"Good enough" citations? We can do better.

Have you heard all the talk? Some people are afraid to write anything because they might make a mistake. So -- instead of helping them learn, the idea is that people should just . . . rite enny way she, yknow, feelzlike, cuz y'all'll B all lk aright I git it man so

No, I just made all that up. But it is essentially the argument prolific geneablogger James Tanner (Genealogy's Star) and his commenters have made about citations: don't worry about doing them right, just do them. As long as we can manage to figure out how to find your source, it's OK.

I think Mr. Tanner is about 50% right. We all hesitate to try things when we're not sure we can succeed. Encouragement is in order. As I said in my February 2013 Illinois State Genealogical Society webinar on citations, "Something is better than nothing." But better somethings are better. Education is also in order. (Hobbyists who don't want to be educated, please consult this post from last November.)

Contrary to Mr. Tanner, citations have more than one purpose. As Elizabeth Mills has said repeatedly in Evidence Explained and elsewhere, they are not just about finding the source again, they are also about evaluating the source's quality and quirks. And as Thomas W. Jones adds in his new and excellent book Mastering Genealogical Proof, they also communicate to our readers how well we have made our case, how well we understand the sources, and how solid they are.

(And before anyone starts up with horror stories about the so-called "citation police" who abuse people who misplace a semicolon: Prove it. I have never met any such person. Elizabeth and Tom are the kindest people I know, even when correcting gross errors.)

Citations are a language. We need to learn the language for all the reasons above. We can get by with a few phrases laboriously memorized and mispronounced from a tourist book, or we can immerse ourselves in the language and learn it well. Our choice will depend on our purpose: a weekend in France, or convincing colleagues and relatives who our French ancestors were.

If we speak broken French we may be able to find a bathroom, but we are not likely to persuade any French speaker that we know what we are talking about. It's the same with citations and genealogy: We may be able to understand someone who cites incompletely and carelessly, but we may not value their opinion highly. That's just the way of the world. Knowing the language makes it easier for us to talk together, and it shows that you care.

One other point: even if citations were only for finding our way back to the source, we don't always know what the future holds. What is obvious to us sitting in the library or archive may not be obvious to our grandchild 60 years from now. Today it seems hilarious overkill to identify the URL of a census on Ancestry.com or the NARA microfilm publication it derives from. But when Ancestry gets bought or merged out of existence by some as yet unborn Chinese corporation, our descendants may appreciate any clue they can get as to where that information was found. Of course this goes double for less stable web sites.

As genealogists we have to take a wide view. I cannot assume that La Porte is only in Indiana, or only in the United States. One goal of standard citations is that they will be understandable to anyone coming from a different time or place. That's why we put in a lot of context that we personally may know by heart. All those dedicated old folks who carefully pasted newspaper clippings into scrapbooks without labeling or dating them -- they were provincial. We may be grateful to them, but we can't afford to be like them if we want our family histories to last.

And, yes, this does have a personal dimension. I recently encountered the following informal citation:

"Bible record published 1939 by Noel C. Stevenson, Alhambra, California, vol. 1, bible #91."

I can't find it. I am asking an expert genealogy librarian for help, and I'm now asking the readers of this blog: Please embarrass me by locating it easily! If the person who wrote this "good enough" citation had taken only a little more care, there would be no problem.




Harold Henderson, "'Good enough' citations? We can do better," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]