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Archiver > TMG > 2000-12 > 0975680647


From: "Ken Nelson" <>
Subject: General source vs Specidic Source was "[TMG] Newbie Question"
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 09:24:07 -0500
References: <006701c05b04$88cb5e40$43be5d18@neo.rr.com>


Bob,
Welcome to TMG.
Your question is one that we all struggle with from time to time. And each
of us reach our own conclusion.
The solution can be applied for any number of legal documents--deeds, census
data, birth certificates, etc. For instance, one might have quite a few
deeds. If they have come from the same source--the Cummings County Court
house, for instance--we can make that court house a general source and place
the deed identifying data in the CD(citation detail).

In a census, we must decide at what level we wish to make that distinction
between general and specific. One could have the general source be the 1850
US Census and all other identifying data in the CD. Most of us, however,
usually choose to have the specific roll of microfilm be our general source
and all other data included in the CD.

With a birth certificate, the principle is pretty much the same. If you are
getting all your certificates from the Nebraska Bureau of Vital Statistics,
then that could be the general source and in the CD you could say that it
was the "Birth Certificate for Bob Keener, file number 1234 (along with all
other pertinent data) " that was being cited. You could have a number of
state repositories as "sources".

The principle here is that source be identified so that anyone following
your work some time down the road, or even you retracing your own steps days
down the road can determine where to go to recheck the data. I have been
doing some research in New Hampshire using the same government source that
another researcher used and now find some discrepancies betwixt her work and
mine. The question is who made the errors in transcription--her or me. With
800 or so documents transcribed into spreadsheet format, it is possible that
I made the errors, but I will only know when I revisit those original
documents. The question is whether there is enough of a paper trail to
revisit my research. In this case there is. ESM's book gives guidance in
what info and in what format it needs to be.

As an aside here, in this process, one needs to decide where they wish to
have bloat--in the footnotes/endnotes which will reflect the size of the
citation detail or do we bloat the bibliography. We struggle to find a
balance. Some folks do not mind a bloated bibliography. TMG handles the
sources for them.

With all this, we have not addressed the problem of the template. Those
templates are an interpretation by Wholly Genes of what Mills has in her
book. The bottom line is, however, that from time to time those templates
have to be massaged to reflect our own method of doing things and to reflect
the source, without spitting out unwanted results like "unknown name of
person" etc. That massaging is another topic and another day. If we choose
not to follow the TMG Template we need to learn how to reassembe that
template so that all sorts of garbage is not generated.

Hope this helps.
Ken Nelson


----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Keener" <>


> After delaying my use of TMG for quite some time, I'm finally ready to
> go -- and, of course, I've got a real newbie question.
> I've chosen Mills Evidence! for my citation format. I've entered my
own
> name and birth date and am ready to add my birth certificate as my source.
> My question is: when using documents like birth or marriage
> certificates, where you will have large numbers of them, what is the best
> way to source them? If I don't add details specific to my own birth
> certificate on the Source form (adding them later as citation details),
all
> I get on the citation is "unknown name of person." The same problem
applies
> to the registration number.
> However, if I do add this detailed information, I'll have to do it for
> every birth certificate -- i.e. putting the name of each individual in the
> "Name of Person" slot -- leading to an unmanageably long Master Source
> List.
> So -- how do I handle this in a manner that results in citations
> faithful to ESM's format without getting a Master Source List that will
> stretch from here to eternity?
> Thanks in advance.
> Bob Keener
>
>

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