Sourcing Made Easy

I hear so many people say, “I would put in sources but it takes to long”. Here are a few tricks I use to make it easy.

My first choice would be Notepad found in your Accessories section in your Start/Programs menu. It is small, can be resized & moved around in front of your browser or other programs.

Coping a section of a website: All you do is copy/paste into notepad the URL, title of the page, then copy/paste the section of the page you want. The Title & URL is your source & the text you put in your Source or Detail/Citation text area.
Example:
mydomain.com/genealogy
John Doe’s Genealogy
John Doe came to this county in 1904…

Document Images: Just move Notepad to where you read what you want so you can read the image & type in Notepad at the same time. Type where it came from, page number or any pertinent info, and then start typing what you want. The Title & URL is your source & the text you put in your Source or Detail/Citation text area. A census will usually take me just a few minutes, but I think my ancestors are worth the extra time.
Example:
1860 census Iowa, Warren, Liberty Twp, p878 sheet 214, enumerated 24 July 1860
Benj Byerly, 53, Minister "German Baptist", VA
Delilah ", 43, VA
William H ", 21, TN, Teacher com s (probably teacher in common school)
Sarah C ", 17, TN, school within the year
Susan E ", 15, TN, school within the year
John A ", 12, TN, school within the year
Mayt(?) J ", 10, OH, school within the year
Martha E ", 7, OH, school within the year
Samuel M ", 4, OH

Most genealogy programs have a copy/paste option when entering sources. So you can copy 1 source & paste it onto everyone that appears on that document. Looking at the above census, you can make 1 source & paste it on 9 people.

Second choice if you want formatted text, use “Split Screen”. This is by loading your Browser or Image Viewer & Word Processor at the same time, click the program you want on top, then you “Right Click” your “Tool Bar” & chose “Tile Windows Horizontally”. Low Resolution monitors might give you some problems so give it a try. One disadvantage of Tiling is it will Tile every program you are running. An option to Tiling is using a program called “Transcript” http://home.wanadoo.nl/jgboerema/en/Freeware.htm it is free for private non-commercial use, but it only supports JPG, JPEG, BMP & GIF images.

One good thing that comes from keeping sources, if you learn more about your family possibly that page has more info that you missed and you can go back to that website or document & see if there is more there.

Note: Just remember to take into account copywrites, when publishing to the web or other printed material. Stuff in the public domain is safe to reproduce.