As active researchers and writers, there is often a need—or at least a temptation—to cite ourselves as an authoritative source for a particular point. Whether it is appropriate to do so depends upon the circumstances.

On a personal level, we are a valid source only for events or circumstances that we personally experienced in a cognizant state. We cannot, for example, attest our own birth; although we were physically there, we had not developed cognizance. If we have no other authority, we can only attest that we were taught to celebrate our birth on a particular day of the year.

As researchers, citations to our own published work may or may not be justified. For some historical subjects there is a rich body of literature and a wide range of interpretations. In other instances, a subject may be so narrow that no one else has investigated it to the breadth and depth that we have—if at all. 

Five questions can help us determine whether our own prior work can be appropriately cited as one form of “proof ” for our assertions:

• If we are citing a prior conclusion or proof argument, has that conclusion of ours been vetted and the argument published in a peer-reviewed journal?  Assertions that have never been vetted are generally not considered to be authoritative.
• If we are citing underlying research reports, are those reports publicly available—at, say, a website where they can be immediately accessed and studied in depth?
• Are other authorities available? Is the topic a general one on which multiple people have published, including ourselves? Are opinions compatible, although each naturally will have varying nuances? If so, then citing ourselves may strike our readers as self-promotion. 
• What is the scope and focus of our prior research? Is the topic a highly specialized one that no one else has addressed—say, a quantitative analysis of a community, or an intricately solved identity issue, or a reference work that is not otherwise available? If there is no one else to cite, then a reference to our own work would be entirely appropriate.
• Are our conclusions unique? Did our findings or conclusions correct or challenge other significant publications on the subject? If so, then citations to both would be appropriate.

In sum: if our own prior publications have gone into considerably more depth than our current piece of writing allows, then it would be reasonable to cite our prior work for a more in-depth discussion. We might also cite others who hold a counter view, to offer a balanced perspective.

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(EE4: 2.12)
Modern genealogists are blessed to have billions of records easily available—in print, in some derivative format, and as images online.  When we examine a published item to identify the elements that need recording, we should bear in mind that published history materials commonly have two formats in need of identification:

• Original work: Most such material originated in manuscript or published format—whether in modern times or antiquity.
• Modern form: This material is now being published in a new format by a firm or an agency that is not the original creator.

Therefore, our citations should

• distinguish between image copies and other derivatives such as abstracts, transcripts, and information extracted into databases;
• credit properly the original creator;
• credit properly the producer of the images or electronic publication;
• identify clearly the nature of the material;
• identify the images or electronic publication completely enough for others to locate it;
• cite the specific place (webpage, frame, etc.) in the database or on the roll, fiche, etc., at which we found the relevant item; and
• cite the date on which the images or data set were created, updated, or accessed—as well as the date of the original record or original publication.

Some publishers of databases and record images add a preface informing us that they obtained their data from another firm or individual. To analyze the reliability of their material we also need to record

• the identity of the entity (individual or agency) that first assembled that data set;
• the original source(s) from which the data was taken and the year or time frame in which the original was created;
• whether a database entry represents full or partial extraction from those sources; or
• whether the record set was generated from materials randomly encountered by the original compiler.

Tracking the provenance (origin) of derivative material can be difficult. A currently marketed database might have been purchased from a firm no longer in existence, which might have bought its information from a book compiler, who might have assembled materials randomly published elsewhere. Such an entity would be of significantly different quality from, say,

• a new database created by a learned society using skilled copyists to extract every document in a record set; or
• a collection of images created by a company that contracts with an archive to reproduce an entire record series. 

If our attempts to track the origin of the material are unsuccessful, we should say so and explain the efforts we have made. This will help us and others avoid unnecessary repetition of the work. When we carefully report our steps, we or a user of our work may be able later to fill some of the gaps in our current research methods or findings.

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(EE4: 1.3)
Each assertion we make as history researchers must be supported by proof. However, proof is not synonymous with a source. The most reliable proof is a composite of information drawn from multiple sources that meet three criteria:

• They represent quality materials;
• They are independently created; and 
• They accurately report the original circumstances.

For history researchers, there is no such thing as proof that can never be rebutted. We were not there when history happened, and the eyewitness accounts of those who were — if and when those accounts exist — may not be reliable. Every conclusion we reach about circumstances, events, identities, or kinships is simply a decision we base upon the weight of the evidence we have assembled. Our challenge is to accumulate the best information possible and to train ourselves to skillfully analyze and interpret what it has to say.

In this process, we typically reach conclusions of three types, each of which carries a different weight:

• Hypotheses are propositions based upon an analysis of evidence at hand. They are used to define a focus for additional research. In testing any hypothesis, we must labor to disprove it as diligently as we labor to prove it. Our role is not just that of judge and jury, but also devil’s advocate.

• Theories are tentative conclusions reached after a hypothesis has been extensively researched but the evidence still seems short of proof. A theory should never be presented as a fact. Any theory we propose should carry qualifiers. Perhaps, possibly, likely, and similar terms can express our degree of confidence in a theory, but we are still obliged to explain our reasoning.

• Proof is a conclusion based upon the sum of the evidence that supports a valid assertion or deduction. It’s a conclusion drawn from many sources — quality sources, all independently created. Proof must be backed by thorough research and documentation, by reliable information that is correctly interpreted and carefully correlated, and by a well-reasoned and written analysis of the problem and the evidence.

A conclusion cannot always be reached. When the accumulated materials are well appraised, the evidence may not support any decision at all. If it does not, then the question must remain open — the fact of the situation remains unknown — until sufficient evidence is developed. 

If extenuating circumstances pressure for a decision (as with impending court testimony in a dispute over, say, historical property or heirship), then the researcher must present all relevant evidence, interpret it accurately, and appropriately qualify whatever hypothesis seems justified. This is commonly done using terms that denote levels of confidence, as discussed in this chapter at §1.6).

The post Our Research Conclusions: Are they Hypotheses? Theories? Or Proof? – By Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CG, FASG appeared first on Genealogical.com.

Chapter Two of Drew Smith’s wonderful guidebook, Generation by Generation: A Modern Approach to the Basics of Genealogy, is about relationships: Father and Mother, Siblings, Aunts and Uncles, Cousins, Greats and Grands, Double Cousins, the Removes, and more. Smith discusses the origins of the terms we use to express relationships, and then he goes on to explain how genealogists have come to visualize and arrange them for organizational purposes. The relationship formats that have stood the test of time are the pedigree chart and the family group sheet. Each one has its own benefits. If one or both is new to you, you can have a looksee below at the samples Drew Smith has incorporated into Generation by Generation.

Pedigree Charts and Family Group Sheet Sample

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The award-winning Map Guide to the U.S. Federal Censuses, 1790-1920, by William Thorndale and William Dollarhide, published in 1987, is the preeminent tool for assuring researchers that they are searching the census in the correct county.  The maps in the Map Guide show both contemporary boundaries and decennial federal census boundaries on the same map. According to co-author William Dollarhide, “That concept was clearly designed to aid genealogists, not just historians, or demographers. Genealogists are interested in what county their people lived in so they can find the right county courthouse. As you know, the most important part of the three elements in doing genealogical research (Name, Date, Place) is the PLACE where the records are stored today. The Map Guide maps provide that service, by showing both the modern boundaries and the contemporary boundaries on the same map. One can quickly see the counties THEN and the counties NOW.  It is graphic, it is easy, and it is consistent for every state . . . As a testament to [William] Thorndale’s research, there has never been one question about the accuracy of the Map Guide maps . . . .”. 

The principal feature of The Map Guide consists of a county-by-county map for each U.S. state (including territorial maps) for each census of the state/territory’s existence. Each such map displays contemporary boundaries overlaying the boundaries of a particular census year. Users of the volume will also discover a detailed introduction containing an historical essay about the census, an appendix describing the mapping process, and a discussion of state session laws that mandated the thousands of boundary changes.

According to esteemed genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills:

“Ancestors who lived to a ripe old age on the frontiers of America may have spent their entire lives in one community and yet lived in a dozen different counties.  My first step with any new project is to create a genealogy of the area in which the ancestor lived—charting its parent counties and its offspring—and I begin that effort with Dollarhide and Thorndale’s Map Guide to the U.S. Federal Census, 1790-1920.”

To further illustrate, here are two maps from the Thorndale/Dollarhide volume: (1) A guide for using the book, and (2) the 1890 map for the Montana Territory.

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As Dr. David Dobson has noted in the Introduction to his new book, Scottish Baronial Families, 1250-1750, medieval Scottish kings established administrative units overseen by barons to assure that the King’s laws were enforced, taxes were collected, and, when necessary, knights and other warriors were available to defend the kingdom.

By the late seventeenth century there were hundreds of baronies in Scotland; however, in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745-1746, the British Government enacted the Heritable Jurisdiction Act of 1747, which reduced the powers of barons and the nobility in general.

Working mostly from primary sources written in Latin—especially the Register of the Great Seal of Scotland from about 1320–Dobson has traced the origin and line of descent of nearly 1,000 Scottish baronies and baronetcies, including some whose progeny eventually moved to the Americas. Representative of the contents of Scottish Baronial Families, are the following two pages describing the barons Graham/Grahame/Graeme/Grayme .

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Smithtown, New York, situated about 50 miles east of New York City in Suffolk County, was founded by Richard Smith and his family in 1665. The famous 1698 census enumerations for Smithtown have not survived; however, Kory Meyerink, author of New York in 1698: A Comprehensive List of Residents Based on Census, Tax, and Other Lists, was able to reconstruct the missing census from probate records initiated in 1702 by Richard Smith’s wife, Sarah Smith. You can see Mr. Meyerink’s reconstruction of the 1698 census for Smithtown below. Smithtown is just one of the score of New York localities whose population the author has identified for this important book. The work includes a complete name index and an appendix of Dutch names in common usage at the time of the census. Readers should also consult the Introduction to New York in 1698, which we reproduced in the November 12, 2024 issue of “Genealogy Pointers.”

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The late Leonard H. Smith, Jr., and his wife Norma H. Smith were great students of New England and Nova Scotia ancestry.  Together they compiled numerous works on these two subjects; however, probably their greatest genealogical contribution is their two-volume work, Nova Scotia Immigrants to 1867. The Smiths’ interest was spawned by Mr. Smith’s parents’ birthplace, Digby County, Nova Scotia. The couple eventually immigrated to Massachusetts, where their son Leonard was born. As the authors note in the Introduction to Volume I of their book, “No one who has worked with United States censuses of New England can have failed to notice the frequency with which the words “Nova Scotia” appear in the columns headed, ”Birthplace of Father” and Birthplace of Mother.” It is clear that thousands of persons enumerated trace their ancestry through that province.”

Researchers whose forebears came–or might have come–to New England via Nova Scotia before 1867 face no small problem, as that year marks the beginning of official recordkeeping. “With the exception of [some] passenger lists and town records, however, the usual sources only rarely offer information as to the former home of an immigrant. The scarcity of those records in early Nova Scotia magnifies the problem.”

If you are hunting for your New England and/or Nova Scotian origins prior to 1867, you would do well to read the Introduction to Nova Scotia Immigrants to 1867, and examine a sample page of immigrants found therein; which is why we have reproduced those pages below.

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Most genealogists know—or learn belatedly—that they should be on the lookout for existing accounts of their ancestors, whether published in a printed book or online. While the information in older books about any family must be examined for possible errors and their findings compared with original sources, published family histories frequently save the genealogist much time and effort. For persons possessing Latin American origins, Lyman Platt’s 1996 book, Hispanic Surnames and Family History, is still the best guide to published family histories.

Hispanic Surnames and Family History is an exhaustive review of the development of Spanish surnames in Latin America and the Hispanic United States where there are obvious links between Latin American and Spanish families. (The word Hispanic refers to persons born in Latin America or the U.S. whose parents spoke Spanish and whose principal cultural background was Spanish). Among other things, this work ranks the top 1,000 surnames throughout the Americas at the time of publication and identifies surnames that are unique to specific Latin American nations.

At the very heart of the book, however, is a bibliography of Hispanic family histories in the U.S. and Latin America, certainly the most extensive list of its kind ever compiled. Dr. Platt cites every Hispanic family history he was able to locate in newspapers, magazines, historical compilations, and monographs. For the genealogist concerned with Hispanic ancestry, Hispanic Surnames and Family History is one of first places—if not the very first–to begin one’s own genealogy.

To illustrate what a researcher might learn from this book, please consider pages 67 and 138, which we have copied below. The third entry on p. 67–from the section of the book that lists Spanish surnames for which a history or historical sketch exists—refers to the surname Frias. To see the actual bibliographic citation for Frias, look at the last entry on p. 138. It describes a work published by Jorge H. Frias, “De Donde Venimos y con Quien nos Vinculamos,” which is in fact the first publication a Frias descendant should examine. Although Dr. Platt found only one citation for Frias, more common names such as Gallego(s) shows three sources, and Garcia, fully sixteen. In fact, Hispanic Surnames and Family History cites over 1,800 sources of published family histories of potential benefit to genealogists, making it still the greatest bibliography of its kind in print! View Hispanic Surnames and Family History

Census Records

Since census records are one of the first sources to examine, once you’ve exhausted the memories of family members and checked to see if a genealogy of your family already exists, we can also recommend Lyman Platt’s other book, Census Records for Latin America and the Hispanic United States. Arranged by country and thereunder by province or other locality, this 1998 publication is comprehensive as of that date. For this volume, Mr. Platt has assembled all known censuses—by locality, year, and source—for the nations of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Spanish Florida, Guatemala, Honduras, Spanish Louisiana, Mexico (the largest source of census records), Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

This important volume also contains an introductory essay on the nature and whereabouts of Hispanic census records as of 1998 (some of them likely have been digitized and put on the Internet in the interim), and a lengthy list of abbreviations to Mr. Platt’s sources. Finally, for the reader’s edification, we have reproduced the book’s Introduction and sample census record pages for the Mexican state of Sonora. View Census Records for Latin America and the Hispanic United States

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Between 1997 and 2024, Genealogical.com published the nine-volume series, Scottish Soldiers in Colonial America, by Dr. David Dobson. We are delighted to present those books in a new, fully indexed, consolidated edition.  This consolidation edition of Dr. Dobson’s nine-part series identifies over 10,000 Scottish soldiers who served in the Americas. The new comprehensive index of names enables genealogists and historians to easily identify every person named in the soldier descriptions—spouses, children, parents, ship captains, and so on–and not just the soldiers themselves. This edition improves on the originals in two other respects. Dr. Dobson has attached a detailed list of Scottish regiments that were stationed in colonial America. We also encourage readers to consult the rich Appendix, for it contains all the “American” entries from the author’s 2021 book, Scottish Soldiers in Europe and America, 1600-1700, which was published separately from the colonia America series.

As the following examples from Volume II of the consolidation illustrate, Scottish soldiers who served in the Americas moved around quite a bit. This is so partly because they served in the British army and, after 1783 in any case, mostly preferred to remain loyal to Great Britain. For researchers hoping to find their immigrant ancestors, this means working with records found in more than country. On the other hand, Dr. Dobson’s findings will help genealogists pin down their Scots forebears to a specific time and place. See for yourself.

Cochrane, Captain John, Commander of the Castle of William and Mary in New Hampshire, was ordered to dismantle the said castle and go to Boston, a memorial dated New York, on 19 November 1779. [Source]

Gordon, Alexander, settled in Norfolk, Virginia, as a surgeon and druggist in 1761. Colonel of the Norfolk Militia he fought at the Battle of Great Bridge where he was captured, later he was exchanged and moved to New York where he rejoined the Army and fought at Head of the Elk and at Brandywine in 1777, he moved to England in 1779 but returned with Lord Dunmore in 1782, in London in 1784 [Source]

MacNab, Duncan, settled in Anson County, North Carolina, a Loyalist soldier, fought at Moore’s Creek Bridge in 1776, and at the Siege of Savannah, moved via East Florida, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then to London in 1784. (Source]

Robertson, Captain James, of the 77^th (Montgomery’s Highlanders] Regiment, from Greenock to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1758, with a detachment of the 77^th Regiment, escorted Christian Conestoga Indians from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to New York in 1764, to protect from the Paxton Boys, served in America from 1756 until 1783, Barrack Master General from 1756 until 1776, was granted 10,000 acres in East Florida in 1766, Governor of New York from 1779 until 1783 [Source]

Thomson, Alexander, prisoner of war captured at the Siege of Worcester on 2 September 1651, was transported via London on the John and Sarah of London to Boston in December 1651, landed there in February 1652, [possibly an indentured servant at Lynn ironworks.] [Source]

Finally, Dr. Dobson’s Introduction to the new edition provides an excellent overview of the history of the Scottish military experience during the 17^th– and 18^th-centuries. We are happy to reprint the Introduction below:

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