Master Source List

[bordercot196@btinternet.com 0]

I am a new user to the UK Silver Edition and am trying to understand sources. Although I feel I understand them some confusion exists. For example I have about 600 people in my file. Each one of these can have a source for birth, marriage and death/burial information as well as 1841/51/61/71/81/91 census information. For each of these entries I could add a source making a Master Source list of probably over 3,000 entries, this can't be right !

Is the intention to add a single source such as a particular church baptism register and then call up this source every time a baptism for that church is entered ? Same goes for the census, just call up one source for the 1851 say, and then use this one source for every 1851 entry ?

[jeffpiper 0]

I am a new user to the UK Silver Edition and am trying to understand sources. Although I feel I understand them some confusion exists. For example I have about 600 people in my file. Each one of these can have a source for birth, marriage and death/burial information as well as 1841/51/61/71/81/91 census information. For each of these entries I could add a source making a Master Source list of probably over 3,000 entries, this can't be right !

Is the intention to add a single source such as a particular church baptism register and then call up this source every time a baptism for that church is entered ? Same goes for the census, just call up one source for the 1851 say, and then use this one source for every 1851 entry ?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There are 2 schools of thought. Lumpers and Splitters.

 

Lumpers will have a small number of sources. E.G a source for each of the census Returns 1841, 1851 etc. some may lump together to as large a group as possible but others may lump in smaller groups. e.g. 1841 census Essex, 1841 census Durham, 1841 census Scotland.

The same will go for other records.

 

Splitters will have an individual source for each location of information. so a census will be split right down to the individual census Record E.g. 1841 census 4 High Street, Chelmsford Essex HO107/1234/56/78.

 

Which you are is a matter of personal preference. Do you want lots of sources or not?

You sound like you would be a lumper from your comment.

My preference is a lumper. So I have a source for each census, one for birth certificates, marriage certificates etc.

[bordercot196@btinternet.com 0]

There are 2 schools of thought. Lumpers and Splitters.

 

Lumpers will have a small number of sources. E.G a source for each of the census Returns 1841, 1851 etc. some may lump together to as large a group as possible but others may lump in smaller groups. e.g. 1841 census Essex, 1841 census Durham, 1841 census Scotland.

The same will go for other records.

 

Splitters will have an individual source for each location of information. so a census will be split right down to the individual census Record E.g. 1841 census 4 High Street, Chelmsford Essex HO107/1234/56/78.

 

Which you are is a matter of personal preference. Do you want lots of sources or not?

You sound like you would be a lumper from your comment.

My preference is a lumper. So I have a source for each census, one for birth certificates, marriage certificates etc.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[bordercot196@btinternet.com 0]

Jeff, Thanks for the reply. It looks as though I'm going to be a small group lumper ! This seems to be a better way to get a handle on the master source list and keep the number of entries to a sensible level.

[Terry Reigel 0]

The standard "Mills" sources types supplied with TMG are designed to have one source created per census household, will, birth record, etc. (It's been a while since I looked at the UK source types, so I'm not sure about them.) I think this is because the US style guides tend to place the person or household first in the source notes, and that's most easily done with one subject per source. The result is a lot of sources.

 

Many users choose to create more generic sources than that - the "lumper" school. If you do, you have two choices in how to deal with all the details. The easiest is to simply put the details in the Citation Detail (CD) field of the citation. They then all appear in source notes in a single place, generally at the end of the note. That's not exactly what the style guides suggest, but for many users that's just fine - the information's there; what difference does it make exactly how its arranged?

 

But you can do both if you want - put the details in the CD, but use a technique called "Split CDs" which allows you to place them anywhere you want in the notes. That's described on my website in my article on Split CDs.

[GenerationGoneBy 0]

As a splitter, let me point out that once a source is used, you can deactivate it and it will only show in the MORE version of the source lists, this way you can have 3000 sources and still only have to search through a few. Also if you have a census tag, with 10 people attached, it will still only be one source for those ten people, so your figures are a little high.

[Morbius 0]

Another point would be how much work you are willing to do in the future. I would catorgorize reserachers a bit differently, and argue that the kind of researcher you are will determine whether "lump" or "split" (I expect I would be the latter, and am now dealing with over 6000 sources without difficulty).

 

I would describe researchers as "data acceptors" or "data analyzers" with the first group being people who lump (minimal work) and the latter group being people who spllit (maximum work).

 

If you are an experienced researcher, you have experienced many times the phenonomon of inconsistent data. This pehnonomon, I think, serves to illustrate the differences in the two types of researchers.

 

Those who are "data acceptors" tend to be people who don't intend to put a tremendous amout of time into research, or are working a small project for specific purposes

 

Some "data acceptors" accept the first data they find as correct and make no changes at all. Other "data acceptors" accept the last data they find as correct and make changes with every new bit of information. Many such people don't even bother to source their work (a real shame), and really shouldn't have a lot of confidence that they have the correct data.

 

Those "data acceptors" who do source their work, do so only in general terms (e. g. one source for all information from the 1860 census), as they don't intend to spend much time analyzing their data and don't really need very detailed source information. Knowing that data came from a census record is sufficent for their purposes, and they don't need to go to the extra work involved in detailed sourcing. These are the lumpers.

 

Those who are "data analyzers" see a piece to a puzzle in every bit of information, maybe a bit of a chalange, and will spend a lot of time wrestling with conflicting information in order to be as accurate as possible. Such researchers will spend a lot of time comparing and contrasting conflicting information in order to resolve the conflict, or at least better understand the parameters of the conflict. Such reserachers require very detailed sourcing. It would simply take too much time to go back over all the possible sources of information, and need to be able to quickly identigy the specific sources of each bit of informaton (e.g the household of John Jones, Farpoint County, Idaho, 1860 census v. the household of his nearby brother, Tom Jones, Farpoint County, Idaho, 1860 census).

 

So it seems that lumper or splitter tends to be a function of available time and intent. If time is short and you don't intend to spend a lot of time analyzing data, lumping will provide basic source information and save time. If you do spent a lot of time analyzing data, then splitting will actually save time searching for where the data came from.

 

The great thing about TMG is that you can go either way, but understand that having made a choice you are generally stuck with it. To change in mid-project would cause inconsistencies that would prove problematic.

 

It sounds as though you are experimenting a bit to see which you would prefer before leaping fullscale into the project. A very wise way to proceed.

 

I am a splitter for a variety of reasons, including the wrestling with the data one. Sometimes the data wins, but at the very least I get a better idea of where I need more information. "Mills" is a good basic template, but lacks sufficient detail and hasn't caught up with the digital age. Photocopies are no longer really necessary, as portable scanners are plenty cheap and produce very good results. I take one to the library and photocopy only when I have no choice. The digital images are hundreds of time better, and more detaild than photocopies, and they are in color and can be manipulated. The TMG Source List makes it pretty easy to catalogue sources, so I can "recheck" sources without opening a drawer.

[Terry Reigel 0]

I would catorgorize reserachers a bit differently, and argue that the kind of researcher you are will determine whether "lump" or "split" (I expect I would be the latter, and am now dealing with over 6000 sources without difficulty).

 

I would describe researchers as "data acceptors" or "data analyzers" with the first group being people who lump (minimal work) and the latter group being people who spllit (maximum work).

Sorry, but I think you are wide of the mark. I don't think whether one accepts data without criticism or analyzes it to death has a thing to do with how you choose to enter sources in TMG. I create one TMG source per roll of census microfilm, which I think qualifies me as a "lumper," but I probably record more details from census records than 95% of all TMG users.

 

The difference between creating many sources or only a few generic ones only has to do with whether you choose to record the details in the source definition or in the citation details field, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the level of analysis one applies to the data, or how much time one tends to apply to either data analysis or recording.

[Pierce.Reid 0]

Another way to look at how to use sources is to define why you record source information.

 

Basically you want anyone reading your information (including yourself some time in the future) to be able to locate the original information, if that is possible, or to evaluate the information, if the original is not available (like "stories my mother told me").

 

When referring to documents more or less in the public sector, certain conventions are used. They could include a formal structure, such as suggested by Mills and others, or they could be based on reference codes generally recognized by "persons in the field". For example, English census records have a simple code to identify each page of any census. These codes could be entered directly into Ancestry.uk to bring up an image of the actual page. For IGI references, you could use the FHL identification, which generally points to the film the original data is recorded on, and which can be viewed at any Family History Centre. How to locate this information is generally known to anyone working with these tools, so it is not really necessary to put in all the details suggested by Mills et al.

 

In our case, we don't use source records for census or IGI references. If we get a census from Ancestry or another electronic source, we identify the on-line service and the unique code used by the archive to refer to the specific page. For US censuses, I just cut-and-paste the couple of lines of reference material from the Ancestry entry for the individual. For IGI entries I just give the FHL film number and an indication if this is an extracted record or a patron or church member submission. I put this information in a simple footnote, rather than a formal source record. If I derive certain information (e.g. date and place of birth) from a census, I use a simple footnote identifying the census(es) that provided age/birthplace. The person is linked to the census record, and in any journal report I would generally have the census detail transcribed.

 

We do use formal source records, but generally for less common-place information, such as a book, specific letters/emails we have on file, unusual web sites, etc. In those cases, the formal structure of Mills et al provide a useful guide to what details we should include, both to help us locate the information again and to evaluate the probable quality of the information. Where we have countradictory information, we will identify the differences and justify our selection for our database.

 

As someone who collects census almost faster than I can enter it into my database, I don't want to spend time creating detailed source records when a much simpler notation works just as well, both for me and for future researchers.

 

Pierce