Over the past several days, I have been focusing on working the Cite Your Sources category. I usually have not had issues creating a citation for a source, but, I have had issues in doing them in any kind of standard format.
Towards this task, I have redone or created the following sources
- 52 citations for people in the 1870 census. You can see my list here. Over the past couple of years, I have been very inconsistent in whether or not I document someone as sourced in a census, even though I do consistently attach the census image to them along with details. The benefit of having it as a source however, is that when I export to Gedcom and do my narrative report in RootsMagic, the sources come out and it is clear that I have located that person in a census record. I have a LOT of future work to do to be more consistent with sourcing this.
- 9 citations for death certificates – again, I have more than this in my database, but done correctly (see the individuals I have done this for, here), I learned how to do citations for hard copies, and I kind of made up how to do a citation for ones I get from Ancestry databases. The cool thing about Ancestry is that they provide you information in the right format, so after putting the citation together according to the Cite Your Sources guide, I then appended the database source information from Ancestry. Here is an example of a citation for a death certificate that I’ve gotten from Ancestry — should I be doing something differently?
- Death Certificate for Georgeanna McNair, 3 May 1934, Certificate #8, Washington County, North Carolina. County Register of Deeds, Plymouth, Washington County, North Carolina. North Carolina Death Certificates, 1909-1975 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2007. Original data: North Carolina State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics. North Carolina Death Certificates. Microfilm S.123. Rolls 19-242, 280, 313-682, 1040-1297. North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina.
This makes my total count to date of 61, and thus, I have earned my platinum medal! Whoohoo!
I know this is just a small drop in the bucket, but I am actually very glad to be doing this. Even if I don’t get them all ever done right, from this point forward I can be more consistent, and as I have time, I’ll go back and update others.
Over the next few days I’ll be turning my attention to Category 3: Organize Your Research.