If you’re writing up the family history, what should you document and provide a citation for?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Generally speaking…everything that’s not common knowledge. It’s not necessary to cite the dates of the US Civil War, the date World War I ended, or the date Pearl Harbor Was bombed and precipitated the entrance of the US into the Second World War. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if you say your relative was an abolitionist during the Civil War, that needs a source of where that information was obtained. If you say that your relative moved to Chicago after the Chicago Fire looking for work, that needs a citation. If you say your ancestor worked in the Pullman Car Works, that needs a source. Any dates of vital events need citations. Any statements regarding biological relationships need sources–as do statements about relationships via marriage. The source could be a typewritten family history from the 1930s, an interview you conducted with a relative, a census enumeration, a marriage record, a draft card, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
No one’s going to stop you from writing something without sources. No one’s going to prevent you from publishing it or putting the information online. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it is difficult for you to evaluate the accuracy of any statement without knowing where the information in the statement came from. And you can’t begin to analyze conflicting pieces of information without knowing where those conflicting bits of information were obtained. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you’re writing up the family history, what should you document and provide a citation for? Generally speaking…everything that’s not common knowledge. It’s not necessary to cite the dates of the US Civil War, the date World War I ended, or the date Pearl Harbor Was bombed and precipitated the entrance of the US into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/153979"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}