Documenting Your Family Tree

Documentating Your Family Tree

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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