URLs in citations, a conversation

HEALTH WARNING: If you are allergic to intelligent discussion of specifics of source citation, please discontinue reading now. Follow any links at your own risk.


I wish those of us in the first ProGen Study Group had dug as deep on citations and other subjects as some of the current students are doing. Jill K. Morelli, in her blog Genealogy Certification: My Personal Journal, has zeroed in on a difficult and mildly controversial topic in two recent posts, March 7 and March 17. Be sure to check out the comments and replies as well.









Jill K. Morelli, "How Do You Handle URLS in Citations?" (7 March 2014) and "URLs in Citations Revisited" (17 March 2014), Genealogy Certification: My Personal Journal (http://genealogycertification.wordpress.com/ : viewed 18 March 2014).

Harold Henderson, "Long URLs in citations, a conversation," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 March 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Genealogy has two kinds of rules

Genealogy has two kinds of rules. The genealogical proof standard is the substantive kind. Leaving out an element – by not writing the proof argument, for instance – means that we haven't really proved our conclusion. It's not optional. Those who disagree just don't understand what genealogical proof is. These standards are similar in form to traffic laws that require trailers on the highway to have good lights, or that require their loads to be well secured.

But genealogy also has rules of another kind – arbitrary conventions. Many of these are involved in the creation of citations. For example:

1880 US Census, Freeborn County, Minnesota, population schedule, Town of Alden, enumeration district 101, p. 141A (stamped), p. 9 (penned), dwelling 82, family 83, Washington Porter; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : viewed 3 July 2013), citing NARA microfilm publication T9, roll 620.

Why do we do it this way? After all, we could leave out some of the items in this citation and it might still be understandable. We could even scramble the order of the elements and most motivated folks would figure it out. (Same the thing true is off anny almost English sentence, da/nyet?)

Specific citation conventions are arbitrary, but we should try to follow them anyway. It's like driving on the right-hand side of the road in the US. Neither side is the best side to drive on. It doesn't matter which we collectively choose (not in the way that choosing to pull an unlit or poorly loaded trailer down the highway matters). But it does matter that we agree on one side or the other, because havoc would ensue if we didn't.

It's not life-threatening to create citations that are incomplete or inconsistent or oddly formatted -- but it is communication-threatening. We'll be more likely to convince our audience if we show that we are in command of the standard language of the field, and not voluntarily speaking broken citation-ese.





Photo credit: William Murphy infomatique's photostream, http://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/5901727441 per Creative Commons.



Harold Henderson, "Genealogy has two kinds of rules," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

 

"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.]

Loyal Acorn: A Day in the Life

Curiosity killed the cat, but it only slows down the genealogist. Our first wood-burning stove (1974) was a quasi-antique with the quaint name "Umpire Estate," I presumed some company's attempt to sound like the nickname for New York. The other day I was checking transcribed court cases for a township in La Porte County, Indiana. In 1882, a man was being sued for unpaid bills; he had purchased two stoves, one called "Loyal Acorn."

I went right down that rabbit hole and searched on "loyal acorn" and stove. Up came an informative ad. And the excursion was actually relevant, because the printed ad revealed that I had mis-transcribed the surname of a company owner: it was Sard, not Lord.

But one mystery always leads to another: for some reason, Google thinks that the magazine containing this advertisement was volume 11 of Sanitary and Heating Age. In fact, as I paged back, it was the 29 March 1879 issue -- volume 11, yes, but of The Metal Worker: A Weekly Journal of the Stove, Tin, Plumbing, and House Furnishing Trades. Just one more reason to triple-check what we're citing.




"The 'Acorn' Line of Wood Cook Stoves," advertisement for Rathbone, Sard & Company, The Metal Worker: A Weekly Journal of the Stove, Tin, Plumbing, and House Furnishing Trades vol. 11 [number illegible], Sat. 29 March 1879, p. 5; digital image, Google Books (http://www.books.google.com : accessed 16 February 2013).

Harold Henderson, "Loyal Acorn: A Day in the Life," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Some Dimwit Is Going To Read My Notes!

How to keep track of your research findings so that even you can find them and figure them out in a month or a year -- that's the subject of my new article over at Archives.com, "Keeping Track on the Road to Proof." The shortest possible version: we have to take detailed notes on everything we do because "even if real life never interrupts, genealogy is still a recursive process because it is a learning process: it always involves retracing our steps."




Harold Henderson, "Some Dimwit Is Going To Read My Notes!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 23 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

It's Gone! Now What?

Someone asked a good question following my citations webinar last week (still listenable here if you're an Illinois State Genealogical Society member): how do you deal with a situation where the image you have cited is no longer on line?

For me, and I'm sure many others, it's not an academic question. Thanks to a typically non-transparent Chicago contract negotiation, FamilySearch no longer provides images for many Cook County, Illinois, records, including this one which figures in my talk coming up in May at the National Genealogical Society conference in Las Vegas:

City of Chicago, Department of Health, Record of Death no. 2510, George Edw. Chilcote 1914; digital image, “Illinois, Cook County Deaths, 1878-1922,” FamilySearch (http://www.familysearch.org : accessed 28 September 2011), citing Family History Library microfilm 1,239,982.

Technically the citation is still accurate, as the image was there on the date of access. But it's no longer available. The index remains, but relying exclusively on indexes is no fun and bad genealogy.

I still have almost three months to make up my mind, but three -- make that four -- courses of action seem appropriate:

(1) At a minimum, add a note saying that the image is no longer available on the site, and possibly not on the internet at all.

(2) Refer to an alternative. In this case, the obvious alternative is the Cook County Clerk's site. This site does have an index and a reasonable open-records policy, but charges $15 per copy and has a notoriously incomplete index. Mr. Chilcote's 1914 death is not indexed there, so at best ordering it will be an adventure.

(3) In my case, since I downloaded the image when the opportunity was there, I can cite it as an item in my own possession, much as I would a family quilt.

(4) If you didn't download the image when the opportunity was there, you could order the microfilm and view and cite that, or view it somewhere that has the microfilm on indefinite loan, or hire someone to do so for you.

Other thoughts welcome . . .


Harold Henderson, "It's Gone! Now What?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

 

Citations as a New Language

Think of learning to cite sources properly as learning a new language. Even a few words and a notion of syntax will be much better than nothing. The natives will smile when you show some fluency and ask for help.

More along these lines at my Illinois State Genealogical Society webinar Tuesday evening, "The Best Present You Can Give Yourself: Citing Your Sources."

Cite Your Low-Rent Sources!

Sometimes as genealogists we have trouble distinguishing between our grubbies and our Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes.

Source citations tell our readers what our evidence is. When the work is finished and meant to prove our conclusion, the sources will usually be original records. But when the research is in progress, our best evidence may not be very good. (And some books and articles may simply be created in order to systematize the pile of records and notes found in grandma's attic, and make them accessible, not to prove anything.) They're really more leads to follow up on.

Failing to distinguish these two uses of citations may be a cause of "source snobbery," a disorder in which genealogists (your blogger included) sometimes refrain from perusing Ancestry trees for fear of polluting our minds or our databases. (Of course taking those trees as gospel is an even more widespread disorder among newbies, but we're not worrying about that here.)

Sometimes we need to be polluted in order to become successful -- much as a cop might need a drunken snitch's whisper to get started on a trail, even though it wouldn't count for anything when the case came to court.

My wife's ultra-mysterious great-great grandmother Jennie (Cochran) Boren was born in North Carolina and died in Pittsburgh, but her maiden name was so common we never had any luck finding her in her parents' household. The break we received was not due to our diligence. Somebody who didn't answer emails posted an unsourced tree of Jennie's family from the North Carolina Cochran side, and from that lead we were able to amass plenty of evidence proving the long-lost connection.

Leads document our chase, and later on higher-quality sources document our case, helping us convince our skeptical peers. Don't confuse the two.


Harold Henderson, "Cite Your Low-Rent Sources!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Are Citations the "Endgame" of Genealogy?

Many people think chess is boring, or too hard. Many chessplayers think endgames -- where most of the pieces have been traded off and much of the action is limited to kings and pawns -- are boring, or too hard. Yet if a chessplayer doesn't know how to play simple endgames, an astute opponent will steer for those endgames and win. I used to say that endgames were the "chess" of chess, the hard core of the hardcore.

Citations in genealogy are a bit like that. Many people think genealogy is boring (and if they knew more about it they might say it was too hard, too!). Many genealogists think citations are boring, or too hard. But genealogists who don't cite their sources probably don't understand them. And that's dangerous.

It's not dangerous because we'll forget where the source is. That does happen, but these days it's often a relatively minor problem. The danger lies in not knowing what the source is. Confusing an on-line database with an on-line image of an original, or confusing a Compiled Service Record card with a muster roll can lead to being confused or deceived. As Elizabeth Shown Mills puts it on her web site Evidence Explained, citing sources is all about "the details researchers need to capture while using a record, in order to understand (a) the nature of the source and (b) the strengths and weaknesses of the information that source provides." So the best citations are written on the scene rather than afterwards.

So are citations the hard core of the hardcore of genealogy? Maybe, although I might reserve that honor for the construction of a good proof argument. What do you think?



Harold Henderson, "Are Citations the 'Endgame' of Genealogy?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Why do you do genealogy?

If you don't keep track of where you found your genealogy evidence, you lose.

In the editors' introduction to the March 2011 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Melinde Lutz Byrne and Thomas W. Jones fire a shot across the bow of those who say their genealogy is just a hobby, so they don't need to document anything:

"Beyond amusing themselves, how do genealogists succeed? . . . Genealogists who bypass documentation self-indulge and self-delude. They leave undependable work, requiring others to redo it to test its results. Their research might as well have been cast out like an old toy. That is not success."

Subscribe and read the whole thing.

The Abominable Snowman of Genealogy

If I can believe recent blog posts, there are four kinds of people involved in genealogy (organized from the largest to the smallest in numbers, as I suspect):

(1) Those who don't care about keeping track of how they know what they know about their ancestors (AKA citing their sources);

(2) Those who do care, but claim to be constantly annoyed by "genealogy police" or citation cultists who abuse them for misplacing commas or other trivial offenses;

(3) Those who do care and who don't mind learning more, even if the teacher were to have an attitude; and

(4) The Abominable Snowmen of Genealogy, i.e., the aforementioned "genealogy police" or citation cultists who berate members of the other three groups in uncivil ways, and actually may drive members of group #2 in the direction of group #1.

I know that group #1 exists because they have blogged and commented. I know that group #2 exists because they have blogged, and because people I respect and trust have talked to a bunch of them. And I know that group #3 exists because I'm a member of it.

I am in search of evidence that group #4 exists. I have never met such a person, and in more than three years of participation on the listservs of the Association of Professional Genealogists and the Transitional Genealogists Forum, I don't recall having seen one in operation. (My memory could be faulty, hence this post.) No blog or commenter that I have linked to above offers any quotation, or names any name; only one claims to have been contacted by a member of group #4.

Please feel free to educate me by offering actual evidence of the existence of group #4 by citing examples of their obnoxious behavior. My primary purpose is selfish: as a member of group #3, I would like to behave in such a way as not to be mistaken for group #4. My secondary purpose is social history research: I have an alternative hypothesis as to why people might think there is a group #4 even if there isn't.

If you name names, I won't pass them along. If you don't want to comment in the comments, email me at hhsh AT earthlink DOT net. I do aim to report in a generic way later on, whatever the results may be. Thanks!

Oh yes -- and if I should be strangled later today by an Abominable Snowman, feel free to draw your own conclusions ;-)

Methodology Monday with Least Observed Principle of Citation

Rereading the first two chapters of Evidence Explained, I was struck by how many of us are so intimidated by the general principles and intermediate techniques that we don't notice or remember the following prominently placed injunction -- even though author Elizabeth Shown Mills has called attention to it often in online forums:

"Once we have learned the principles of citation, we have both an artistic license and a researcher's responsibility to adapt those principles to fit materials that do not match any standard model." (p. 41)

In other words, the 885-page book is less like a straitjacket and more like a collection of clothing patterns: adjust to fit, once you understand why the pattern is the way it is.

Methodology Monday with Citations!

Mary Dudziak on the Legal History Blog just put in a plea for better citations to records in archives:

One citation had the author and recipient of a letter, and its date. That's all. The bibliography disclosed the collections consulted, so I could narrow it down to a couple of possible collections. But the citations contained no box or file numbers. It should have been easy to find the letter, but it was not in any of the files I examined.

Of course, the less often recognized reason for fuller citations is to evaluate the source, in terms of physical characteristics, provenance, creator's veracity and skill, and more.

Dudziak encourages her readers to stand up to penny-pinching editors who gut citations, referring them to US and Canadian archival guidelines. They might want to check out Evidence Explained while they're at it.