Sourcing of records (continued)

To add to the pain of finding records and adding sources that had been forgotten, it was decided to improve the standard of citations given in my TMG (The Master Genealogist) event sourcing. Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Mills (now in its 3rd edition) appears to be the standard to follow. Its style is based on the Chicago Manual of Style but with considerable extensions for citing the many varieties of sources used in genealogy.

There appears to be considerable differences of opinion in how much detail to add to sources in genealogy software packages. Certainly there should be enough to allow someone else to find the source material at a later date if possible.
An experience in trying to find the original material used in a book about the history of a Lincolnshire village was a lesson. The book dates from the 1930s and at that time some of the material was not deposited at the county or national archives. Nonetheless, after a time all of the material that was of interest, except for one item, has been discovered. There was just enough guidance but more would have been useful.

Evidence Explained starts with some fundamentals of citing sources - when to use italics, quotes, semicolons etc. - and builds from there. It does seem extraordinarily finicky at first and at a personal level it will depend on what you intend to do with your genealogy records as to how much time you invest in the art of citations. As I want to publish my family history it seems useful to make it look a little more professional than it was.
I know that in my branch of engineering it is relatively easy to spot the beginner by the way diagrams are drawn, or reports written, and so on.
However, when seeing how long some of the source citations get to be especially when the record is on-line via a record provider and then quoting a further repository makes one want to take short-cuts. For example, would it be reasonable to cut out much of the citation for a census entry where there are several on-line providers carrying the same record and the indexing makes the record easy to find at any of them? (Just give the TNA reference and family name for example?)

These questions are still be worked on but I take much more notice of the detail of sources given in books than I used to.
Anyway, much of what is in Elizabeth Mill’s book has been taken on-board, and it has proved to be very useful.

It has taken a lot of time re-organise the sources in TMG but the end results in reports are looking better for it.
I will eventually to get back to some proper research but the time spent on learning a lot of new tricks is hopefully worthwhile.