Review: Elizabeth Shown Mills’ QuickSheet – Citing Online Historical Resources

A few days ago, Connie Lenzen, writing in The Columbian (Clark County, Washington), wrote an article, Genealogy Today: Citing Internet sources, that reviewed Elizabeth Shown Mills’ “QuickSheet; Citing Online Historical Resources, Evidence! Style.” As more and more people do online genealogy research, this is going to become very important.

Excerpt from the Article/Review:

A Web site is the online equivalent of a book, and so you look for the name of the author, creator or owner of the content of the Web site. Sometimes this is not readily available because people don’t always give a byline. You look for the title of the Web site, the type of item, the publication data and the citation detail.

Mills gives examples of how to do this. For instance, this is how she would write a citation for an entry from the 1880 census on the LDS web site, www.familysearch.org.

“1880 United States Census,” database, LDS, FamilySearch (http://www.familysearch.org: accessed 1 July 2005), entry for Leung Tung Wong (age 18), Holyoke, Hampden County, Massachusetts.

Very helpful to those of you are are using online databases (and the Quicksheet doesn’t just cover online census information either).

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