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Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - What Source Have You Used the Most?

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has another challenge for us:

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  Have you done a good job of citing your sources in your genealogy management program or online family tree?  How are you doing?  How many source citations do you have, and how many people are in your tree?  What is the sources to persons ratio?

2)  Which master source (e.g., 1900 U.S. census, Find A Grave, specific book, etc.) do you have the most citations for?  How many?  How did you figure this out?

3)  Tell us in your own blog post, in comments to this post, or on Facebook or Google+ in a post.  Be sure to leave a comment with a link to your post on this blog post.

1)    I try to create source citations for all of my events, but I still have many events where the source citation is part of notes instead. This is left over from my PAF program which I used for nearly ten years. When I work on a family, I try to move these Notes sources into real sources, but it takes time.

My current database, RootsMagic says I have 8,839 citations coming from 1,512 different sources. I have 7091 people in my database and 16,603 events. My source to person ratio is 8,839/7091 = 1.25. Obviously, I have not sourced all of my events yet. I’ve only done about half of them.

We did this same exercise three years ago and my ratio then was 1.09. So I have been improving!

2)    I ran the statistics for the number of sources I have. It came to 356 pages! My most used sources         in order are:

Database
2017
2014*
Find A Grave
1048
446
Texas Deaths 1890-1076
173
123
Cemetery & Bible Records Vol 1 (Mississippi)
152

Skaraborg Parish Records
126

California Voter Registration1900-1968
130
74
Barron & Allied Families
112

Nilsen Family: From Jonkoping to America
102

Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY)
85

World War I Draft Registrations
84

Parish Records
82

*I didn’t record all of these databases in 2014




Again, if I didn’t separate all of my census entries by county, I would have a very high statistic for the U.S. census.

Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Suzanne Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.

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