My list of 2016 systems for myself included the usual ideas, such as eating better and exercising more frequently. Among those ideas were some serious commitments that I needed to make towards taking control of my genealogical research by documenting the sources I find and have found in the past. Stopping the process of finding documents and not bothering to examine and analyze them until much later or ever. Also, becoming more diligent about filing away the information I’ve collected after examining and analyzing it.
In looking back at 2016 and these systems that I created for myself to follow, some of these ideas did bear some small fruit and others just simply didn’t pan out for a myriad of reasons. The documenting my sources did work out because I made a conscious effort to create citations or at least note down pertinent information about a particular source while I had in front of me and spent time over a period of months creating citations for items I’d found in the past. After completing my research at a repository I wrote citations for the items viewed while still on site or immediately after leaving having that information still fresh in my mind. Instead of writing these source citations sometimes weeks, months, or years later when I was trying to analyze the source later and write about.
In order to document, examine, and analyze these newly found bits of information, I came up with the process of after returning from a repository of entering the item into my research log which included the source citation, then entering the source into Evidentia and using that program to examine and analyze the source.
I tried using Evernote when researching online as a way to help me get into the habit of creating source citations when I found a piece of information or didn’t. What I found was that it was easier for me to just not use Evernote when downloading a digital image of a document found online and instead save the image file to the pertinent research folder on my computer and record the search and findings along with a source citation in my research log.
