There seems to be a never ending controversy about what is a genealogical source. Or what is evidence or what is proof.
Let me say at the outset that I do not believe that ANY current genealogy program is doing intrinsically establishing the evidence through quoting sources to provide adequate proof for the assertions made in the genealogy.
The program that at least has a clue is Evidentia. But even that program does not connect the finding it makes directly with a genealogy.
What Evidentia does is allow a user to load in records and from each record allow the user to identify what claims that record assert; ie, a birth record could claim a person’s name, date of birth, place of birth, name of father, and name of mother. You might have a death record for the same person and that might give another name, birthdates, place of birth, and parents’ names. You could have a marriage record that provides the person’s name, age at marriage, birth place, and parent’s names. It is your task to rate the reliability of each of these claims and from all of the claims on a particular factoid, decide what, based on the evidence you have found, so far, is the right assertion for that factoid. And be prepared to update the assertion if a new record is identified that also makes a claim on that factoid.
I have watched two broad camps of serious researchers over the past decades. One that I call the “Absolutists” require absolute proof beyond a shadow of doubt before they publish anything. Their research, for the most part is thrown out by their heirs when they die and is never published because they always find some reason something is not quite right or they are just so afraid of being criticized for making a mistake.
The other camp (which I claim membership) are researchers who adopt the proof standard of “preponderance of evidence”, meaning that all of the evidence I have found so far leaves me with these conclusions. But I have no ego involved in the assertions such that, if new evidence is presented, I am more than willing to update any and all of my conclusions. I do not publish anything without having some basis for my assertions. But I publish and let the world crowd source my conclusions. I always find it amazing that you hardly ever get someone write and tell you that you got something right, but folks are quick to tell you when you have missed something and so got something wrong.
I long ago decided that I would be publishing my research mostly online. As I was actively researching and adding to my studies, trying to publish a book would be publishing something that would be out of date before the book would be printed.
I wanted my online presentation to provide the evidence wherever possible that drove my conclusions. That meant that I did not just want to publish where I found the records that provided the evidence for my assertions, but I wanted to publish the actual evidence. I also wished to display that evidence online in close proximity to the relevant assertions. This, of course, meant that I would publish either a “permanent” link to the record or a transcription of the record with information about where I found the record.
The “where I found the record” is important. If I found the record in an online tree on Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, WikiTree, or someone’s private website, I should say so. If those repositories pointed to a source record, I could instead quote the source record, IF I HAD ACTUALLY READ IT… This last point is important. If the NEHGS Register published an article and listed a birth date for a person and then sourced it to some source I do not have access to, I cannot quote that source. I have not personally inspected it! I can only quote the NEHGS article as my source.
Now, if I was able to inspect the source and it was a transcription, I would need to indicate it as such. If a source references a census record, I need to look at the actual image of the census to see if I agree with the evidence. I would also make my own transcription of the census record so that when someone looks at the data for the person, they have in front of them the information to see why I made my assertions.
The bottom line is that source you quote is the one you actually saw. And that source should be transcribed, if possible, from at least an image of the actual record.
I do not include the images of those records very often. Besides copyright issues, I do not feel they are important unless I am trying to prove a lineage where I am going against conventional wisdom. If am am asserting that so and so is a child of different parents than other published genealogies assert, then I want to provide more than sufficient evidence of the correctness of my assertions.
Can an Ancestry Member Tree be your source? Of course. If a tree says that someone was born on a particular date and at a particular place and the tree is the only source for those details AND you have no evidence that can refute those assertions, then the data is likely true. A lot of the Ancestry trees are done by experienced researchers who choose to use Ancestry as a way to publish.
Or the data represents family knowledge. Look at the tree and see if the home person might be a relatively close relative. Where too many novice users get in trouble on Ancestry is when they start researching and make bad assumptions with insufficient analysis. But when just records their grandparents and great-grandparents details, they likely had access to family records that you will never have access to.
Although I use the event notes to transcribe records as I find that works for me, many researchers will use the standard sourcing tools that come with their program. When you do that, please transcribe into the citation notes what I would just add to the event notes.
Any questions?
