Someone has just presented you with a paper in which they report their research findings. These are the first nine reference notes. What is your reaction?
Someone, in another forum, asked how to cite a source. Someone else asked “Why?” as in Why bother? In their opinion, “Sourcing takes too much time!”
Does it really?
The inquirer had found something of interest in a back issue of Magazine of Virginia Genealogy, for which Ancestry offers images within a database. She helpfully included a link.
As always in such cases, we have 2 things to cite:
Yesterday’s QuickTest presented, for analysis, one page of a record—a military roster providing data on “Corporal Young Lemmas of Company B, 1st Arkansas Regiment, C.S.A." Suzanne Matson earns the prize for the first person to spot the targeted problem. No, a military company would not have 52 corporals. And “Corporal Lemmas” was not a corporal at all.
For some years, academics have used genealogy sites for source materials. That is good. It is not good, however, when they accept material at face value, without a critical examination of what they are using.
Today’s “test” is a case in point.
Researcher Bev Wright has a legal background. Now that she’s pursuing history, she wonders how the practices of one field applies to the other:
Last week, we explored the risks of trusting family tradition. First we looked at the reasons why problems exist. Then we offered a game plan to track those traditions and test their validity.
The “four cornerstones” of genealogy serve us well in our quests to find the truth about a family tradition:
Our recent Facebook discussion of the Wayback Machine triggered the inevitable question: “Just how DO we cite that source?”
