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Why citations matter in family research
Every family tree is only as good as its sources. A name without a source is a rumour, and a rumour copied from tree to tree becomes a false fact that is hard to kill. A citation fixes that. It says exactly which record you used, where it lives, and what it says, so anyone, including you in five years, can check it. Good citations also protect your own work: when two records disagree, the citation tells you which one you trusted and why.
The generator below builds citations from fields you enter: author, title, place, publisher or archive, year, detail and, for websites, the address and the date you accessed it. It offers templates for books, census records, birth, marriage and death records, and websites. The templates follow the Evidence Explained style guide as a guide only; they are not an official standard, and no single style fits every archive. The point is consistency: use one style, use it every time, and your notes stay checkable.
How to use the generator
- Choose the source type: book, census record, birth, marriage or death record, or website.
- Fill in the fields you know. Title matters most; author and place help when they exist.
- Add detail: a roll number, a page, an entry number, or a district and volume.
- For websites, add the address and the date you accessed it, because web pages change.
- Click “Generate citation” and copy the result into your notes.
A worked example
Say you found a man in the 1880 United States census for Ohio, on roll 123. Choose the census type, enter the place as Ohio, the title as US Federal Census, the year as 1880, and the detail as roll 123. The generator produces a citation that names all four pieces. Anyone reading it can go straight to that roll and check the entry. Without the roll number, the same citation would be nearly useless, because the 1880 census covers millions of people.
Now take a book. You used a county history by John Smith, published in London by Acme in 1990, called Family Roots. Enter the author, title, place, publisher and year, and the generator formats them in order. The habit that matters is entering the detail at the moment you find the source, not later. Details found later are often details misremembered, and a citation written from memory is barely better than no citation at all.
What makes a good citation
A good citation answers three questions: what is the source, where is it, and which part did you use? “The 1880 census” answers only the first. “Ohio, 1880 census, roll 123” answers all three. For a book, the page number is the third answer. For a website, the address and access date are the third answer, because the page may move or change. For a parish register, the parish, the year and the entry are the third answer. Always include the specific part, or the citation is a pointer to a haystack, not to a needle.
Good citations also record the source as it actually is, not as you wish it were. If the census age looks wrong, cite it as written and note the problem separately. If a name is spelled two ways in two records, cite both spellings. Cleaning up a source in the citation destroys the evidence that would let someone else judge it. Your job in a citation is to report, not to fix.
Common mistakes to avoid
The most common mistake is citing a website that cites a record, instead of the record itself. If a genealogy site shows a census image, cite the census, and note the site as where you viewed it. The second mistake is citing a family tree as a source for its own claims: a tree is not evidence, it is someone else’s conclusion. The third mistake is the vague citation, such as “ancestry.com” with no record named. A vague citation feels like research but checks like nothing.
Another mistake is citing only the sources that agree with you. When a record contradicts your tree, cite it too, and note the clash. Contradictions are where research advances: a second marriage, a name change, or a wrong assumption usually hides behind a clash. A researcher who cites only friendly sources builds a tree that looks solid and falls over at the first serious check.
Building the habit
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