Referencing genealogical material can be more than a little problematic since the reference point can be anything from an official government record to a conversation you had with your great-aunt Sally. Additionally, when one begins to pass information along (as we are doing here) the point of reference is the person sending the material and many times not the original source.

How to Reference

We believe that the use of PDF files for much of our work will help this process tremendously. In a PDF file one can add additional paragraphs or pages to site references without dramatically increasing the information being stored and then viewed. PDFs also have the added advantage of keeping things together in a nice neat package where they can be stored for future reference.

We are further trying to improve the reference issues by asking that you follow the rules we have established for photographs which will hopefully address the problem with files outside of the PDF format.

What to Reference

The simple answer to this issue is "everything." There is nothing more frustrating than to find a critical fact you have been searching for to discover that no one has a clue where the item originated. If nothing else you can reference the source of the information to you so that we can create a chain of knowledge that owuld hopefully lead back to the original person who reported the fact.