Citing of an Ancestry Member Tree

Russ,

The explanations of the Ancestry "trees" that you give in your blog post will help many users understand the process there. Your ultimate citation does differ from EE's recommendations. You've explained your rationale. Let us explain ours:

EE creates a citation framework that (a) enables many different types of material to fit into a basic pattern; and (b) conveys a standard meaning across various record types.

Because you are a well-known user of Ancestry's FTM software, I'm assuming you are familiar with EE's QuickSheet: Citing Ancestry.com Databases & Images. There, we give two models for citing data from the user-contributed “trees” at Ancestry’s website—one for a tree that offers documented data and one for a tree that offers undocumented information. Because your example is an undocumented tree, let’s use that second QS model for comparison. 

Your reference-note citation is this:

Crista Cowan, Cowan Mulliner Woodruff Kerr; Crista Cowan, Utah, 2014.  Profile of Richard Ridgway (1679-1718), Ancestry Member Tree; accessed 04 Apr 2014.

EE’s reference-note citation to the tree you are using would be this:

     1. “Public Member Trees,” database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 4 April 2014), “Cowan Mulliner Woodruff Kerr” family tree by Crista Cowan, profile for Richard Ridgway (1679-1718, d. Bucks, New Jersey) undocumented data updated March 2014.

EE’s reasoning is this:

• If we decide to cite these family group sheets as though they were individual manuscripts or individual publications, then users of these trees could have dozens or hundreds of individual citations to group sheets in their master source list (aka bibliography).
• If we use a standard database citation—and this is part of a database, not a loose sheet of paper—then we have only one master citation and we can use it for endless numbers of individual entries or “profiles” within that database.
• This form is also the same basic format in which we can cite virtually anything Ancestry provides. Any database name can be plugged into that first field. The 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th fields are exactly the same and can be automatically populated by the software. In the 5^th field, we add the relevant date. Then in the citation’s “specific data” field, we can add whatever is relevant to identify any profile at all.  We have just one basic template to remember.

On more technical points:

• EE would put quotation marks around the title of the tree we are citing. Given the many similarly named trees, it is important to know the exact name of the cited tree—and to let out readers know that this is an exact title. Quotation marks serve that purpose. They are the standard punctuation mark for titles of individual items (chapters, articles, databases, etc.) that appear within larger publications (books, journals, websites, etc.).
• Following another longstanding convention for reference notes, EE would put all details for one source into a single “sentence.” If we split the details between two separate sentences, as in your example, then we are telling our readers (and ourselves at a later date) that these are two different sources. A reader who expects a citation to follow standard convention would read your model and interpret it this way:
  • Source 1: Crista Cowan wrote something called Cowan Mulliner Woodruff Kerr, but because there are no quote marks or italics, it’s not clear whether it’s a publication or a manuscript, but it was obviously written or published by CC in Utah in 2014.
  • Source 2: is a profile of Richard Ridgway that appears as part of Ancestry Member Tree (wherever that is), but being a newbie—or somebody 50 years from now—I’m not sure where and how to find it.
• EE would add a place as well as a date to the identifier for Richard Ridgway, given that this database can have dozens or hundreds of same-name people.
• EE would also identify this as “Public Member Trees,” given that this is the label Ancestry applies and that Ancestry distinguishes this collection from its “Private Member Trees.

Your thoughts?

Yvette, all opinions are welcome. We learn from sharing viewpoints--and you make a good point. All of this is why we say Citation is an art, not a science.

RESPONSE TO RUSS'S MESSAGE 9:

Revision date:

Absolutely, Russ. Revision dates  are a problem with much of the material on the web. That is why, when citing web-based material, the parenthetical field in which we normally put "publication date" uses that to cover

• date of publication; or
• date of update; or
• date of access

With web-based materials, "date of access" is the most-common one because of the issue you raise.

Proposed citation:

Because you plan to point our friends at FTM to this discussion, and (we hope) they will use this discussion to correct some existing issues, let's summarize what your citation would be to this particular entry. I'm going to flag in red the points on which I've tinkered:

"Public Member Tree,"  database, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 05 Apr. 2014), "Cowan Mulliner Woodruff Kerr" family tree by Crista Cowan, profile for Robert Ridgeway (b. 24 Aug 1631 Devon, England - d. in Devon England), undocumented data updated March 2014.

The reasons for the 7 bits of tinkering are these:

• Standard typography and grammar rules place commas inside of quotation marks. (Ditto for periods.)
• The title of the website (or book or journal) should be italicized.
• The standard punctuation mark between place of publication and date is a colon, rather than a semicolon.
• Standard rules of grammar and punctuation still call for adding a period when we abbreviate a word. <g>
• After the close-parentheses for publication data, the standard punctuation is a comma.
• A punctuation mark was needed between the "profile for Robert ...." data and the statement that the data is undocumented.

Hope this helps.

Software Design & the Citation Problems They Create

Russ, you’ve fingered the biggest frustration of all, where citation is concerned. Trying  to get various software to do what we need it to do, when it has been designed otherwise, can be tougher than teaching chipmunks to line-dance.

There is an underlying problem to the issues you’re having Russ. That is: Your software was the pioneer in the field. It originated back in the late '70s, created by innovative engineers who, unfortunately, were not trained in the conventions of research and writing. As a consequence, they instituted definitions and practices that go counter-grain to longstanding conventions and standard terminology in the research world. We’ve discussed this issue with FTM developers many times over the past 25 years and the bottom line has always been this:

• It's the way the program's developers decided to define things back in the '70s.
• Changing those definitions now, to bring FTM into conformity with research standards, would confuse all those FTM users who, by using our software, have {ahem} 'learned it wrong.'

For example, you speak in terms of what to put in the

• Citation Detail field
• Source Template

In the citation world, a source template is universally understood to be the template in which we enter all details for our source.  A citation is universally defined as the statement in which we identify the source of an assertion.  

To put it another way: A source template is the template in which we enter all the details about our source—not just some of them. And a citation is the output generated from that template.  Ergo, every detail entered into the source template is a citation detail.

That citation statement may appear as (a) a reference note; or (b) an individual entry on a list of sources—aka bibliography. The output of the “source template” will vary according to whether that output needs to function as (a) or (b). But every piece of information about that source is part of the source template that creates the citation—and every field of the citation is a citation detail.

FTM’s terminology, unfortunately, takes all the details we need to fully identify our source and arbitrarily divides it into two different entities. Only part of it is called “source.” The rest is lumped into something called “citation detail."  That arbitrary division is greatly the root of the problem you’re having, causing you (and millions of others who use that software) to have to do manually override the software-generated output in order to create citations that conform to standard practices.

Needless to say, we appreciate your tackling these issues—and, as always, we stand willing to work with the developers to make things easier for all researchers.