Ancestry.com Source Citations for VI Census

One of the most troublesome aspects of genealogy, and a cause for much discussion, is formatting source citations for all those records. This is perhaps one of the most frustrating and intimidating aspects of genealogy for beginners and intermediate level genealogists, so many people give up and just use whatever websites like Ancestry.com suggest.  Unfortunately, this really doesn’t work very well for the St Croix census on Ancestry.  Since I’d like to do my genealogy right, I have been spending considerable time to try to figure out what’s the best, and most useful, way to format my citations in my database. 

Where My People Went–The 1880 St Thomas Census

A couple of weeks ago I posted that the 1880 census of St Thomas and St John was available online from the Danish Archives (http://200inparadise.blogspot.com/2013/02/new-online-records-st-croix-and-st.html).  I mentioned that the census was not indexed so it requires a page-by-page read.  Quite an undertaking. This weekend I finally got around to going through the set.  While I had a particular family I was looking for, I also managed to answer a number of genealogical questions regarding families that disappeared from St Croix.  It seems many of them moved to St Thomas and were enumerated there.

Tracing Your Sources

Trace your Sources?  I’ve heard about tracing your ancestors, but how do you trace “sources”? 

While researching my family I worked with many sources of information.  Sometimes, the sources are freely available, other times they can be quite tough to find.  In addition to primary original sources, such as certificates and registers, there are loads of secondary sources as well as derivatives and transcriptions.  A good researcher makes use of all of them in their research, giving each source the credibility it deserves.  It also allows careful researchers to verify your research for themselves.  Sometimes, derivative sources point to primary sources but other times they simply point to more derivatives.  Then you need to trace them back, step by step.  I had to do this recently myself.