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.
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
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.
1 Like
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.