Forums
I'm working on a family from the Netherlands. They had 16 kids. Most got married. Some had two, or more, husbands. Using the register format of Individual, birth, death. Marriage, spouse birth death. You end up with a minimum of 5 citations per child. The citations are mostly 3 layer with a decent sized URL. Typically 4 lines as an endnote. I'm getting about 3 kids per page :) It makes for a very choppy look.
My choices appear to be, live with it, don't cite everything, take something out, or get some sort of epiphany.
I don't want to not cite, nor do i want to take things out.
Suggestions would be gratefully accepted.
Cryptoref, you say that your…
Cryptoref, you say that your pages have a “very choppy look” because you're "getting about 3 kids per page” and have "typically 4 lines as an endnote." It sounds as though you mean footnote—i.e., notes at the foot of the page—as opposed to endnotes, which come at the end of a chapter or end of a research paper.
This is a common situation. At my personal website, where I archive many of my research reports and articles from peer-reviewed journals, I have a number of papers with just that situation. As a couple of examples:
https://www.historicpathways.com/download/MillsWilliamMaryofGoochAlbemarle.pdf)
https://www.historicpathways.com/download/samuelwitterrachelsmith.pdf
As a reader who is a serious researcher, when you approach someone else’s work of this type, are you bothered by the ‘choppiness’ you refer to, or do you appreciate the references?
If we are creating family histories that we want to be easy reading for relatives who are not researchers, then endnotes are the easiest way to avoid pages on which footnotes take up more space than the narrative. On the other hand, the serious family historian will be frustrated by the necessity of flipping back and forth between the text of our work and the endnotes many pages away, trying to match one with the other.
We have to ask ourselves, Who’s our readership and What’s important here? Is it more important to (a) not look choppy; or (b) present the evidence for our claims where readers can easily connect each claim to its source.
We can also thoughtfully edit our footnotes to eliminate repetition and redundancy. On the surface, it would seem if your citations are all for b-m-d events and they are three-layer citations, then you're using databases with images. Odds are, you have multiple entries for each database. In this situation, you can shorten your notes by restructuring your citations to feature the database, then add the details for the register/entry/person in the field for “specific item.” After the first full citation, your shortened citation need use only the title of the database—followed by register/entry/person data—without repeating the name of the website creator, the website title, and the URL.
(Caveat: shortened citations, of course, are advisable only for final drafts of our work. If we use them in our working drafts, a revision may eliminate the first full citation, thereby orphaning our shortened citations.)
Another approach, if—say—all your Gronigen citations for a set of children are to one database, you might cite the database at the start of that set of notes and then say that all Gronigen births, marriage, and death records were accessed at this database. Thereafter, you would cite only the register/entry/person.
This dilemma is another reason why we help ourselves by studying published works in peer-reviewed journals, even though they do not deal with our research area. By studying the way in which each article is structured and how information is presented, we build a tool chest of ideas and approaches that help us in our own work when similar situations arise.