Citations

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A citation is the entire textual reference to the source.

Why Cite

You just want to explore your family tree, so why bother with all of this academic nonsense, right?

If you are just using Gramps to draw a quick family tree, then perhaps there is no need to bother with citations.

But if you want to share your family tree with other people, citations let you record how you know these things, and this record may last longer than you are around to explain.

Creating detailed citations can be time-intensive and may seem to be a distraction from your research, but you will find the investment pays off later.

A simple family tree can be a little dry, but linking to related documents helps you embellish your family story.

And if you are like me, you may need a little help remembering how you came to some conclusion some months ago.

Guiding Principles

In order of importance:

  • Citations help provide evidence of the conclusions (or 'facts') in your tree
  • A citation should enable another researcher to easily identify the precise material you are referencing and how you came to some conclusion
  • Citations should be as simple as possible to record while still being precise. Don't waste time on extensive detail if you won't continue to be so thorough.
  • Record a citation as soon as you can, before you forget or lose the details
  • Adopt a good style early on to avoid rework later - you will probably never bother to fix hundreds of sloppy references
  • Provide citations for as much of your tree as you can.
  • Record your references in a way that will still be relevant in many years. URLs are useful now but don't last.
  • Be consistent in your citations
  • Even a short or sloppy citation is better than no citation
  • Follow citation style guides if you can. A lot of thought has gone into what to record.

If you are just starting with your family tree, then you will probably want to just get started recording people and events in your tree. After a while, start adding citations to your tree. Then before you have gone too far with recording citations, occasionally review your citation style and consider how it might be when your tree is much larger and used by someone else.

Sources, Repositories and Citations

Using Gramps Citations

Expand on the Citations introduction in the wiki manual's Categories chapter.

General Style

Source
Gramps Field Core Value? Comment
Title Yes One of the most important fields, together with Citation Volume/Page. This should ensure the source can be uniquely identified.
Author
Id Let Gramps auto-populate this
Abbreviation
Pub. Info


Repository:
Gramps Field Core Value? Comment
Name (shared) Yes
Type (shared) Yes
Media Type (not shared) Yes
Call number (not shared) No? This is a finding aid, to help locate the source within a given repository. (There is no equivalent mechanism to help locate a citation within the repository, which is relevant where the source is multi-volume or electronic.) How to handle web repositories?


Citation:
Gramps Field Core Value? Comment
Date ? Is this intended to be the event date, document publication date or date that I reviewed the source?
Id Let Gramps auto-populate this
Volume/Page Yes One of the most important fields, together with Source Title. This should ensure that the relevant part within the source can be readily identified.
Confidence Yes Normally just the default. You may want to set this to 'Low' or 'Very Low' if you are not sure this is the right family

Citing online evidence

Examples

See also

External Links

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