It Goes Both Ways

The envelope arrives in the mail. It’s been weeks and weeks since you sent away for that copy of a marriage certificate or a Civil War pension file or Social Security application. Or the record set you’ve been hoping would be digitized is finally available on-line. Now it’s here, right in front of you and you bring out a magnifier and start harvesting every centimeter of your document for information.

If you take a look at the Board for Certification of Genealogy (BCG) Standards, standard 35 is about source analysis. This standard outlines that a genealogist examines a number of things about the document or source, before we even get to “the good stuff,” namely, what the document says. The last part of that standard mentions that a genealogist should: “[Appraise}. . . The source’s history, including its governance, provenance, purpose, recorder, storage, and time lapse between events and their recordation.” [italics mine]¹

In Evidence Explained, 1.10 Technical Knowledge, Elizabeth Shown Mills points out that having a thorough understanding of your source will support an “accurate analysis” of that source.²

Why is analyzing a document an important skill to develop? What’s the point, if the information I seek is right there in front of me?

Basically, if you don’t understand why and how a document was created, you will not be able to fully understand everything that record can tell you. For instance, researching and gleaning an understanding of the UK census will give you an idea of who probably reported the information and what those double or single hash marks that appear underneath names sometimes mean.

I loves me the UK census, so I spent quality time learning about it: Why and how it was created, and who it was taken by. Now, when I look at, say, the 1851 census of England, I know that worksheets were filled out by each head of the household or with help from the enumerator. I know that the record I am looking at was copied from those worksheets by the enumerator. And, I know that the double hash mark meant a new building or address began on the next line. The single hash mark denoted that the person or family below lived at the same building or address.

The more you know about a source before you look at it, the more you will be able to glean from that source.

But, genealogists don’t just analyze documents. We create documents. Understanding the “purpose” of a document applies to the ones you create, too. Asking yourself the question “Why is this document being created?” before you start working on it, is vital to turning out a good final product. Some examples:

• Are you writing a research report for a client or a genealogy book to hand out at next year’s family reunion? The standards of research and writing should be the same, but they are two different writing projects.
• A letter written to a client is going to be a great deal different in tone than a letter written to your new DNA cousin.
• Transcribing a will or a deed is quite different from abstracting information from a will or a deed.
• An article for your local weekly newspaper is going to have a different readership with different interests than an article written for NGSQ. You have to know your audience to make an article relevant to those who read either publication.
• You might create two documents that seem the same, and may have overlapping information, but have two very different purposes for being created. A resume is a tool (usually one page) that lists your experience and accomplishments. Its purpose is to get you a job interview. A curriculum vitae (CV) however is a comprehensive list of your experience and accomplishments. It may run several pages long and be attached to academic work, a syllabus, call-for-proposals, or a business plan.

As we all know, documents will live on long after we are gone. Taking the time to be clear about what you are writing and why you are writing it will help you produce a better end result.

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1. Board for Certification of Genealogists, Genealogy Standards: 50^th Anniversary Edition (New York, New York: Ancestry.com/Turner Publishing Company, 2014), pages 21-22.

2. Elizabeth Shown Mills, “Fundamentals of Evidence Analysis: 1.10 Technical Knowledge,” Evidence Explained: Citing Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, Third Edition (Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc., 2015), pages 21-22.