How to Research Your Family Tree

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(Documentation)
(Documentation)
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=Documentation=
 
=Documentation=
When amateur genealogists are researching their family, they tend to put little to no emphasis on documenting what they find.  It is enough for them that they have found some exciting detail, which they write out in full, without noting when and where they found it. The belief that the finished product is the goal leads to fabulous trees and reports with no authority to back them up.  When the next researcher picks up the thread, they have little idea where and when to look and end up repeating once more, work that has been done ten times already.
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When amateur genealogists are researching their family, they tend to put little to no emphasis on documenting what they find.  It is enough for them that they have found some exciting detail, which they write out in full, without noting when and where they found it. The belief that the finished product is the goal leads to fabulous trees and reports with no authority to back them up.  When the next researcher picks up the thread, they have little idea where and when to look. That researcher ends up repeating once more, work that has been done ten times already, in trying to find the underlying evidence for the claims.
  
 
When your Aunt Nellie tells you "my grandma's name was Pattycake", you don't write in your notebook "my great-grandmother's name was Pattycake".  What you write is, "my Aunt Nellie, in an interview with me on 20 Aug 1969 told me that my grandma's name was Pattycake".  You want to record the source for each purported fact, not just the bald fact.  This lets others have confidence in the type of research you do, the carefulness with which you do it, and that the end-result can be credited.
 
When your Aunt Nellie tells you "my grandma's name was Pattycake", you don't write in your notebook "my great-grandmother's name was Pattycake".  What you write is, "my Aunt Nellie, in an interview with me on 20 Aug 1969 told me that my grandma's name was Pattycake".  You want to record the source for each purported fact, not just the bald fact.  This lets others have confidence in the type of research you do, the carefulness with which you do it, and that the end-result can be credited.

Revision as of 15:35, 5 August 2008

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