Heartland Genealogy

Do you have older source citations in your tree that your high school English teacher would yell at you about? Do you have source citations in your tree that even you can't use to locate the information? I don't know about you, but I have such sources in my tree. As I'm reviewing my Crawford research, I'm finding those source citations. Most of these HORRIBLE citations came from my early days of research when citation standards were just being developed.

Do you have documents in your genealogy files with incomplete citations. Congratulations if your answer was no! Unfortunately, I have documents with partial citations. One set of those documents is four marriage bonds involving Crawford family members from Kentucky in the 1790s. Mary Crawford consent to marry James Sellers given by Rebekah Crawford on 19 Dec 1791 in Lincoln County, Kentucky witnessed by James Crawford and Wm Sellers Bond of James Crawford and Nathan Douglas for the marriage of James Crawford to Martha Night on 12 Mar 1793 in Lincoln County, Kentucky. Consent for the marriage was given by John Goodpastor and witnessed by James Sellers and Samuel Sellers Consent of Rebekah Crawford for Sarah Crawford to marry William Sellers on 2 Feb 1796 in Lincoln County, KY witnessed by James Crawford and James Sellers Bond by James Crawford and James Sellers for the marriage of James Crawford and Sally Duggins on 12 Sept 1799 in Garrard County, Kentucky

This morning, I watched part of the Wacky Wednesday episode: The Source Is Gone and hope to finish it watching it later today. During this presentation, Cousin Russ discusses how he is rethinking how he cites memorials on Find A Grave. During the presentation, Cousin Russ compared the suggested citation for a Find a Grave memorial to how he was citing the memorial in his software. This made me curious about my own citations and how they compare. Below is the suggested citation for the memorial of my second great grandfather, Washington Marion Crawford. When I looked at the footnote for the Find a Grave source in my software (RootsMagic), I found that the footnote was similar to the suggested footnote. My footnote is 'created' using a template to enter the information. The above template is a 'custom' template that I created. I often copy a built-in template and then customize the copy. I like using templates. They make it easy for me to remember to include the importa...