Genealogy Do-Over, Cycle 2 Week 5

This week's Do-Over consists of:
1) Building a Research Toolbox and 2) Citing Sources

I had fun this week! I was able to retrieve tons of genealogy websites and tools that I had bookmarked over the years. I decided to create my genealogical toolbox as a page on this blog. By doing so, it will be available anywhere I have access to the internet, and it allows others to see and "steal" any links they may want to use. As I worked my way through the bookmarks, I found a few dead links. I used that as an opportunity to delete and reorganize the bookmarks to make them easier to access. See the before and after images below. I also viewed some of the tools from other bloggers, checked them out, and added the ones I liked. I know that having one document where I can find all of my tools will be very beneficial to my searches. 

BEFORE - ALL GENEALOGY LINKS WERE LUMPED UNDER ONE FOLDER

AFTER - ALL LINKS ARE UNDER APPROPRIATE GENEALOGY FOLDERS

The second part of this week's Do-Over has been to cite sources. In my younger years, I didn't see any reason to cite sources that were oral, letters, or in email. I just added the information. If I found the information online back in the day, I just cited as from Ancestry or Family Search and left it at that. It wasn't until about ten years ago, that I saw the importance of needing more from my citations. I have spent the better part of the last seventeen years, working full time, raising four children (and grandchildren), while going to college. When I would need to put my genealogy on hold (sometimes for more than a year), I would have a hard time picking it back up, because I couldn't remember where I left off, or how to re-locate the information I had already obtained. Just citing Ancestry.com didn't work. I began adding more information to my citations and that helped. Now, over the last two years, I've been learning more and more about citing sources in a more uniform way designed for genealogists. I bought the book Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace by Elizabeth Shown Mills and I am trying to learn the proper way to cite my sources so I can keep my place, track my research, discover discrepancies, expand my research, determine source reliability, and establish proof. By learning and using these proper citations, I will be more confident in my own assertions.

I have received information about births, deaths, and marriages via Facebook private messages and emails. Learning to cite those has been challenging, but I think I covered it enough so that others will know how and where I received the information. I am excited about how my genealogy resources and knowledge is progressing.

My Facebook private message citation using EE 3.42 Email & Instant Messages:

Margit (Knott) Sußbauer, Straubing, Germany [(ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE),] to Renita Ford-Collier, Facebook private message, June – Oct 2013, “Lukas family births, marriages, deaths”, Personal Correspondence Folder, Ford-Collier Research Files; privately held by Ford-Collier [(ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE)], Glenn Heights, Texas, 2013.

There is so much to learn! How are you doing on your Week 5 Do-Over?

Mills, Elizabeth Shown. Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace. Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Pub Co, 2007.