform the reader of the exact source for every statement of fact. This allows the reader to backtrack easily to the original source and verify the author's interpretation of the document.
  
  
• Citations allow the reader to judge the quality and thoroughness of the research behind a scholarly work.
  
  
• Citations give credit where credit is due. Do not leave yourself open to charges of plagiarism.
  
  
• Citations give clues to other researchers as to sources available on a given family, in a given area or in a certain time period.

Do not let formatting concerns prevent you from maintaining good source documentation. Investigate Elizabeth Shown Mills’ Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian and Richard Lackey’s Cite Your Sources for citation examples, but remember that content is always more important than form. Be complete in your own citations. When deciding what information you must cite, more is better. Your citations must provide the following information.

• What was the exact source used? Suppose your grandmother told you her mother’s birthdate was 15 May 1881, or so she had been told by her mother. Your source is an interview of your grandmother. You should include the information that her source was her mother in your source note, but your great-grandmother was not your source!
  
  
• When your source is your own memory of an event, include information such as your age at the time of the event, your relationship to the people involved in the event, and the date you wrote your recollection of that event.
  
  
• What is the complete name of that source? Include all details necessary for you or your reader to find that source: major and minor titles, page numbers, line numbers, and the version you used: original, microcopy, abstract.
  
  
• Who created the source? Remember there may be multiple ‘creators:’ author, publisher, government department, deponent.
  
  
• Include all relevant dates in your citation: for example, the date of a document’s creation and the date of its recording.
  
  
• Where did you find the source? Were you in an archive, a library, or the county courthouse?
  
  
• Always document negative results. Include the sources searched and the information you were seeking. It is very frustrating to reexamine a census three times simply because you don't remember your prior searches.

Citation examples will appear throughout these pages. Feel free to use them or create your own format. Remember, be consistent and be complete.