Friday, October 7, 2011

Follow-Up Friday: Creating a Naturalization Source Citation

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In my post Treasure Chest Thursday - A Certificate of Naturalization for T.S. Leland, John Carruthers left this comment:

"Randy, I would like to suggest you have a Follow-Up Friday following your Treasure Chest Thursday.  In particular I would like to know how you sourced/cited the Certificate of Naturalization in RootsMagic. Did you add any Facts? Did you put the complete transcription in the Notes? Did you link the scanned image to your database? Where and How?
"I realize there is no right or wrong way to cite a source but I would value knowing how you approach the problem."

The process I used to add this Fact, the Source Citation for the Fact, and the image of the record to my RootsMagic 4 database was this:

1)  In the "Edit Person" window for Torger Sjurson Leland, I clicked the "Add a Fact" button and selected the "Naturalization" Fact from the dropdown list.  I entered the Date (13 April 1876), the Place (Madison, Dane, Wisconsin, United States), and the Place Details (Circuit Court) to the fields.

2)  With the Naturalization Fact highlighted, I clicked the "Sources" button and selected the "Add  New Source" button in the "Citation Manager" window.  I scrolled down the "Select Source Type" list until I found "Naturalization Record."  That entry noted that the source template was based on:

"National-level Court records; declaration of intention, certificate of arrival; Location optional for E! compatibility; Court as lead element in source list
Ref: [EE, sec 11.49, p 618; E!, p 92]"

I found the entry in the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives for this collection - at http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/wiarchives.uw-whs-dane0088 - in order to obtain information to enter into the source template.

I clicked on the source template for "Naturalization Record" and the entry fields (with my entries) were:

Master Source: Dane County Circuit Court
*  U.S. Court: Dane County (Wisconsin) Circuit Court
*  Series: Dane Series 88
*  Record group: Naturalization Records, 1841-1954
*  Repository:Wisconsin Historical Society Archives
*  Repository location: Madison, Wis.
*  Case or file: Volume 10

Source Details:
*  Name: T.S. Leland
*  Item of Interest:  Certificate of Naturalization, Page 349

I added information to the "Quality" button - I selected Original Source, Primary Information, Direct Evidence.  I added information to the "Repository" button - the  name and location of the Archives.

The completed "Edit Source" screen looked like this:


The Footnote created by this source template is:

T.S. Leland, Certificate of Naturalization, Page 349, Volume 10, Dane County (Wisconsin) Circuit Court; Naturalization Records, 1841-1954; Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, Madison, Wis.

3)  With the Naturalization Fact highlighted on the "Edit Person" window, I clicked on the "Media" button and used the "Add new media" button, found the image in my files, and added the media item, including a caption.  The "Media Album" screen looked like:


4)  I clicked on Torger Sjurson Leland's name, and then on the "Note" button (I prefer to keep all of my notes in the Person Note rather than in the specific Fact Note) .  I went to my blog post, copied the transcription of the Certificate of Naturalization, and added the Source citation created above (I try to put source citations in my Notes also).  The Note screen looks like this:


I did have to add italics to the underlined text, and noted that my crossed out word is not crossed out in RootsMagic (there apparently is no option for that in RootsMagic).

5)  The final "Edit Person" screen with the Naturalization Fact highlighted is shown below:


While the actual actions above took me about five minutes, it took me almost 30 minutes to write this post to explain the process!

 Using the RootsMagic Source Templates is really easy to create an EE-quality source.  If you have the book Evidence! Explained, then you can follow that model to write a similar source citation in notes or your software program without using the source templates.  I don't know what I would do without the source templates in genealogy software!

That's my process, John. Thanks for the question!  And thanks for the geneablogging meme idea of "Follow-Up Friday."

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I just love the citation models in Rootsmagic. You still have to check your citations, of course, but they save so much time and help ensure consistency. This is a very helpful tutorial. Thanks, Randy!

John said...

Thank you for explaining the process you use to cite a certificate in RootsMagic. In my humble opinion your approach is very practical and very logical. It appears to be useful in citing a variety of different types of sources with only minor changes in the details.
You might be interested to know my technique for learning from a tutorial like yours. It works best on a Windows 7 machine. I open your blog to the article, hold down the Windows key, and hit the right arrow on the keyboard. This puts the window on the right hand side of my monitor. Then I open RootsMagic, hold down the Windows key, and hit the left arrow on the keyboard. This puts the RootsMagic window on the left hand side of my monitor. Now I can actually do things in RootsMagic following the instructions in the side-by-side tutorial. To keep things neat as you go along you keep doing the Windows key/left arrow thing as you open more individual screens in RootsMagic.
John Carruthers
Victoria BC