Saving Time (Part I)
The two biggest time saving tips for every family history researcher are going to seem counter intuitive because I am going to suggest that you spend time to save time. The two biggest time savers are citing your sources and keeping a research calendar. I know how it is. You start researching and you get hooked into a promising line of research and you don’t want to lose your train of thought by documenting what you are doing, but if you do it is going to save you a lot of time. In this post I will take a look at citing your research and save research calendars for the next post.
How many times have you come across someone else’s research and it is just what you need, but it has no sources. Then you ask yourself, “Is this research valid?” Then after a while, minutes or days, of haggling with yourself you decide you are going to have to verify the work. So what started out as a great find ends up being just a good clue. If you cite your work the next person to use what you have done will be grateful. And a lot of the time that next person is you, years later. Without citations you may not remember how sure you were at the time of the original research. So now you are researching the same stuff all over again. Before you brush this off, because you tell yourself will never forget, understand that everyone forgets and it is unlikely you will remember everything you did to research a single name years from now. I can say from personal experience, you will forget.
Once you decide to cite your research, either from learning the hard way or the easy way, you may ask, “How do I cite genealogical research?” The particulars of this answer can and have taken up entire books and web sites. There is however some easy ways that can get you started. First, many of the genealogical research sites will show you a citation. It might be called citation or source and in may be at the bottom of the page or you may have to click a link. If you can find the citation you just need to copy and paste. Second, if you need to create a citation, see what your genealogical software provides. Many software programs have you fill in the spaces and the citation is built for you. Lastly, you can create a simple citation where you answer a couple of questions. Where are the records located and how did you find them? Be sure to write down enough information that someone else can find the record. You might even ask a friend to find the record using your created citation. This may not put it in a professional form, but it will help you and others find the record again.
Posted in Documentation and tagged Citations, Saving Time.
The Beginning
Purpose
To the true Amateur Family Historian the work is their passion, it consumes them. They don’t think of it as work. It is the gental care of family members lost in time. It is there love. But in everyday reality genealogical research is treated as a hobby. I know, to some of you the term hobby makes you cringe. After all you are not collecting stamps you are bringing your family together. However, as our family says,”If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is probably a duck.” Unfortunatly family history research, to the amateur, is little bits of time here and there when life does not get in the way. It behaves (looks, walks and quacks) like a hobby. The purpose of this site is to help the Amateur Family Historian to make the best use of time and still perform high quality work that others can build on, not just one more resource that has to be verified by the next researcher.
How can this web site, just another is hundreds of genealogical web sites, help you save time and help you do quality research? We will save you time by doing the “how to” research to find all of the best tips and processes and distill down the information to a couple of well documented paragraphs on what you need to do to do the best research and documentation. We will help you to do your best work by choosing subjects that will benifit you most. You will get to help us choose what to work on. Look to the next blog entry for a list of our first research subjects and make your opinion known.
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Posted in About Amateur Family Historian.