Genealogy Do-Over Week 5-Building a Research Toolbox & Citing Sources

The Old Water Tower Chicago, IL 1980 (from Dad's slides that I scanned this week)

This week's topics are definitely things that cannot be completed in one week but they will both be well worth the effort when done and maintained on a regular basis.  They are 1-Building a Research Toolbox and 2- Citing Sources.

If you are part of the do-over and you haven't yet taken the time to watch the video that Thomas MacEntee posted from his talk at RootsTech, you should. And even if you are already doing something similar or have a collection of links in your favorites, take the time to check out Thomas MacEntee's links because he has some really cool ones in his toolbox.

A research toolbox is basically a collection of links to online resources for genealogy research.  The idea behind a research toolbox is actually something I already knew that I should be doing, I just needed this project to actually do something about it in a more organized and dedicated way.  If you look at the top of my blog you can see that I already have two tabs for holding information like this but if you click on them you can also see that they are practically empty.

So this blog will be the container for my toolbox because I want to be able to access the list from anywhere and because I want to be able to share it.  It may take a while to get it organized but I hope to be able to work on it for an hour or so today and then I plan to dedicate time every week to getting it done once the do-over cycle is finished.

Citing sources is something that I knew I should be doing almost from the very beginning. Ancestry directs you to do it whenever you add media to your tree from outside of its holdings.  But I didn't do it because I didn't know how to go about it and finding out would have taken time away from chasing those Bright Shiny Objects!

About a month ago I bought a copy of Evidence Explained and a few days ago I downloaded the trial of Evidentia.  Per Thomas MacEntees' suggestion for all-in participants, I'm going to publish this post and then dig in to the first two chapters of Evidence Explained. After dinner I will finish watching some intro videos I started a few days ago about Evidentia and then see what I sources need citing in my new tree.

Week 6 topics next time: Evaluating evidence and Reviewing Online Education Options.