Ancestry Magazine

I hate footnotes!

When I finished high school, I danced a polka, thinking there were two things I’d never have to do again: science projects and footnotes. Dumb thought.

Still, there is a difference in the footnotes I did in high school and college and those I do now. Back then, I cited sources because teachers demanded them; to me, it was a pointless exercise. If a published source said something, it was bound to be so or else it wouldn’t be in print, right?

Then I discovered genealogy—a world of curious people and wild claims. This branch of the family tree was Indian, someone would claim. No, others argued, it was pure Scotch-Irish. Old Henry, on the shady side of the tree, was grafted to the “rich and famous Reverend John.” Odd, considering that Henry was a poor drifter who spent more time in jail than in church. Too soon, I discovered ancestors who had four fathers and five different birth dates, if everything I saw could be believed.

That’s when I remembered Grandma’s favorite saying: When you drink from the water, consider the source. That’s when I saw the pipeline between the footnotes I hated in school and the contradictions I now wallowed in. This family tree I was trying to grow was drawing water from a lot of wells. But exactly what was the source of the water?

Growing Healthy Trees
Family research is an incredible experience in the Information Age. A click of the mouse catapults us into a wondrous world. Vendors offer image copies of original censuses, immigration rolls, and colonial land warrants. We can read old journals and newspapers on our electronic desktops. We find databases compiled by companies dedicated to history and abstracts compiled by generous souls sharing information they have found.

Information, however, is not the same as fact.

Whatever we find, we have three decisions to make. First, is it credible? Second, does it actually pertain to our person or someone else with the same name? Third, do we understand what we’ve found? Are we interpreting it correctly? Can we use it to find more?

Obviously, to judge how much credibility a piece of information deserves, we have to know its source. But just knowing the source is not enough. Determining reliability means we have to track that source back to its origin. There, we can evaluate its well-spring to determine if our source is pure (unbiased and based on firsthand knowledge). By following that information stream from our source back to its own original source, we can discern whether the information has been polluted at some point along the way—as with, say, errors in copying a record or interpreting its content.

Good websites help us make these judgments. They identify the source of each and every piece of information they offer. When they post a database, a set of abstracts, or a set of image copies, they provide a background discussion, explaining the material used to compile that information. Do we take the time to study that background?

As “family tree climbers,” we can easily dash from branch to branch gathering buds and blossoms and shiny leaves to paste onto our family tree—or into our data management software. But family trees need to consist of more than pasted leaves. Healthy family trees grow themselves naturally, limb to twig—provided we nourish them with quality facts from reliably documented streams.

Elizabeth Shown Mills eases the drudgery of source citation with her classic guide Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian and its companion QuickSheet; but her favorite work is her historical novel Isle of Canes (Ancestry, 2004), in which she demonstrates how well-documented genealogy can be turned into a powerful family epic.