Saturday, June 13, 2015

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

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



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.


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 (File > Properties) says that I have 62,774 source citations in 1,200 master sources, and there are 44,884 persons in this tree.  My source/person ratio is 1.3986. 


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 1,200 master sources was 2,064 pages long.


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


**  Find A Grave:  13,693 (21.8% of the total)

**  Massachusetts Vital Records, 1841-1915:  2,715

**  Social Security Death Index: 2,366
**  1930 U.S. Census:  1,362
**  Vermont Vital Records, 1760-2003:  1,314
**  California Death Index:  1,044
**  1940 U.S. Census:  969
**  Medfield, Mass. Vital Records book:  815
**  Roxbury, Mass. Vital Records Book:  746
**  World War I Draft Registrations:  741
**  Woburn, Mass. Vital Records book:  700
**  Concord, Mass. Vital Records Book:  682
**  1920 U.S. Census:  636
**  1900 U.S. Census:  514

*  In Legacy Family Tree 8, I created a Source Report (selecting Reports > Other Reports > Source Citations > checking "Master Sources and Citation Summary Counts") to get a list of all master sources and the number of individuals with a citation to that source.  


For Find A Grave, there were 5,578 individuals with a Find A Grave source.  I couldn't find a way to obtain the total number of source citations for each master source.  


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


The URL for this post is:  
http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/06/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-what.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here is my post! https://ellen2321.wordpress.com/2015/06/13/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-june-13/

You caught me at a good (or bad?) time, I was looking for a distraction from some boxes of paper I just inherited!

Lois Willis said...

Here is my post
http://loiswillis.com/?p=4441