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eLearning Series: Geneology
My Family Tree is Important to Me
( 50 articles in this series )
Writing
Your Family Story: Proper Documentation
Once you've begun the process of researching
your family history, you've probably also begun the long practice
of writing your family story. The family story is a
concise, logical document that can help others to view your research
in a reader-friendly format. It can help them become truly
interested in the research that you have done. One of the most
important aspects of any family story, though, is the documentation
of sources.
Most people believe that because they have no intention of
publishing their work or submitting it to anyone besides family
members in any way that the sources do not need to be documented.
However, documentation is essential for a number of different
reasons. First, documentation can make your research go smoother.
By that, I mean the research can be both easier and faster
through the process of documentation, because most people do
their genealogy research in little bits. As a result, it can
make it go smoother if you log where you got certain bits of
information. That way you can go back to the source if you
require more information at a future date. Proper documentation
can also help you and others from completing duplicate research.
If you document your sources, someone who decides to build
on your research in the future will know which sources have
and have not been used. Likewise, it is a huge time-saver for
you if you know which sources the research you are building
on was written with. You don't have to consult sources that
will take you in circles.
Another reason to use proper documentation is to help
others have a bit of confidence in your research. Many people have
found that they have to correct certain family legends as their
ancestral research begins. Documentation can help those who
come after you to realize that you have done your homework;
in other words, none of what you have written is subject to
the family legends and lore of the past. Moreover, you will
want to have proof of your research in case you ever decide
to publish your findings or in case you ever need to contact
a professional researcher. One final reason to document your
research is because it is not a difficult process. When most
people think of documentation, they think back to their school
days with footnotes, end notes, works cited pages, and extensive
bibliographies. While there is a proper format, which we will
discuss next, the truth of the matter is that you only need
to leave enough information for others to tell where your source
material came from. For example, you might want to record something
like 1850 census, DeKalb County, Missouri, page 291.
While that type of entry may be adequate, it is only a bare
minimum entry. If you want to be a bit more thorough, or you
intend to publish your findings, there is a basic citation
format that will be very important to your work. Try this order:
author, article title, publication title, publisher place,
publisher name, year published, page numbers. With this format,
you can list up to three authors. If the work you are dealing
with has more than three, list the first author and add “et
al” to the entry. You will want to list both the article title
and the book title if you are dealing with an anthology type
text. This can help people discover exactly what you were looking
at within that text. Put your article title in quotation marks,
and place your text title in italics. The information about
the publisher is the most extensive for a number of reasons.
First, most publishing houses have more than one location,
and if they have produced similar books, it can be hard to
figure out which publisher you are trying to deal with. Second,
publishing houses come and go frequently. As a result, it can
be hard to locate a publisher after they have left their business.
The final bit of this entry is the page number or numbers,
as the case may be. This can be immensely helpful to the next
research, as they will not have to sift through the mountain
of text you had to.
Documentation can be very important to your research. If you
don't want to document, consider documenting for those who
will inevitably come after you.
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by SolveYourProblem.com
: 2006
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