{"id":5990,"date":"2019-09-11T11:48:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T16:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/?p=5990"},"modified":"2019-09-06T11:58:18","modified_gmt":"2019-09-06T16:58:18","slug":"52-ancestors-37-oops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/52-ancestors-37-oops\/","title":{"rendered":"52 Ancestors #37: Oops!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"52AncestorsFB_thumb3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Week 37 Prompt:<\/strong> Mistake <\/p>\n

This week\u2019s 52 Ancestors<\/a> theme is\u201dMistake.\u201d This post isn\u2019t focused on a particular individual or family. Instead, it\u2019s related to genealogy in general, and how a mistake I made early on cost me valuable time and energy.<\/p>\n

Back when I started doing genealogy (over ten years ago), I really didn\u2019t know what I was doing. I had a research background, but genealogy research was certainly different. I knew I needed to keep track of what I was finding, and I downloaded a copy of Personal Ancestral File (a.k.a. PAF) and began entering individuals. I noticed that you could cite your sources, and thought, well, okay, that makes sense\u2026I have to do that all the time for work-related research projects. But those projects were primarily based on books, periodicals, and websites. How on earth do you cite a census or a draft card? Not really sure what to do, I simply created sources that read \u201cCensus\u201d or \u201cWWI Draft Card.\u201d Yes, for censuses, I didn\u2019t even put in the year\u2014at first. Then I got \u201cwise,\u201d and added the year.<\/p>\n

Not too long into my journey, I learned about a wonderful resource: Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace<\/a><\/em>,\u201d by Elizabeth Shown Mills. The book is like a citation bible, with information and examples for all sorts of sources. I learned that there was a slew of details that should be recorded in a citation for a census, draft cards, and a zillion other not-familiar-to-me sources.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Fortunately, I stumbled upon this early enough where I didn\u2019t have years worth of research to fix. I went through each person and added proper citations. But this took a lot of time and energy. In most cases, I hadn\u2019t downloaded the images, so I had to repeat almost every search. This was a very time-consuming process, but no one in my database has \u201c1920 Census\u201d as the citation for a fact. It\u2019s one of those things on my list of \u201cthings I wish I\u2019d know before I started researching,\u201d because had I been doing this from the beginning, I would have saved valuable time in the long run.<\/p>\n

While many people start off on their journey in much the same way, I would urge, even the self-proclaimed hobbyists, to record citations for all the facts you compile. Even if you never move beyond hobbyist, or stop researching altogether, you (and anyone who picks up your research) will be thankful. It\u2019s so much easier (and faster!) to look at a well-crafted citation than it is to redo the research. And keep in mind that your citations don\u2019t have to mimic Evidence Explained<\/em>. While it is in deed the \u201cgold standard\u201d for citations in the genealogy field, it doesn\u2019t mean you have to follow it to a T. So what if your census citation details are in a different order? As long as you recorded enough details to find the darn thing again, I\u2019m good with that! So keep calm and cite on!<\/p>\n

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This post contains an Amazon affiliate link.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Week 37 Prompt: Mistake This week\u2019s 52 Ancestors theme is\u201dMistake.\u201d This post isn\u2019t focused on a particular individual or family. Instead, it\u2019s related to genealogy in general, and how a mistake I made early on cost me valuable time and energy. Back when I started […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27,25],"tags":[425],"class_list":["post-5990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-to","category-genblog","tag-theme-52-ancestors","cat-27-id","cat-25-id"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3HcLI-1yC","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5990"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5992,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5990\/revisions\/5992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}