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

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing encourages us every Saturday to have a bit of Genealogy Fun. Today's event is about finding statistics about the sources in our genealogy database.  He wants to know:

  • How many sources do you have in your database?
  • What is the source to person ratio?
  • Which master source do you have the most citations for?
Then we're to tell about it in a blog post.  So here goes:

I use RootsMagic for my genealogy program. I have a total of 1123 master sources with a total of 6727 citations and I have 6170 people in my database.  So my source to person ratio is 6727/6170 = 1.09.

Now, my number would be a lot higher, except many of my sources are still listed in the person notes and have not been moved to the individual events.  When I used PAF, I kept my sources in the person notes in chronological order.  As I work through a family, I convert them slowly to event sources.

My most used source is Find-a-grave with 446 citations.  Coming in second is Folkräkning in Ă…senhöga, Jönköping, Sweden. The Texas Deaths, 1890-1973 has 123 citations and in fourth place is California Voter Registration 1900-1968 with 74 citations.

If I didn't separate out the U.S. Federal Census by county and state, I'm sure the census sources would be pretty high on the list.

The source to person ratio will rise as I continue to move the source citations from Notes to Events.

Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Suzanne Gorrell, My Trails into the Past

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