Elizabeth Shown MillsRecensioni

The definitive book for sourcing all and any kind of information found regarding genealogy. I love this book! It's indispensable. I wish I had purchased this book back in 2007 when it was originally published. I have the 3rd printing, 2015 edition.

The definitive reference book for genealogical citations. This is a must have writing manual for students, researchers and writers of family history.

This is a must read book for anyone doing serious genealogy. It addresses both methodology and the business aspects of professional genealogy.

Elizabeth Shown Mills and her granddaughter Ruthie teamed up to provide genealogists everywhere with a book of quotations pertinent to the field. The quotes are attributed not only to genealogists, but also to authors, entertainers, historians, and other persons, even fictitious characters, such as "Frasier Crane." The book will be an asset for genealogists and genealogical speakers for years to come. While the quotation categories are too numerous to include, the quotes are wide-ranging--from accuracy to writing--including such categories as document analysis, family trees, genetic genealogy, maps & mapping, plagiarism, and standards. Some quotes were included more than once under different relevant topics. Each attributable quotation is cited in the endnotes. An index of persons quoted is included. Keywords to locate relevant quotation sections are also provided. It fills a void in genealogical reference. Its creation by a granddaughter-grandmother team, particularly when the grandmother is one of the world's most respected genealogists, is a bonus for genealogists.

Excellent resource on the earliest records of Natchitoches. The translated Catholic registers chronicle the lives of the residents in a detailed and carefully explained manner. Not only does this book transcribe the critical data of births, marriages and deaths, but it also points out the problems of records sometimes recorded by the French priests, and sometimes by the Spanish priest.

This book is a style guide/handbook for citation and analysis for a genealogist. The first part focuses outlines the basics of each, while the second part shows examples of formatting your citations.

Unfortunately, I didn't find this as useful as I'd hoped. The citation suggestions are primarily for a family historian or a genealogist hoping to publish their work. Though she gives some examples of citations on a family group sheet or an ancestral chart, much less time is spent discussing how to analyze records. As a beginner just starting to look into my genealogy and not currently planning publication, I need a little more hand-holding than this provided. Others have mentioned the lack of online citation examples - the book was published in 1997 before there were clear standards for online citations, but as I have done primarily online searches, I would find it much more useful to have those clearly explained as well. I will definitely be able to use her examples of cited family group sheets, but I will continue my search for an introduction to analysis of records.

Very concise and well explained. A quick guide to citations without looking at the big book.. I use this frequently. With the lamination it will last a lifetime.

A must-have staple for reference material when writing.

The real draw of this book to me is is it explained Primary documentation quite well in under one chapter. SO many of our researchers can't wrap their mind around that basic and important concept to the point that I've had important figures in the community try and use second hand trivial newspaper stories told 80 years after the fact as Primary research!

This book seems to be a first-rate handbook about evaluating and citing evidence, intended for historians and genealogists. I am neither, but my mother did some genealogical research and my education was mostly in the sciences, so I appreciate the difficulty and importance of questions of evidence.

The Foreword begins with the statement "All sources lie" by 'Lawrence of Arabia'. Fascinating to see the intellectual kinship between T. E. Lawrence and Dr. Gregory House. The first chapter is a concise, lucid exposition of epistemology applied to historical evidence. Points to the author for including references to two books by Joe Nickell about photographic evidence and detecting fraud.

The rest of the book is an extensive discussion of types of evidence, such as artifacts, government and church records, and various publications. To show how complete it is, one can learn here how to cite Frakturs and samplers.

One thing I learned from this book was the word 'presentism': interpreting the past through current ideology or opinions. The example given is that the phrase 'free people of color' did not mean just African Americans: it included Native Americans and other ethnic groups. Another thing I learned was how content analysis can help detect fraud: forgers often include extra detail to make their documents plausible, and this extra information can be tested for accuracy (p. 32). Finally, I learned that there is such a thing as negative evidence: some states will issue a Certificate of Failure to Find if a search for a death certificate does not reveal one (p. 463-4).

The astute reader will see a problem with the book: it discusses how to cite online data such as web pages, blogs, etc. Since the book dates back to 2007, it is already being overtaken by technology. For example, a future edition will probably mention Facebook and YouTube explicitly, as well as photos taken with cell phones. In other words, to be most useful, this book should be available online, with updates more than once a year. I don't see a reference to an online version mentioned in the book itself.

Otherwise, the book is quite complete. The only other thing that I did not find therein was a discussion of how to cite cuneiform tablets.½

A very useful book for researchers. The author provides an exhaustive list of resources (online and off) for verifying data. Aimed at historical research.

If you only get one reference book about how to record family history, this is it. It's concise and handy as a constant reference.

I joined Library Thing because this book is not classified in LOC with genealogy as subject. Published by Baltimore's Genealogical Publishing Co. and written be well-known genealogy author I felt I needed a place to come and properly Catalog this item. Historians and other researchers will most certainly benefit from this reference resource but genealogists certainly can't live without it!

The first substantive page of this book begins as follows:

"As history researchers, we do not speculate. We test. We critically observe and carefully record. Then we weigh the accumulated evidence, analyzing the individual parts as well as the whole, without favoring any theory."

This high-minded description is reminiscent of the neat-and-tidy descriptions of the Scientific Method that appear in the opening chapters of high school science textbooks. Its relationship to the way professional historians actually work is, based on my quarter-century in the business, akin to the relationship between textbook descriptions of scientific method and the work habits of real scientists. In a word: tangential. Most working historians begin with a question, a problem, or a speculation and then gather data that seem likely to shed light on it.

Evidence Explained is a reference manual for people interested in swimming in a sea of historical data. Serious genealogists (the audience at which it seems, implicitly, to be aimed) will find it valuable, as will serious amateur historians compiling the histories of towns, counties, and local institutions or organizations. The opening chapters provide a useful synopsis of basic historical-research concepts (the short of thing you'd get in a methods course as a senior history major or first-year graduate student). The subsequent chapters give detailed, comprehensive guides (with multiple models) to how to cite just about any type of historical source you can possibly imagine.

These guides-to-citation chapters are strongest where they deal with the ins and outs of birth and death records, military records, church records, and other materials that are bread-and-butter to genealogists. This kind of information is simply not available in most general-purpose academic style guides (like the MLA Manual of Style or Chicago Manual of Style), and readers who use it regularly will find this book invaluable. Undergraduate or graduate history students or professional historians will--unless they do extensive work in vital records--have little reason to embrace this book. The MLA or Chicago manuals (as well as software like Endnote or the superb, free Zotero) handle 99% of archival and common non-archival sources economically and clearly, and Barzun & Graff's The Modern Researcher is a better primer on research methods.

As a professional copyeditor, I've found that no matter how comprehensive the Chicago Manual of Style is, there's always a reference that *isn't quite* represented, especially when it comes to historical and governmental sources. I think that this book will come in handy on those occasions, because it is quite exhaustive.

As I said to my husband when I first received it, "I will only need this book once or twice a year, but then I'll *really* need it!"

I would definitely recommend this book for serious historical or geneological researchers. I wouldn't recommend it for most writers, unless you hate having to extrapolate from Chicago style.

I'm glad to have this book on my shelf.

Evidence explained is a comprehensive resource for anyone who is into serious historical research (I would not recommend this for an undergrad doing his/her first major term paper, for example). Not only is there information about how to cite a given source, whether it comes from the Internet, a government archive, or library microfiche, but a nice summary of approach to sources and descriptions of the different types of sources and how to treat them is included. If you're just interested in a quick formatting guide, it has a set of summary pages that show you that at-a-glance as well. The only problem with this book, is that it's a big, heavy, expensive hardcover tome--and would be a lot more useful in an electronic, searchable format, yet I didn't see so much as a companion website for it! And I really don't want to lug this thing around the world to different archives as I do research. So in the end, I think this is one of these books that is useful in theory but not in practice--until this is all available in one place on the net (which I'm sure it will be soon) I would just get it from the library and photocopy the pertinent information to save on the back strain.

I requested this book as an early reviewer because I'm always looking for books to assign undergraduates so they'll understand not only how to cite properly, but why it matters. Alas, this book isn't it. At $50 and ~400 pages, it doesn't serve the purposes I'd hoped it would.

Instead, it gives Chicago-style citations for a wide range of primary sources, especially ones of interest to genealogists. It's fine for what it does--it explains what's going on, it gives good examples, and it's very thorough--but I don't know why if you're going to spend this sort of money you wouldn't just get the Chicago Manual or Turabian. The beauty of the Chicago style is that you can follow its rules for any source as soon as you grasp the basic structure. This book would be a good choice for people afraid of making a mistake or who need more guidance than the Chicago Manual gives.

Based on the Chicago (Humantites) citation style, this tells you how to properly cite everything and anything you could think of

An excellent book. Comprehensive guide to citing sources - examples include vital records and other non-US sources.
Could be a bit overwhelming for someone new to citation, given the abundance of information, but the grey pages with quick summaries are a good guide to the basics.

This is a must have desk reference for the serious historical researcher (this includes genealogists). The book is filled with examples. The introductory chapters should be read regularly to reinforce the concepts.

Another "Must Have" for any genealogist or Family Historian, especially one who uses internet sources to document their research.½

Excellent Quick Reference Sheet

Exellent book with guidelines for source documentation, tips and rules.

Chock-full of examples, but, like all style guides, a lack of internet citations (though Ms. Mills, a well-known genealogist gives it a bold stab). Good section on why you should cite.

I ordered this book online as I wanted to upgrade my standards for genealogical research. If I'd seen it in a bookstore I probably wouldn't have picked it up, as the hardcover version is $17, which only includes about 60 pages of actual text, the rest of the rather small book being filled with examples of citations and appendices. As it was published in 1997, it also isn't very up-to-date in discussing referencing online sources - which topic, granted, is almost too young to be covered at all.½