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.
I'm spending time this year cleaning up my database to. I started my tree using Ancestry then after I switched to RootsMagic for my main program I wasn't happy with the sources either. It takes time, but it's coming along! :)
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