Honoring a Source (and Admitting Where I'm Bad at It)
okay so. this is the lesson where i have to tell on myself a little.
last time we talked about writing around the parts you're not sure of. today's about the parts you ARE sure of, or think you are, and how you keep track of where you got them. because here's the thing. someday somebody's going to read what you wrote and think "wait, how do we know this," and if you can't answer that, the whole piece gets shakier than it needs to be.
i'm not great at this part. i want to say that up front so you don't think i've got some clean system i'm about to hand you. i don't. i'll find a record at 11pm, copy the good part into a document, and by the next morning i have no idea which database it came from or whether it was a census page or somebody's family group sheet from 1987. it's happened more times than i want to admit. so what i'm giving you today is the version of "do this right" that i'm still working toward myself.
why bother at all
if you're writing "the way we tell it is—" and just going with the story, why does sourcing even matter?
because not everything in a family history is a "way we tell it" story. some of it is a fact. a date, a place, a name spelled a specific way on a specific document. and facts are more useful to the next person if they know where you found them. maybe your kid, thirty years from now, wants to double check something, or wants to go looking for more. you're not just writing for you. you're leaving a trail for whoever comes after and gets the bug the way i did.
it's also just respectful. somebody kept that record. a clerk, a church, a relative who wrote something down. saying where it came from is a small way of saying "this mattered enough that i didn't just make it up."
the bare minimum that actually works
i'm not going to tell you to learn a citation system. i don't know one. here's what i do instead, and it's simple enough that you can start today.
keep one document per person, or one per family line, and add a line at the bottom every time you use something. doesn't have to be formal. something like:
grandma's coffee habit — from a memory eden texted me, oct 2024 birth date, place — 1920 census, found on [whichever site], household listed as "peterson" photo of the porch — physical photo, from sandy's shoebox, no date on the back
that's it. that's the whole system. a plain document, a running list, whatever you already have open on your computer. phone notes work fine too. i've used the notes app on my phone more than i'd like to admit for exactly this.
when you're not sure, say so in the note, not just in your head. "i think this came from ancestry, but it might have been familysearch" is more useful to future-you than nothing at all. i wish i'd done that more.
save the actual thing, not just the fact from it. a screenshot, a photo of the document, the physical letter if you have it. i've had records disappear from free databases after they update their site, or get moved somewhere i can't find again. if you only wrote down what it said and not where it lives, you're stuck.
the shoebox and the magnets
a few christmases back i took a bunch of old scanned photos from that same shoebox of sandy's and 3d printed little magnet frames for the whole family, one photo in each. nothing fancy. i just wanted people to actually see these faces instead of them living in a folder on my laptop forever.
justin put his on the fridge. it's still there.
here's the thing about that project though. i had to go back through every photo and figure out, again, which ones i actually knew anything about. who's in it, roughly when, where it came from. the ones i could source, even loosely, i felt fine printing and handing out. the ones i couldn't, i almost didn't include, because what if it's the wrong person and now it's on somebody's fridge being wrong forever. i printed them anyway, with a little note on the back. "unknown, from sandy's box, maybe 1950s." that felt like the honest move.
that's the whole habit, really. you don't need certainty. you need honesty about what you have and don't have.
a caution, since we're near computers and old paper
if you're scanning physical photos or letters, handle the originals gently, they're often more fragile than they look, especially anything from before the 60s. and if you're digging through free or paid genealogy sites, save your source information as you go rather than promising yourself you'll remember it later. you will not remember it later. i say this with love and total confidence, because it's happened to me more times than i'll admit twice in one lesson.
before next time
pick one fact you've already written down somewhere, a date, a place, a name, and see if you can still say where it came from. if you can't, that's okay, just start the habit now. no worries at all if the trail's already gone cold on the old stuff. start today.