Saturday, March 21, 2015

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

It's Saturday Night, 
time for more Genealogy Fun!!


For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you 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.


Here's mine:


1) I'm trying!  I'm not nearly done.  I'm almost obsessive now...I've been adding source citations almost every day based on new research, on MyHeritage Record Matches, on Ancestry green leaf Hints, etc., all for persons and events that are in my database without a source citation (due to slacking off for many years).  I'm also trying to "improve" existing source citations when I find them by adding better citation details.


At present, my RootsMagic 7 database statistics file says that I have 60,966 source citations in 1,158 master sources, and there are 44,670 persons in this tree.  My source/person ratio is 1.3648. 


2)  I think that Find A Grave is the master source in my database that has the most individuals and source citations.  I found this out by:

*  In RootsMagic 7, I created a Source List report (selecting Reports > All reports > Source list > select "Print all sources in database sorted by source name") and browsed the list.  The list for all 1,158 master sources was 1,966 pages long.


The number of citations for some of the master sources were:


**  Find A Grave:  13,100 (21.4% of the total)
**  Massachusetts Vital Records, 1841-1915:  2,721
**  Social Security Death Index: 2,302
**  Vermont Vital Record Cards: 1,312
**  1930 U.S. Census:  1,200**  California Death Index:  999
**  1940 U.S. Census:  967**  Medfield, Mass. Vital Record book:  814
**  Roxbury, Mass. Vital Record book:  739
**  World War I Draft Registrations:  715
**  Woburn, Mass. Vital Record book: 697
**  Concord, Mass. Vital Record book:  681
**  Dedham, Mass. Vital Record book: 536**  1900 U.S. Census:  515

3)  I expected to find a better statistics report in this report that listed the master sources with the number of individuals and citations, and in numerical order.


The URL for this post is:  
http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/03/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-which.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver



6 comments:

GeneGinny said...

FTM 2014 only tells me that I have 583 source "groups." The only way to know how many times I've used each source is apparently to print out a usage list and count them. Not gonna happen!

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

I also use RootsMagic. I have 6,484 people in my database with 14,466 events. For that I have 1241 master sources and 7,193 citations. So my source/person ratio is 1.11. My events to citations ratio is 2.01.

My most common source is Findagrave.com with 575 records. I would have more census records if I didn’t split them out by county in each census year. However, I have a 113 pages of census records.

Lois Willis said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lois Willis said...

I use Legacy 8 Deluxe, and to find the main statistics was fairly simple, but rather than search through the list of over 3000 master sources to find the ones with the most entries, I used Excel to do the work for me. For details on how I did this, check out my post
Finding source citation statistics in Legacy 8 Deluxe

Anonymous said...

This was an interesting exercise. I used an old version of Family Tree Maker. It was easier than I thought to figure out the answers. And the overall stats were better than I expected, so I feel good tonight!!

Celia Lewis said...

My background is early USA, England, Canada, with a smattering in northern Europe - Netherlands & Wurttemberg.
Looking at the Source Report (Legacy), FindAGrave as source only 41 times. Biggest is the 1900 US Census, followed closely by 1910 (71) and 1880 (87). But I also found 66 citations for the source of "Goshenhoppen Register" in PA, and 65 citations using source of "Marriages, white County, Illinois, USA".
I need to also clean up my sources somewhat - I'm doing the Do-Over this year, and standardizing my files, sources, etc. Nice little exercise. I've saved the report, as I can see some errors in several! :)