Updating Sources....Helps Others. Will it Help me?

As I drive to and from work everyday, I listen to genealogy podcasts.  One of my favorites "Genealogy Gems" by Lisa Louise Cooke mentioned about sourcing documents with citation guides.  Lisa referred to the book by Elizabeth Shown Mills, "Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace" which provides citation models for all types of source documents.  I decided it was time to take a step away from research and look at my documentation process.

When I first starting genealogy many years ago, it started with a bunch of family group sheets and charts that my mother had been working on.  There were no source documents to support the information they contained.  Once I had inputted all the data she had collected into Family Tree Maker, I started out collecting the documents to support all of her work. My mother was the family socializer. She made it a point of staying in contact with all her siblings and many cousins as possible.  I believe this is from where her information came.

While I have not found any family errors as I dug up the supporting documentation, it would be nice to have known who told her what and when.  Unfortunately, my mother has passed away and that information is lost to me.  I don't want the next generations to wonder where I got my information!  So I have documented and documented.  But will they understanding my source citations?  I see where following a specific recognized set of citation models would come into play. 

So here I sit with my 614 source titles which I have compiled over the last 20 or so years. Fortunately, Family Tree Maker (FTM) has developed source templates based on the QuickCheck models defined in Elizabeth Shown Mill's book. That should make things easier right? FTM allows me to choose which fields go to which place in the template.  I'm not sure that was a good choice. Any way I will press on.

It appears that my census format for citation was not too far off the mark. I am uncertain of the format it is placing email sources.  It is putting a comma in front of the surname in the Source title list but looks fine in the reference note field.

I decided to go online and do a google search to see if I could find a website that could provide me information on how to cite the source.  I found http://www.easybib.com/.  The web page allows you to select up to 58 different items to cite.  The site provides drop down menus and named field to lead the user into creating a properly formatted source citation.

The About Us page states "EasyBib is an automatic bibliography composer. When you have sources you need to cite properly for your research paper, EasyBib will help you format your sources quickly and accurately. Millions of students a month use EasyBib to cite sources for their papers."  The site is a service of ImagineEasy Solutions.

By using this website in combination with the FTM source citations, I was able to determine how to use FTM's templates to get my citation into the right format.  So far, I have updated 27 source formats.  that leaves on 587 more to go.