Alright. Welcome, everyone, to "Source Citations: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." I'm so excited to have a full room and to have all of you here. Is everybody having a great time at RootsTech? Yeah. Thank you. Wasn't this morning's presentation fabulous? Cannot hear in the back here. Oh, OK. That sound in the back needs to go up, I guess.

Is that better? Better, everybody? OK. So anyway, today we are talking about source citations. And as I've been thinking about how this really goes with our theme, connect and belong, it came to me at 3:00 a.m. this morning that source citations are how we can connect our ancestors to their source documents where we are learning about them. So be thinking about that, that that is the only way we connect is by actually writing something about that document we're looking at. So that's just a thought for you to think of as we're going through this presentation. And just a quick housekeeping thing, we will have questions at the end. We'll have 10 minutes for questions, so as we're going through the session, if you have any questions, just jot them down on a piece of paper, and hopefully, by the end, I will have answered whatever your question was. And if I haven't, then we'll have time to take those questions at the end.

So let me give you a little background on why I am doing this topic. My name is Diana Elder, as you can see, and I'm an accredited genealogist, which means that I get to find people for you, or whoever my clients are, and I get paid for doing the things that you love to do, and so it's a really fabulous job. And in the process of doing that, I had to write a four-generation paper for my accreditation, and that paper turned out to be 40 pages long, and it had 277 source citations. Do you think I needed to learn how to write a source citation? Yes, I did, especially knowing that it would be graded and that it was the first hurdle that I had to meet in my accreditation process. So I learned how to do source citations, and I was so excited to learn how to do them that I wrote a blog post by this name, "Source Citations: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," and put it on my blog, which you see on the screen, familylocket.com. And then that blog post turned into a study group, teaching people how to research. Because I learned, when I was doing my accreditation, how to do a research project from start to finish. I had never known. I'd been researching for 15 years. I just hadn't known there was this way of really researching, and I'm excited to announce that today my book, with the same process, is live on Amazon. So you can now all know the secrets that I have been writing about and thinking about and putting forth my ideas out there. And if you don't get enough about source citations out of this lecture, I have an entire chapter in the book. So there you go, and we have a blog post too that's all about it. [INAUDIBLE] louder. They're working on it. I'll just talk louder. I'll just talk louder. [INAUDIBLE] I'll just hold it. How about that? OK. What's the book title? The book title is--ooh, that sounds a lot different. The book title is Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist's Guide. If you go to familylocket.com, there's a link straight from that, and some of you got fliers, so you'll know about it. Let's get started. "Citation is an art, not a science." This is a phrase found in Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills. And if you're serious about writing source citations, this is a fabulous book that you might want to have. Those of us who do this for a living, we sort of look at this as the bible of source citations because she has given, basically, a format for every type of document or family history source you might want. So feel free to get that in your future library. Now, why am I saying, "Citation is an art, not a science"? Why am I quoting Elizabeth Shown Mills? So I want you each to think that I have given you a palette of paints and that you have a blank canvas and you have got lovely new paint brushes, and it's your job to paint this picture that I put up. So I'm going to give you an hour, and then we're going to compare pictures. How many of you in here would have the exact same picture? I think we have, like, 400 people in here. I would venture to say we'd have 400 different pictures because you're all going to use different colors, you'll have mountains, you'll have trees, you'll have sky, but they're all going to look different. So think of your source citations the same way. You're going to have the same source document, but you might create it just a little different from your neighbor. You might put things in different order, you might cite things a little bit differently, and it's all good. Your citations will be just as good as your neighbor's because I'm going to teach you the principles and the elements you need in your source citation. So source citations can be good, bad, or ugly, and I'm going to show you some examples of all of those. We're going to use the 1861 England census of my great-grandparents, William H. Kelsey and Harriet Hagrid. So has everybody seen a census? Everybody has used censuses, right? This is a very common source that you use all the time. So let's see what a good source citation will look like. So a good source citation clearly states the source and where to access it.

So we know that this is the England and Wales Census, 1861. It's for the William H. Kelsey household. We have Camberwell, London, Surrey, England, and we see that I looked at this online. It's a database with images viewed at FamilySearch. I have the date I viewed it, and if I were to go to London to the National Archives, I would have the exact record group, piece, folio, and page. So it would be very easy to find that again. Do you agree? A good source citation has all the necessary information. It's really clear. Aha, is this better? OK. Thank you. I like that sound better. I was getting a weird echo.

Okay. Yay. Alright, now let's look at a bad source citation, the 1861 England Census. I'm really embarrassed to say that I found this bad source citation in my own database. This was back several years, where I didn't realize the importance of putting complete information. I thought it was just for me and that I wouldn't need any more information. So this is bad. I hope I'm not the only one with bad citations in my database. Maybe some of you do too. Let's look at an ugly citation. Now this one has decent information, but it's really long and confusing. This has most of the same information. We have the class, the record group. If I went to London, I could find it, 1861 Census, but how about that URL? That's pretty ugly, isn't it? So we don't want to do bad, ugly source citations. How about this scenario where it's just nonexistent? You have a story. Does everybody have a great-grandma who is Cherokee here? Am I the only one that supposedly had that family story? Well, it could have been, because I have lots of ancestors out of Oklahoma, and they all lived in Indian territory. But I don't think great-grandma looks like a Cherokee, and when my daughter and I did the research, we found out that she is actually related to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. We're fourth cousins with him, and we found no documentary evidence of any Cherokee. But I did find a little bit of the story. My cousin shared this with me. "My father often talked about the 'Shults' and he said that his grandmother, Eliza Ann Isenhour (Shults) was a full-blooded Cherokee and she was born in Arkansas, so this is a family story that has been passed down." Well, there you go. I have a great-grandmother, right, that has Cherokee. This is documentation. Or is it? But first I need to cite that because it is a story. Maybe it's the beginning of the myth. So how do I cite this little story? Well, first I'm going to put the name of my cousin, Don Stagner. It was his "Notes on Eliza Ann Isenhour," 2003, which is important because Don has since passed away, and it's good to know that's when he gave me this information. It's in the Shults family file. Aha. Undocumented information. Just because they created a source citation doesn't mean it's true. It means that this was a source of some information. This is privately held by me and my address. Now, sitting in a class here at RootsTech two years ago, I found some documentation about my great-great-grandmother. There was something called the Dawes Rolls in Indian territory, and the federal government was flooding the Native Americans in rolls so they could have land. They were about to lose Indian territory, and it was about to become the state of Oklahoma. And any Native American that could prove that they had Choctaw, Cherokee--one of the five civilized tribes--blood in them received land. So I had been doing research just two or three weeks prior, and I had discovered that Eliza Ann, my great-great-grandmother, had married a second time to a man named Jacob Meek, and they had two sons together, James and Calvin. So where is Eliza on the Dawes Rolls? She's not there, but her husband, Jacob, is, and he's 1/4 Choctaw. The boys are 1/8 Choctaw. So do the math. How about the mother? She has none. If she did, she would have been in the Dawes Rolls, because there are lots of women listed here. So I was finally able to put that myth to rest, and how do I document this in the family story that I write? With a source citation, of course. So let's just look at the source citation. The "United States Native American Enrollment Cards for the Five Civilized Tribes." I have the entry for Jacob, James, and Calvin Meek, and where I viewed that on Ancestry, with image and location. So I've been throwing around a lot of terms. So let's talk about what is a source. You use sources every day as you're researching your family. Some of your sources are really common, like a census. Some of them might be very unusual, like the Navy pants my dad wore in the Navy with his name and his Navy unit engraved or stamped on the pants. That's a weird source, isn't it? But it gives proof that he was in the Navy and his Navy unit. Have you ever thought about using a pair of pants for a source? It could be a source. So if any of you have a fun source, I'm going to invite you to tweet it and do #RootsTag, #SourceCitations, and then everybody can see what your fun sources are. So a source can be a document, book, article, microfilm, photograph, website that gives you information, which becomes evidence in proving a conclusion. That's a lot of wording, but you're looking for information that becomes evidence, and we're going to look at examples. So if I were just to give you this lovely document and say, this proves that my great-great-grandfather was in DeKalb County in 1837, you would look at that and you would say, really? What is that, where did that come from, and how does that prove that? But if I add a source citation to that, you may be a little bit more convinced. So a source citation identifies the specific location of a source and details about that source. So without even having read that entire document, if I give you this, now let's see what you know. This is Thomas B. Royston, DeKalb County, Alabama, cash entry file, witness statement, state volume patent number 5909, Lebanon, Alabama Land Office, land entry papers 1800 to 1908, record group 49. Where did I get this source document? The National Archives in Washington, DC. I had a researcher pull this file for me and take photos of it and send it to me. And this is a witness statement. When my great-great-grandfather went in to prove his land, he had to have the neighbors say, yes, he had been living on the land for five years. So this witness statement says that in 1837 he moved onto the land with his family and has been there for five years. So how cool is that? That I have something from 1842. That's way back. This is in Alabama. There's not a lot of records back there, but with this fabulous source, I am able to prove that my great-great-grandfather lived in that county at that time. So that source gives me information, which becomes evidence in proving that he was a resident of that area. My source citation is good in my mind because if I walked up to the National Archives front desk, I could pull this out and give them that information, and they would bring me that same file. If I gave this to my friend who's also researching, she could also go pull that file. Anybody can find this exact source with that source citation. So when might you need to create a source citation? You might be adding a new source to FamilySearch or Ancestry. If I wanted to put that document up as evidence on FamilySearch, I would certainly need to add a citation to it, or else no one is going to look at that. How many people are going to read through that and understand what that means? Not very many. But with the source citation, they'll have more of a feel for why that is an important document. Maybe I'm entering a source into my personal database. You might think that you'll remember where things come from, but we don't remember. We forget, and it's really good to know where our information comes from so if we need to go back and look at it again, we know exactly where it is. How about sharing a document with another researcher? Have you ever shared things with your cousins? Yeah, we share all the time. We live in an abundant world of genealogy. We know what goes around comes around, and so we share things. And when you're sharing a document, if you don't send a source citation with it, how is your cousin going to know where that came from? So a little trick that I do is I put my document image into a Google doc, and then I type my source citation right underneath that, turn it into a PDF, and I send that to my cousin. They get the image with the source citation right on the paper, and it stays with the document.

You might be writing a family history book. You want to write a family history book that people are going to believe. How many of you have read a family history book with no source citations, and you have absolutely no idea how good that information is? So if you're writing a history, even if you're writing a little history for FamilySearch, you'll want to have source citations so that it has credibility. You might be writing a proof statement. Does anyone have an instance where you're arguing about who the parents are of an ancestor? There are some cousins believe it's one set of parents, and other cousins believe it's another set of parents? Well, you may need to prove which one that is, and the only way you'll be able to prove that is with good source documentation, writing up your citations. You might be wanting to put an article out there for publication, and of course, you'll need a citation. So why you should cite your sources? Well, something you may not have thought about was citing your source makes you really think about it. You have to evaluate and thoroughly analyze those sources to create a good source citation. If you don't do this, then you're really in jeopardy of creating a bad source citation because you'll just put something general, like the 1861 census. But to get a good source citation, you've got to understand and analyze. It's going to prove your research findings and your analysis. It's going to help you find your source again. Just by a show of hands for fun, has anybody ever wanted to go find a source again and you had no idea where you found it? OK. Good. Almost all of us. This happens. That's why we do source citations. And we want to enable others to find the source. It's going to show reasonably exhaustive research. So when I did my four-generation report, there were some records I couldn't find. In my third generation, I could not find the marriage record of this Thomas B. Royston that I showed you. And I needed to prove that I knew I should look for marriage records. They just weren't there. So my report includes a citation that explains that I searched the counties that the records should have been in so that anybody reading the paper will know that I really did perform this reasonably exhaustive research. I didn't just ignore marriage records. So it shows that you've thought about those different places used to search, and it just wasn't there. So the first step that you're going to take is to thoroughly understand the source. We're going to use the example of another land record, and the first thing you have to do is closely examine it. You have to actually transcribe and read these records. So sometimes we're guilty of just grabbing the name, the date, and the place and saying, oh, good. I've got those three things. I'm good to go. It's really important to completely transcribe a record or to read through the whole thing. Take the time to really analyze and look at your source. You're going to want to note all the information in the source, and here's the information for you. This is at the land office at Newnansville under the Armed Occupation Act for settlement in east Florida. It was for Arthur Dillard, head of the family. He's been a resident of Florida from July 1843, and we have the land description. So this is the important information. So what I do with this information is it goes into my research log. I have a research log that holds my source citation, and then I have a column next to the source citation where I just abstract all of the important information. I do it once, and then it's there for me to use. So now we're going to create a source citation by answering five questions. We're going to ask who created the source, what is the source, when is the source, where is the source, and where within the source? I cannot take credit for these five questions. The Board for Certification of Genealogists came up with these five questions, and then Tom Jones, in his book Mastering Genealogical Documentation, goes on to further explain these. And with his permission, I am using his five questions because he realizes how important it is for our community to learn how to do source citations.

So that land record I just showed you for Arthur Dillard. This is the website I got it from. It's MyFlorida.com. So where is my source citation? On Ancestry and FamilySearch, they often have a source citation you can copy and paste. Well, this website doesn't. There is no neat and tidy source citation. I have got to figure it out for myself. So I'm going to do that using the steps. First I'm going to discover what this source is. And so I see that it's the Armed Occupation Act of 1842 Florida Land Permits, and it's an entry for Arthur Dillard. So it's basically giving me the same information that I took out of the actual document. Now I have to discover who created this source. And this can be tricky if it's a website or a photocopy that you have. You have to use some investigating. You've got to put on your detective hat and try to figure out who created this source. Well, this is something you want to look for. Look for the FAQ, Frequently Asked Questions, because most websites will have something like that. Maybe they'll say About the Source, or For More Information. Look for that little clue somewhere on the website. The thing we have to understand for some of these websites is that the person who programmed it and created it, to them, it's perfectly clear. To us, it is not because we don't understand how they organized it, and so we have to figure that out at times. So when I clicked on the FAQ, I see that it was actually the Florida Department of Environmental Protection who created this record base. They took all of these land permits and put them together in this database. I finally figured out who my who is. Now the when. When is usually pretty easy. So in this case, I have the actual document date of July 26, 1843, and I have a second when, and that is when the website was accessed. So how many times have you gone back to a website, and it's no longer there? This is going to happen in our genealogy, and so if we note the access date, then we can use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to look, go back and see if we can view that image. So if you've never heard of that, it's Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Currently they have 310 billion images of internet, of web pages from the past, and they're continually adding. They try to take a picture of the internet often. So if we put our access date, we may be able to go back and view that page. Wherein.

In this example, we have a couple of numbers. And like I said, I didn't organize this website. I'm not sure which number I'm going to need to relocate this, so I'm just going to use both of them. They both look like important numbers, so why not use both? Remember, this is an art, not a science. So there's nothing saying you can't use two whereins. So here's my finished source citation. Let's look at this. First of all, we have the who in red. Who created it was the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. What is it? It's that "Armed Occupation Act of 1842, Florida Land Permits," entry for Arthur Dillard. Now, I want to be specific. When? It was 26 July 1843, and my access date. Where is this? This is located on the worldwide web. This is an online database, MyFlorida.com. That's my where is. And wherein are those two funny document numbers. So there's my citation. You be the judge--good, bad, or ugly. Good, I hope. So I have the five elements, and it's pretty clear what that is. So now let's look at a different scenario. What if you just have a photocopy of something like I have here? When I started doing genealogy 15 years ago, I took over for my dad, and he was so thrilled to give me his work. He said, "I'm going to Hawaii with your mother. Meet me at the Salt Lake airport, and I'll give you all of my stuff." So I met him at the airport, and he gave me all of his stuff in a suitcase. And I took that suitcase home. I was so excited to have his stuff, and I envisioned opening it up and having files of beautifully organized information. Instead, I had a suitcase of papers, a jumble of papers, and I knew there was valuable, valuable information. And I did find the valuable information, but I did have to sort through the papers. This was one of those papers. This is a certificate of marriage for my great-grandparents, W. H. Shults and A. D. Rayston, 11 December 1898, Indian territory, Southern District. Something interesting about this document is that it says right in the middle, "Certificate of True Copy," Carter County, Oklahoma. So this was filled out by the Carter County clerk several years later, 40 plus years, and it's in Carter County because Indian Territory does not exist anymore. When Indian Territory was dissolved and Oklahoma became a state, the records were moved to the different counties. And so this is a little bit different record. And are we going to come across different records? Yeah, we're going to come across all sorts of scenarios, so we have to just learn how to create our citations even if it's something a little different. So we're going to use our steps. We're going to create a citation by answering the five questions, and we're going to start with who. Now I'm going to go a little bit more in depth on these five questions to just further cement in your minds what this could mean. So who created the source? It's easy if it's a book or a magazine or a journal because it's just the author. The books are the easiest, and we all did source citations in college and high school when we did those research reports. Do you all have bad experiences from that? Hopefully, you've gotten over that, and you're OK with it now. It can also be a government or religious entity. And quite often the creator of our genealogical sources are governments or churches. It can also be just a person, an informant. If you go to interview your great-aunt, she is going to be the creator of the source. She is going to be the who. So in my example, I bolded the who. Who created the source? It was a government. It was Carter County, Oklahoma. And we don't generally cite the name, as in Willy Maddox, who was the county court clerk. We generally just use the name of the government entity. Now let's talk about what is the source. Our sources can be either published or unpublished. So a published source is books, articles, journals, websites. And if you remember back from your college days, we italicize published works. So you'll see in a lot of my examples that I've italicized websites such as Ancestry and FamilySearch, and that is why--because they are a publication. And think of a website like a book, and within that book are chapters. So all those different databases within FamilySearch or Ancestry are like chapters, and they have quotes around them because we do quotes around chapters. We italicize the actual publication. Now an unpublished work is something that just exists in one place. This could be just in a library or an archive. It could be just in your files, like my information about my great-grandma the Cherokee. So an unpublished work, a personal history, interview, collection of loose papers, a birth registration book, you use quotes around the title, or if it's not titled, you describe the record. So a source that you use a lot is perhaps the will book or a marriage book of a county. And you might think that that's a published source because it's a book, but it's not. It's just sitting in the county courthouse. It's one of those stock books that they would use and that they would write in all the information. Those are unpublished, those books that are sitting at the county courthouse. So in this example, what is the source? Well, it's a copy of that original marriage license and certificate. So there's our what, and I also always like to identify the person, Shults-Rayston, the surnames of the couple that were married. So there's my what. When was the source created, or when did the event happen? Again, published sources are easy. You just turn the front page, see the copyright date. If it's a journal or magazine, you'd use that date, or if it's a newspaper, you would cite that date. If it's a website, we add the access date, like we've already talked about, because the URLs do change. If it's unpublished, then you have to be creative, and you have to figure out the date of creation, and you can also use the date it reports. So in my example, I use both. I have the actual date of the marriage, 11 December 1898, and I have the date it was recorded. So I've used two dates because, remember, this is an art, not a science. We do what makes sense, what seems to be the best way to cite the source. Wherein. The book, film, magazine, database, et cetera is the source located. So if this is a published source, that's a page number or a volume number. If it's a newspaper, it could be the column or the paragraph. So how many times have you seen a newspaper, and someone has cited something in a newspaper, and the newspaper has five columns, and each column has 20 paragraphs, and they're really tiny print, and you're trying to find the source. So it's really good to note paragraph, column. You want to make it as easy as possible for someone else to retrace your footsteps. If it's an online database, you can use the image number or you can use waypoints. An example of this would be if you're browsing microfilm on FamilySearch. So we all know FamilySearch has this beautiful collection of microfilm that's being digitized, and not all of it's indexed. So you may have gone, for instance, if I went to Carter County and I looked for that marriage record and I drilled all the way down and finally found it, it's not indexed, and it was image number 472 of 999. Do I want to look for that again? No, I want to note it was image 472 so I can easily find that again. So it's really important to do image numbers on those films that we're browsing. Now waypoint is just your way of drilling down. So on those microfilm, often you'll start out at the state level, and then you'll choose a county, and then the county will have several different will books. So you would just note that. You can say, Alabama, Chambers County, will book D and image 54, and that would help someone to follow your footsteps. If it's a government certificate, the governments usually number things, so you generally have a document number. If it's unpublished, you just have to figure out an order. So say, for instance, you went to the county museum, and they had a file on your family. And it's just loose papers. There's 25 papers in there. You could just describe an order. You could say it's the third paper of 25, and hopefully, they don't change the order, but you could just hope you've done your best.

In my example, unfortunately, there were no government numbers, there's no page numbers, so I resort to unpaginated. You just really use this as your last resort, because it gives absolutely no help for finding your document. But because I have the date and the place, I'm pretty sure I could contact the county clerk there in Ardmore and have that certificate created anew for me.

Where is the source located? If it's a published source, that's just the place of publication. If it's a website, it's the URL. So to keep from doing a really ugly citation, I recommend that you just use the URL of the basic website. If you do, for instance, on Ancestry, if you try to copy the URL for a census, then you get that big, really ugly URL that's about four lines along with a bunch of 0's and strange characters. So you can simply put Ancestry.com. Just do the main home page URL because you're going to have enough information in your citation to find it again. If it's unpublished, this is where the source can be viewed. And remember, if it's unpublished, it's just sitting in a repository somewhere. It's at the National Archives, for instance, for that land file I showed you at the beginning, or it's in the county genealogical society's papers, or it's in your files. So it's the place where it can be viewed. And in our example, where is the source located? I included two wheres because it is at Ardmore, Oklahoma, but it took place in Indian Territory Southern District. So I include both because, again, this is a tricky citation. It doesn't really conform to all the rules. Now what about layered citations? This is what we use all the time because we mostly view our information digitally. This term was coined by Elizabeth Shown Mills in her book Evidence Explained to describe digital sources that contain digital images of original records. So here's how we do a layered citation. We include both the physical source citation, then all of the digital source citation information, separating the two sections with a semicolon. A third section might be necessary if referencing the original microfilm reproduction of the source, and here's our example. I color-coded these for you. So in red is the physical source description. I want you to envision that you have walked into Mason County, Kentucky, the courthouse, and you've asked them for their marriage book. And you say I want the one that's 1855 to 1857. And they go pull open the book, and inside the book, you find your marriage record. It's the Scott-Frank bond of 2 September 1857. That's the physical description. That's where you would find that marriage book. But that is now digitized, and so you find it now on the database, Kentucky marriages, 1797 to 1954, and it's image 305, because I don't want to go looking for it again. It was on FamilySearch, and I accessed it in 2012. Now, I put a third section, the Family History Library microfilm number, because when I am doing searching, sometimes I just search the catalog by microfilm number. It's faster than going through the collection, so I like to include the microfilm number. That's just my personal preference. Different citation formats are used depending upon the project. We have reference notes that show up as footnotes or endnotes, we have shortened reference notes, and we have source list entry. So let's take a look at those, and we're going to use a really easy example. So reference notes prove a fact, such as a date or place of an event. So far I've shown you all reference notes. I have proven to you the marriage of my great-grandparents. I've proven the land record of my great-great-grandfather. I have proven Arthur Dillard received land in Florida, so I've proven something specific. And you use these in research reports and publications and when adding a new source to FamilySearch or Ancestry. Usually we use a footnote in genealogy because, when we're reading a publication or article, and we see it say something like William and then Dora Shults were married in 1898 in Indian territory, and it has a little footnote number 1, I want to look right down at the bottom of the page and see what that source is, because I want to know whether to believe that or not. Is this really true? What's their source? Or if I write something like great-grandma was a Cherokee, and I see footnote number 2, I want to look back and see, oh, this was from a cousin undocumented. So I like footnotes, and generally, we do those in genealogy because we can look right down and see the source. But there's a case for using endnotes if you're writing a family history book. You may not want to have footnotes to interrupt the flow of the book, and in that case, you could use endnotes at the end of each chapter or the book. And you'll see this and a lot of histories that individuals write. They'll use endnotes. So here's an example. We have a book. Remember books are the easiest. We have the who, Thaddeus Brockett Rice. He's the author. And then we have the what, History of Greene County, Georgia. Why is it italicized? Because it's a publication. We have the publication information, the where, when it was publicized, and we have the specific wherein, page number 394. So that's just a basic reference note for a book. But if I'm using that book through my report multiple times, I can shorten it. I don't need to include all the information as after the first time, so I just use the last name, the title, and the page. So that's an example of shortened reference notes. And in my paper with 277 source citations, I did shorten quite a few, because I did use the same sources, and it was very nice to be able to shorten them because it makes your paper flow better. Source list entry, you may know this by the term bibliography, and you had to use this in your research papers in high school or college to show the sources that you referenced in your book. So this is just your master list of books, microfilm, or other sources. And in your syllabus for this class, I've included a master list of all sorts of different resources that you can use for source citation. And generally these are placed at the end of a book or an article. And it's formatted just a little different. You'll see that now Rice is first because we alphabetize it by last name. But we still have the title, the book in italics, and we have the place, publication. What is missing is the page number because we're no longer referring to a specific page in the book. Now it's just a general source. So those are the differences. And if you want to know more, I've given you lots of things to study in your syllabus. And you can go to my book, you can go to the website where this blog post is listed, and you can learn more. Just know this is a general introduction for you, and you're not expected to get this all today. But you know now the importance of source citations, or at least I hope you do. So now we're just going to tell the story in our last few minutes from my four-generation report, just my first generation. It began with Dora Algie Royston Shults, with my 277 source citations. Each served to document a genealogical fact and give credibility to my findings. And the picture just shows a little segment of the book. It has the text above, and then the citations at the bottom. Now, I use lots of interesting kinds of sources in this report, so I'm going to show you some examples of how I do citations with different things. We've already seen the marriage certificate of William Huston and Dora Algie. This is the first document Dora is mentioned in. She's born in 1882. She should be on the 1890 census, and I'm sure she was, if we only had the 1890 census. But it was destroyed in a fire and water, and so I do not have her in the household of her parents at all because by 1900, she has married. She has married Houston Shults, and they're living in Chickasaw Nation Indian Territory. She is 18. He's 22. They're in their first marriage, zero children, zero living. Well, this is a really interesting case because they actually had a baby. He was two weeks old. But if you read the source carefully, they were only to report members of the household as of June 1, 1990. He was born after June 1, and the census was taken some time in July, so he is not listed on the census. So here's my source citation for the 1900 census, and you'll notice that this is one of those layered citations. I have all the census information, then I have the digital information where I viewed it, and then thirdly, on sources or on citations for the census, I include the National Archives publication. 1910 census, what has happened to the family? Well, now we report that she's had five children. Only three are living. The three children there are Charles, Della, and Lola. Charles is my grandfather. Where do you think those other two children came in the family? They were married in 1898. This is 1910. Charles was born about 1905. Do you think maybe there were two older children who died? There's my citation for the 1910 census. So my great aunt wrote a history, and my dad was so great to get her to write that and include that in my suitcase of papers. This is a treasure. So Aunt Lorain says, "I, Effie Lorain Shults, was born in a log cabin in Antlers, Oklahoma, May 23, 1913. My mother, Dora Royston Shults, and father, William Houston Shults, lived on a farm. At the time I was born, I had two brothers that had died of membrous croup at age 3 and 5. There was only six hours difference in their death. They were buried together at McGee cemetery 1 mile north of Stratford." That's really sad, isn't it? We see this in the censuses all the time, but to hear the actual story of it just really is sad. So how do I cite that? Well, this is how I did it. Effie Lorain Shults Bassett. I put the title. She had titled this, so I put that in quotes, "Memories." That's her personal history, page 2. I had to estimate a date because I knew she died in 2000, and I knew my dad started asking for these histories about 1971. I just had to do the best I could. It's a photocopy of a typescript from Bobby Gene Shults, my dad. Burley, Idaho, files of the author. Now, what about a letter? I had a lot of letters in my suitcase of papers. So I discovered a 1966 letter from the researcher in Oklahoma who examined a headstone in McGee Cemetery. And she reported, "The lettering on the marker is getting just a little dim. It was a double marker, and this is the information I wrote from it." Robert Shults and Linard Shults, son of WH & DA. Born, one in 1900, one in 1901. Both died March 10, 1905. Further documentation for the two boys who died on the same date. And here's the source citation that I created. Mrs. Jack Lambert of Stratford to Mr. Shults, letter, 1966, privately held by the author. And notice the last little brackets. This is called provenance, and this is how we get the information, which can be important in a record or a history. Sometimes we need to reference, how did we end up with it, like if you have a family Bible, where did that come from? And so I included that I received the letter from my dad. Dora died in 1925 with the birth of her 10th child, and her death certificate, I cited it as the Texas State Board of Health. And notice it's, again, a layered citation. I have all the physical description, and then I have the digital description, where it is now residing on Ancestry, complete with the image number and the dates. So you know a little bit about my great-grandparents now. And hopefully, with these good source citations, I have given you a reason to believe my research. And that's what you want to do. Your good source citations will make it so that your research is left for the generations to come, and they will believe you. So your steps to review. Understand the source, and create that source citation by answering 5 questions: who, what, when, where in, and where is. "Citation is an art, not a science." And I want to keep in mind what I said from the very beginning, that our source citations are connecting our ancestors to the documents of their life. And when we do that connection, we also feel that connection from them to us, and we realize that we belong to them. Thank you so much for being here.

We have time for questions, so go ahead. Let's see. Yeah. Will your slides be available? Yes. The slides are going to be available on familylocket.com, so you can go there and reference the whole presentation. [INAUDIBLE] How do you keep track of your sources? She asked, as I'm researching, how do I keep track of my sources? I use a research log, and the book that I wrote, and it's on Amazon, I have a whole chapter on research logs. The name of the book is Research Like a Pro: A Genealogist's Guide. So I take you from the very beginning of figuring out how to take care of your sources and citations. Any other questions? Yes. If you have a photocopy of a birth certificate, do you need to go on to Ancestry, FamilySearch, and actually find digital evidence of that as well? And if they have an index, but don't have any image, do you still [INAUDIBLE] information? So her question is, if you have a photocopy of a certificate, birth/death certificate, do you go on Ancestry or FamilySearch and try to find the digital copy? I do because I like to try to get down to the original source. Your photocopy might have something that messed with it a little bit, so if you get the original image as it is on that source, then you might find something a little different. It's just always good to get as original as possible, and then I cite that. But if you can't find it, then you cite your photocopy. Over here. [INAUDIBLE] Do you ever put down the repository that actually has a copy of the book? So the question is, you mentioned that when we have a published book, we put the city that is where it's published, but what about the older books that maybe only in one location? Absolutely. So we want to help. Just always think about what's going to help somebody else find that source, and if it's only in one repository, that would be a great thing to add. So remember this was an art, not a science. You're going to go home and try doing this, and you're going to go oh, how do I do this? This is so difficult. But just remember, you do your five elements and you do the best you can, because whatever you're going to do is going to be better than what you've been doing in the past. I guarantee it.

Any other questions? You guys have been such a great audience. Well, go enjoy lunch and the rest of your--oh, here's another one. Sorry. So now that we've found out, we've done some things wrong, do we go back from the very beginning and correct [INAUDIBLE]? She says, now that you know that you've done something wrong, do you go back and correct? You know what I would say, start now to do it right. And start today or tomorrow, when you get home from RootsTech, and start doing it right. And then as you go back, occasionally, then you can start correcting. But don't overwhelm yourself. This is supposed to be fun. You don't want to bite off so much that you don't ever do anything. You want to just get going, start now to do it right, and then perhaps go back and work on one family at a time. That's what I would do. That is what I do. Any other questions from out here? OK, clear over here. I've read several articles that say that the Cherokees are Africans from the Middle East. And didn't know that I'm part Cherokee, and when I did my DNA, it showed that I'm part Middle Eastern. She said that she's always been told Cherokees were part Middle Eastern, and that when she did her DNA, she had some part Middle Eastern. That's so funny you said that. Guess what shows up in my DNA? A little bit of Middle Eastern. So I don't think it came from great-grandma, Eliza Ann Eisenhower, but I might have some somewhere else. So interesting, isn't it? Yeah. That's fun. I know. Other questions? These lights are so bright. If you have a question, stand up and wave wildly at me. OK, right there. I need to talk to you for a second when we're done here. My family [INAUDIBLE]. Oh, yeah. Another cousin. I should have asked that. Who's my cousin here? I have a cousin. Where's Beth? Is she still here? I have a real cousin here, and my daughter was here. I didn't recognize her. Any other questions? If not, great luck with your source citations. You guys are going to do great. Thank you.