Family Historian User Group

Please forgive what may be a naive question butis there an agreed convention for referring to sources e.g. birth registers?

ID:1152

No there isn't an agreed convention as far as I know. This has been discussed many times in the past on the family historian mailing list and there appear to be two main ways of doing this.

Either assume that each certificate is a source or assume that the source is something like 'GRO Birth Certificate' with the citation referring to the GRO reference number.

There is a similar argument with census records where some people use a source to record one census entry for a household, whereas some others use a single source for each census, e.g. 'English Census 1841'.

My personal opinion is that having a single source for each certificate or census entry is the best option if you want to transcribe the contents of the certificate or census entry, whereas the other method is perhaps better if all you want to do is record the reference number.

For certificates and other sources that refer to just one person (or two in the case of a marriage certificate) I have one source per document

e.g. Birth Certificate, Fred Bloggs, 1492

For censuses (censii???) I have one source per parish

e.g 1871 Census Return, Morden

I then use the 'where within source' to record the piece, folio, and page number.

It works for me, but YMMV [wink]
Hope this helps
Graham

I was afraid there wouldn't be a simple answer. Thanks for the tips.