Still Working on Citations

I just thought I'd post a quick update regarding my endeavor to get my sources and citations in order in my Family Tree Maker database. Though this is turning out to be a major project within my publishing project, I'm glad I decided to do it.

My original goal was to reformat my sources, as closely as possible, to match the recommendations in Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Mills. If I had kept to that goal, I'd be much further along; however, in conjunction with the "source" format, I'm also looking at each citation for each source. In the language of my young texting friends, OMG! The problems I'm finding are numerous and in some cases hard to explain.

I'm still working on reformatting my US census record sources. (Almost finished with 1910) I'm finding some citations linked to the wrong source - as in right state wrong county. Also, sometimes I wrote out "enumeration district" and sometimes I used "ED"; sometimes I used "pg" and sometimes I wrote "page. These may seem minor problems but when you see these citations next to each other they look really ugly.

Some issues resulted from using the merge option from Ancestry as Ancestry hasn't been any more consistent than I. Sometimes all the necessary information transferred and sometimes almost nothing came through. I've had to spend considerable time finding the record again (at least I've been able to do that with the information I have) and get everything I need for the citation. In the future, I'll make sure I format the detail on the screen before I merge.

This may take awhile but I'm sure I'll be happier with the result once I'm finished.

Updating My Status

Here I am again after a long stretch of silence. Partly the silence was caused for fun, partly for work, and partly for genealogy fun-work. The fun part was a cruise which brought relaxation and new friends. The work part was a remodel of our bathroom - legs and back are still reeling. The genealogy fun-work was/is the final preparations for publishing my Leisure line book which includes my current project of reformatting my citations - complete database - to conform to Evidence Explained.

There, now you have all my excuses! I'm planning to try to be more consistent with my posts from now on but, as I'm sure you know, life sometimes gets in the way. I'm no where near finished with my reformatting but am making progress. It is tedious and time-consuming but I know it will be worth it in the end. Once the reformatting is complete and once my current project is published, the next project should go more quickly as long as I stay consistent with my source and citation entries.

That's it for now.

~~ Becky