Friday, January 11, 2008

Articles on Information, Sources, Evidence and Proof

I've been reading and printing out articles from the Ancestry Learning Center dealing with Information, Sources, Evidence and Proof. The Learning Center has been revamped - and now I cannot "capture" the articles by doing a [File] [Save As] and putting them into a directory on my computer.

Here are some of the articles I've printed out so far for my reading pleasure (usually during baseball games or TV shows):

* "Building a Case When No Record 'Proves' a Point" by Elizabeth Shown Mills, 4 April 2000.

* "Corroborating or Conflicting Evidence" by Patricia Law Hatcher, 6 August 2003

* "Corroborating or Conflicting Evidence - Part 2" by Patricia Law Hatcher, 19 August 2003

* "Doing the History" by Curt B. Witcher, 3 June 2004.

* "Evaluating Evidence" by Patricia Law Hatcher, 11 June 2002.

* "Information, Evidence and Proof" by Donn Devine, 19 October 2001

* "Red Flags and Rationalization" by Patricia Law Hatcher, 28 November 2000
* "Evidence and Sources - How They Differ" by Donn Devine, 26 September 2000

* "A Template for Evaluating Evidence" by Elizabeth Shown Mills, April-June 2004.

* "Weighing the Evidence" by George G. Morgan, 12 February 1999.

* "Cold Case Genealogy" by George G. Morgan, 6 January 2006

I know there are lots more good articles, but the Search box on the Ancestry Learning Center is a problem now - it doesn't find everything! For instance, I input "elizabeth shown mills" into the search box, figuring it would give me all the articles authored by ESM, plus any others that mention her. I get three pages (less than 30 matches), most of which are Ancestry Journal or News items, book reviews and only four articles by ESM (none of which are the two on my list above). I figure there are more, because I found more doing the search for "Evidence" and "Proof" as the search term!

Ancestry needs to fix their search engine in the Learning Center in order to get consistent and complete results.

If you know of other articles on these topics, please let me know!

UPDATE 7:40 PM: I added some more articles to the list. It looks like the "new and improved" Ancestry Learning Center article "Archive" (when you click on the "Archive" link) goes back to 2004 only.

After growing frustration at not finding articles I was sure were in the Ancestry Learning Center, I found the "old" Library files at http://www.ancestry.com/learn/library/archive.aspx. The Search Box at this site works well (724 matches for "evidence"), but the articles can not be saved to your hard drive.

1 comment:

Lee said...

Thanks, Randy! This should keep people busy over the weekend!