Snyder Community
Hale County, Texas
Research
Citations and Sources
Many of the pages on this web site have footnotes, sometimes a lot of them. By identifying the sources of data I've published here, I hope to enable other researchers to locate and read them, when possible.
The footnote and bibliography formats are based on my interpretation of Elizabeth Shown Mills' styles. These vary somewhat from other well-known standard styles such as The Chicago Manual of Style, Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers, and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. For example, when citing periodicals, I give the volume and date, rather than the volume and issue. Mills recommends this "because typographic errors occur more often with numbers than words." 1 Mills also has a laminated ready-reference pamphlet to keep beside the computer, offering suggestions for standardizing citation of online sources. 2 I have tried to write my footnotes and bibliography according to Mills' basic principles and examples.
Mills encourages the use of the terms original material and derivative material to analyze evidence, rather than the more traditional categories primary evidence and secondary evidence.3 When a person records information about events he has personally witnessed or experienced, he creates an original document. For example, when Gladys Rastetter Mason wrote her own memories of growing up in the Snyder Community, she produced original material which I have used on this web site. However, when she wrote articles about other Snyder Community families, based on her interviews and correspondence with members of those families, the resulting documents were derivative materials. These are still valuable sources for research related to the Snyder Community, but such derivative material must be evaluated based on its form, "the circumstances of its creation, and the skill and reliability of its creator."4
Many of the documents commonly used in family history research are derivative materials. Mills discusses duplicates, transcripts, edited transcripts, abstracts, extracts, compendiums, histories, genealogies, expository essays, and traditions.5 These important "official" sources can contain variant dates, spellings, or locations. For example, in the marriage records at the Hale County Court House, my Grandpa Orville A. Snyder's marriage record spells his name both "Sander" and "Sanders." In the same record, the officiating minister's name (Kreider) is also spelled two different ways, but at least one of them is correct. Readers of these web pages are encouraged to weigh evidence in light of sources and establish a personal level of confidence in the data. In other words, don't just take my word for it! On the other hand, be willing to re-examine long-held beliefs in light of new evidence.
Sometimes I refer to traditions and oral histories: "Family stories say that..." These snippets of family lore may or may not be verifiable, but because they have been passed down through the generations, I believe they contribute to our understanding of the people and events remembered. They may also provide leads for research.
Footnotes
1. Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian (Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1997; 16th print., 2006), 64.
2. Elizabeth Shown Mills, QuickSheet: Citing Online Historical Resources, Evidence! Style (Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Company, First Revised Edition 2007).
3. Mills, Evidence! Citation & Analysis, 48-49.
4. Mills, Evidence! Citation & Analysis, 49.
5. Mills, Evidence! Citation & Analysis, 49-51.
copyright ©
2006, 2007, 2008 Bonnie Snyder Smith
