The Year Ahead – December 2

In the January/February 2024 issue of Family Tree Magazine, they have introduced The Year Ahead, 366 genealogy tips will make 2024 your best research year yet by Lisa A Alzo. Lisa mapped out a day-by-day research plan.

December 2 – Examine your data for missing source citations, then look up the sources and fill in all the blanks.

This is great advice. In my earlier days of research, I didn’t do source citations. I didn’t understand them. After reading up on subject and seeing how others were using source citations via blogs and YouTube Videos, I started creating source citations around 2000. If I was working on someone who had facts without sources, I would look for evidence to create a source citation. However, all new information had to have a source citation, or I wasn’t going to enter the information. I even created a citation called “Speculation”. This was used when I derived information and I wasn’t quite sure if this really was totally accurate. This is only supposed to be a short-lived citation, until I found something to support or disprove this speculation.

Currently I have two facts with this source citation. One is for a death of an individual of 1816 based on many Ancestry trees; however, I haven’t found anything to support it. Another was a marriage fact based on the birth of their first child. Thus, I see I should investigate these items first.

It's easy to create an Undocumented Facts report in Family Tree Maker. Go to Publish / Source Reports / Undocumented Facts. However, I noticed that I didn’t always put a source citation for their Name or their sex. I could not even exclude those fields from the report, and I ended up with 1307 pages. YIKES! When I quickly scroll through the report, I do see some other facts such as birth dates and marriages dates without source citations. I might need to put that on a to-do list for the new year. I know this is something I could easily do with my laptop while watching TV at night. Thus I created a Task in FTM and made it high priority with a due date of 12/31/2025.

Remember to have fun and Just do Genealogy!