Hi there.
I’ve been a Roots Magic user for some time, and have a database of 400 people, so not huge.
Up until now, and just picking up research after a break, I have never used sources or citations.
Using RM9, and have the book, I just cant seem to process the way to use them.
Firstly, how important are they, and scondly, please could somebody give me a very gentle guide as to how to use them.
For example, newspaper article relating to one person in my database.
Many thanks in advance.
You will get lots of advice as many of us are long time researchers and have developed our own systems.
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However, a relatively accurate database involves documenting where information in your database came from, i.e. birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, newspaper articles, census documents, info. from a tombstone like that found on Find A Grave, land records, wills, family letters and, family Bible, misc. church records to name but a few.
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Start simply but do try to put in your sources and citations enough information so that an observer of your database and yourself at a later time can return to the source to evaluate or reinterpret it.
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Many of us start being “lumpers” which means using fewer general sources rather than 100s of very complex sources.. An example could be the 1850 US Federal Census for the source and the citation or detail Colesville, Chenango County, New York. Or the source could Birth Certificate and the citation could include the details of name, place of birth, the certificate number, etc. Another could be Obituary for the source followed by the persons’s name, newspaper name, date, etc. I use mostly free form sources for the above type of sources. I use the basic book format for genealogy books.
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Getting too complicated in the beginning is usually not the best approach. Being clear and accurate and as consistent as possible is important no matter what your approach. You can always become much more specific over time.
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Where to start adding in these sources? One approach is to start with yourself, and your children, then go back to parents and each level of grandparents. Or you might just start in adding sources as you add new people. The database is yours. Do what works for you in a manner that is not overwhelming.
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Stick to your system until you have a feel for what you are doing. Avoid uploading and downloading from TreeShare, Ancestry, FamilySearch, etc. I have been researching for over 30 years, and I avoid getting involved with bringing other people’s methods into my way of documenting sources. It is ok to start at the “1st grade” and not at the “college” level. Again the goal is for someone looking at the database to be able to easily go back to the sources you have used to re-evaluate or learn additional information that might be in source you took information from. If one is publishing a book, that might call for more specificity in the future.
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I continue to use RM7 in my research, so I will leave to others to give you a simple way to begin adding Free form sources in RM9 (pp. 149-50), Ignore the complexities for now. Just name your sources and put details such as places and page numbers in the citation fields.
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Thank you very much, thats given me some starting points to think about.
You will find a lot of information using search in this forum for sources or citations. One good one to look at is Source/Citation quagmire!. Just one of many posts about soutces and citations
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This is really big question which therefore is hard to answer in a short response in a forum such as this. But let me give you a few clues. First of all, do you know what the difference is between a Source and a Citation? It’s a trick question because I think that nobody knows the difference - not even the greatest experts in the field. I certainly don’t know. That’s because what is called a Source in one place will often be called a Citation somewhere else, even within RM itself. But here is the basic idea.
When you run printed reports, if you enter “sources and citations” into RM, the “sources and citations” you have entered into RM will show up in the printed reports as footnotes at the bottom of each page. The footnotes will tell readers of your reports where you found the referenced information. Well, the footnotes can appear as end-notes at the end of the overall report, but the information is the same whether it appears as footnotes at the bottom of each page or whether it appears as end-notes at the end of the overall report.
Here is an example footnote.
U.S. Federal Census: 1900, Anderson County, Tennessee, Dist. 9, Enumeration District 10, page 129a, family 1.
That pretty much tells you or tells anybody who reads the report where you found the data and where it can be found again. But here is where it can get complicated. RM and most any other genealogy software breaks this footnote up into two parts which I like to call simply the left part and right part (and nobody else but me calls it that). For example, you might enter the data into RM as follows.
Left part : U.S. Federal Census: 1900, Anderson County, Tennessee, Dist. 9, Enumeration District 10
Right part: page 129a, family 1.
The whole idea is that the left part can be used over and over again if you have additional census entries from 1900 and from Anderson County, Tennessee, Dist. 9, Enumeration District 10. But the right part would be unique for other pages and other families. For example, you might have page 129b and family 9.
Except that different users and different software may break up the left part and the right part of a footnote is different ways. For example, with my exact same footnote, you might break it up as follows.
Left part: U.S. Federal Census: 1900
Right part: Anderson County, Tennessee, Dist. 9, Enumeration District 10.
So which way of dividing the left part and the right part is correct? Well, whatever.
As far as typing the data into RM, there are two basic ways. One way is called free form and the other way uses source templates.
If you use free form, there are two fields to fill in, namely the left part field and the right part field. Except that RM never calls them that (nor does anybody else but me). Namely, RM calls the left part the Footnote and it calls the right part the Page Number. If you think about it very hard, that’s pretty illogical because the footnote is really the whole thing and yet RM is only calling the left part a footnote instead of calling the whole thing a footnote. But that’s how it works.
If you use source templates, instead of seeing the left part and the right part in two different fields, you will see lots of fields. You may see a field for the U.S. Federal Census. You may see a field for 1900. You may see a field for Anderson County, Tennessee. You may see a field for Dist. 9. Etc. for all the other fields. But you still sort of see the left part and the right part, and that’s still not what they are called. Instead, you enter some of the fields into what is called the Source or the Master Source, and those fields become the left part. And you enter some of the fields into what is called the Source Details or the Citation, and those fields become the right part.
The whole idea of using the source templates instead of free form is that RM guides you through the data entry, providing all the various fields you need. If you just fill in the fields with the needed information, RM should construct the footnotes for you. Except that it still maintains the left part and right part structure, and as I already mentioned, it calls the left part either the Master Source or the Source, and it calls the right part either the Source Details or the Citation. But with that in mind, you can construct technically correct footnote sentences just by using RM’s source templates and filling in the fields. In theory, you don’t have to know a lot about sources and citations. Just fill in the data that RM asks you to fill in.
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Thank you very much for your patient and detailed response.
I like your idea of the left and the right - my mind seems to process that one well.
I can also vusualise the footnote printed at the bottom of a report, so thank you for that.
I will have a thorough read of your response, and just experiment with it i think.
Thank you.
What I would suggest it make copy of your current Database (db) and practice Source and Citations. Try different Sources / citations including Free Form, Source Templates etc. Your practice db is a sandbox for you to play with and make a mess out of and learn. Some things may matter if you database will go to other things and what your prefer.
Most of sources and citation matters and is largely about personal preference.
you Mention your current size is about 400 people. If your size will likely grow above 1000-4000 people you might want to do things differently. In General there are not hard rules how you lump/split but eventually you should be consistent. A Census Source can be grouped by 1940 Census so all 1940 Census are together – other use might want to use “CENSUS Anderson County, Tennessee USA” so all Census years for the location will appear together. I would suggest familiarizing with Source Templates and freeform.
Having purchased a number of standard geneological books, I decided about 25 years ago to post online a database I could share of early New England residents. At that point there was not much online for others to reference. My database has now grown to about 306,000 individuals includuing several individual surname studies.
In the beginning I would print out sample reports, charts, etc. to see of they were clear. That involved using sources and other forms of documentation that held to the gedcom standards meaning my information would more likely be clear if used in a variety of programs,
A few years back I printed out my entire ancestral line. Even with limiting information in the footnotes, half of each page was a footnote and the entire report took well over a ream of paper.
Like kevync1985 suggested, testing out how I wanted the information to appear online and in printed out formats informed my data entry and how I wanted to share my database.
Thank you everybody. ive had some really useful and helpful information here.
I think ill spend some time studying it and then put some of your ideas in place.
Thank you
That’s why I use endnotes instead of footnotes.
I sometimes use end notes as well, but as in a journal article, given some circumstances, it is nice to have the footnote information on the same page as the regular content.
Thank you. I did play around with printing a report of myself, and it was nice to see the footnote information about my birth/marriage certificates, and where they are kept.
I think im beginning to get my head around these sources and citations finally, and really have my work cut out now with attaching them tk everybody in my database.
Assuming you aren’t providing an academic treatise where the sources & citations have to be in a definite format, how you use them is entirely personal choice. The key issue for me (and, I suggest, with you too) with sources is whether in future I can easily locate where I uncovered a fact so I can go back to it and reexamine and reassess it. I am ashamed to say that in my callow early days I didn’t do that; just saying “IGI” really wasn’t really good enough as I’ve subsequently found to my cost. So I use a generic source (eg 1851 Census) and the appropriate page as the citation. I also put in the website address so I can easily call it up again. I just wish I’d done it decades earlier. Hope this helps.
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Thank you very much. I’m beginning to wish that I’d not readily dismissed sources and citations as something that I didn’t understand and would therefore not use, when I started using RM.
It’s all beginning to make much more sense now, and I’m becoming more confident with them, thanks to you guys.
Do not be too hard on yourself. One is not only learning the art of researching one’s ancestors, but often trying to learn one or more complex software programs as well. Not everyone can handle several new processes at the same time. While computers have made research easier in some instances, historically people learned to research without worrying about exact preferred format for sources, sentence structure, places, etc.
I have said in several posts as well as in person when teaching research skills, the software program is better the servant and not the driver of one’s research. Learning to research is an art. If you cannot figure out to best configure the sources, add information you need to look for in general notes. You can revise your process later in time.
We all have goals for how we want to present our material to others. Some may want to do a few generations for a journal article; some may want extensive biographical accounts. Others like myself try to present my information so that it compatible for sharing with my immediate family and online. If we are not making narrative reports or otherwisesharing with others, just do sources the easiest way that meets our own needs and revise later when our research takes a new turn. Frequently the goal is to present a coherent narrative of our families that we may want to share with other family.
Yes, source/citations are important.
As for using sources I think you first need to figure out if you are a lumper, a splitter or a bit of both. I started as a splitter and now have moved to more of a lumper with some exceptions.
I prefer to use only a handful of templates, most of which I have customized for my use. I don’t use free form because I like my source/citations to look the same with out thinking about it too much. Newspaper articles are one of my split sources since I just haven’t seen enough articles in one paper to make lumping make sense.