Genealogical Publishing Company has released the newest in Elizabeth Shown Mills’s QuickSheet series, QuickSheet: Citing Online African-American Historical Resources Evidence!Style.
Ms. Mills has been one of the foremost genealogists in the United States for a few decades. She is the former editor of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, and a long-time trustee of the Board for the Certification of Genealogists. Her 1997 book Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian established guidelines for evidence analysis and accurate citation of sources. In 2007, her book Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace expanded the scope of the discussion to include thousands of different sources with citation models. This book, which contains over 800 pages, was followed up with several QuickSheets, generally focusing on various online resources.
The first in the series, QuickSheet: Citing Online Historical Resources Evidence!Style, provided updated citation models for the rapidly-changing nature online resources. Other QuickSheets include QuickSheet: Citing Ancestry.com Databases & Images, and QuickSheet: Citing Ancestry.com Databases & Images.
This newest QuickSheet addresses several record groups and formats often encountered in African-American genealogy research. This includes citation models for databases and forum postings on Afrigeneas.com, online articles, blog entries, online book images, census databases, census images, Freedmen’s Bureau records, slave narratives, Southern Claims Commission files, and both database entries and online digital images of gravestones, military records, and slave manifests.
Accurate source citation is the second part of the Genealogical Proof Standard. It is vital to research for several reasons. By citing the source for every fact asserted in your research, you can easily ascertain the reliability of that fact, as can any other genealogist who might review your work. It will allow you to revisit those sources if necessary to verify facts or follow up on other leads. Even if you put your research aside for a few weeks, months, or even years, accurate citation for all sources searched—those with both positive and negative results—will allow you to pick your research back up and proceed from the same point.
To learn more about this new QuickSheet and to order a copy, visit its page on Genealogical Publishing Company’s website.
Comments
Thanks for letting us know about the new Quick Sheet and the citation models for records that African Americans encounter. I look forward to your articles.
Great info Michael, citing references is critical to our success
Is this going to be available in an online format?
To my knowledge, no plans have been made to produce this in an online format. None of the previous QuickSheets have been offered digitally.
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