Review: QuickSheet Citing Ancestry.com Databases& Images

17 March 2009 by Libbi.

Last year, I reviewed Elizabeth Shown Mills’ excellent Quicksheet Citing Online Historical Resources.  I just received a new QuickSheet from Genealogical Publishing Co. , “Citing Ancestry.com Databases & Images” and it is just as good!

Mills’  QuickSheets are  four-page, laminated, folded, 8.5 X11 publications which can be easily carried in a briefcase or laptop case to a library, or kept right on your desk next to your computer monitor. The source citations for Ancestry.com databases and images in this QuickSheet are based on those in the book Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace  (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2007).

With this newest QuickSheet, color coded “Ancestry green” (the original one is red, like the cover of Ancestry’s Red Book: American State, County & Town Sources, Third Revised Edition), Mills shows you specifically how to create citations  for Ancestry.com databases and images.  Each page has footnotes with comments about specific examples to help the user understand  the subtle distinctions of the records and their citations.

The first page  has an overview called “Basic Principles” about Ancestry.com database types and the requirement to create citations for both the source that Ancestry used and the database/image that Ancestry provides as a product.  It also has Basic Templates that can be used as a guideline for any other Ancestry.com database which might be created by an outside party.

The rest of the first page and the other three pages are devoted to the models  for each type of resource (similar to Evidence Explained models). The pages are set out in a easy to use table of Source List Entry, Full Reference Note and Subsequent Reference Note format samples for everything from databases to images to maps.

The 20 record type models provided on this QuickSheet include:

* Basic Format: Databases - Created by Ancestry
* Basic Format: Images - Manuscript Collection
* Articles (at Learning Center) - Staff article, unsigned
* Articles (at Learning Center) - Online archive for print publications
* Books: Database Extractions
* Books: Images
* Censuses: Databases - 1890 Substitute
* Censuses: Images
* City Directories: Databases
* City Directories: Images
* Draft Registrations: Images
* Family Trees - Documented Data
* Family Trees - Undocumented data
* Immigration-Emigration Rolls - Databases
* Immigration-Emigration Rolls - Images
* Maps: Images
* Military Records: Databases
* Military Records: Images
* Newspapers: Images
* PERSI: Database

For the beginner, this handy reference will show you what you should be searching for, and how to note when and where you found it. For the more proficient genealogist, if you often use the Ancestry.com census, military, newspaper, family trees and maps in family history research, and have struggled to place correct source citations in your genealogy databases, then this publication is your ticket to that wonderful place where all your evidence is sufficiently cited and organized. at $7.95, it’s a must have!

Posted in Bookshelf, And More..., Genealogy Sites, News, Genealogy | Print | 2 Comments »