RLP 200: Genealogy Source Citations Simplified with Lisa Stokes

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 200 genealogy source citation simplified with Lisa Stokes. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (42s):
Hello everybody. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (45s):
Hi, Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole (47s):
I’m good. Hi mom. How are you doing?

Diana (50s):
I’m doing well.

Nicole (51s):
And what have you been doing lately?

Diana (53s):
I been working on my NTS presentations, so NGS stands for national genealogical society and they’re conferences coming up soon and I’m giving three classes. So I’ve been working on PowerPoint presentations, getting those just how I want them. So one of them will be fun. I am talking about my rice and project and using white DNA to prove this line that I had pretty much proven with a paper trail, but right in the middle of this line, it goes all the way from California in the 19 hundreds, back to Virginia, early 16 hundreds, right in the middle of this line is a bunch of indirect evidence.

Diana (1m 34s):
And I felt fairly certain actually really certain about it. That it’s always really nice when you have white DNA to say, yep, that is the right line. And so anyway, trying to figure out exactly what I want to share for my case study and, you know, just get that into a really logical format is what I’ve been working on.

Nicole (1m 56s):
Yeah. I have enjoyed reviewing your slides and seeing what you’ve been working on. And I finished my slides for NGS about air table as well. So I’m looking forward to being there at the conference and just a couple additional announcements are that we have our false Teddy group beginning in September, which is going to be researched like a pro, which focuses just on documentary evidence and registration will begin around June and we’ll get some exact dates for that posted soon. And if you’d like to be a peer group leader for that study group, please apply on our website. We’d love to have you and to get notice of coupons, join our newsletter. And sometimes we have deals on our online courses.

Diana (2m 38s):
Wow. I can’t believe the false study group is coming up. I can’t even think about that yet. I’m still enjoying spring, but it is good to plan ahead and think of what educational opportunities you want and get your schedule set up so that you can focus in on whatever you’re doing. We’re excited to work with many of you in that study group. Well, today we have a fun guest have our friend and colleague Lisa Stokes here to talk about citations. Hi Lisa.

Lisa Stokes (3m 6s):
Hi. How are you?

Diana (3m 7s):
Very good. So let me give a little background on Lisa. Lisa is also an accredited genealogist and I actually met her at the Brigham young university track on accreditation during a conference in 2015. And we were both getting started on our journey. She was accrediting and mid south and I was doing Gulf south. And so for the next two to three years, we did a lot of talking about what we were doing and asking questions back and forth. You know, it’s just great to have a buddy who’s also accrediting. And we would have gotten in touch more in person except for Elisa was actually living in Dubai and I was in Utah.

Diana (3m 52s):
So we had to rely on technology. So Lisa also serves with me on the commission for ICAP den and I kept in is the international commission for the accreditation of professional genealogists. So that is our accreditation body. And I work on the presentation committee and she leads the education committee. So Lisa went through the very beginning of the, I kept on steady groups. She and I both did some of the very beginning ones and she is an educator and she had some ideas about how to really improve that. And so she took that on and now runs the ICAP gen study groups, which is a wonderful program for mentoring, anyone who wants to learn about accreditation.

Diana (4m 36s):
She also works with me on the presentation committee because those two things kind of go in hand in hand, she’s done a lot of videos that are on the YouTube channel for ICAP 10. Lisa has a bachelor of science and education from Brigham young university. And as you can tell, she loves to teach lecture and coach others and overcoming research challenges. We’re excited to talk to her today about her new citation course, which has been, as everybody knows a bugaboo and everybody’s research life trying to figure out how to do citations. So we’re excited to talk to Lisa about that. She also has presented at roots tech and the BYU conference on family history and genealogy.

Diana (5m 20s):
The slick day at the family history library. That’s a special night during salt lake Institute. We have accredited genealogists teach classes at the family history library. And currently Lisa has a really fun job. She is using DNA skills as an independent contractor solving criminal cases for law enforcement using investigative genetic genealogy. So that’s neat. In the past, she worked as a research fellow at BYU in conjunction with the defense pow Mia accounting agency. That’s an ongoing program. They are at BYU and they are helping the U S army locate family members of missing soldiers from past conflicts.

Diana (6m 1s):
So, wow, you can totally say has a really strong background in so many things she loves to learn and has taken courses at all the major institutes, the salt lake Institute, the genealogical research Institute of Pittsburgh. She said the pro gen program and the research cycle protean a steady group. That was a long introduction. Lisa, do you have any feedback on that introduction?

Lisa Stokes (6m 27s):
Well, thank you. That was great. I’m just glad to be here today.

Diana (6m 31s):
We’re glad to have you.

Lisa Stokes (6m 32s):
So I do love citations and I am excited to talk about citations. Believe it or not. I think they’re fun.

Diana (6m 39s):
Well, I remember when we were both teaching at roots tech about accreditation and you saying that it took you like a long time to do your first citation.

Nicole (6m 49s):
Me too. It took me a long time as well as sometimes it feels like you’re just sitting there staring at evidence, explain like, okay, what do I do with this? Lisa, tell us more about your progression and learning to write citations.

Lisa Stokes (7m 1s):
Well, I I’ve come a long way since I first started when I was first learning how to write citations. And I found out that I had to write professional and consistent citations in order to accredit, I was pretty overwhelmed. I was confused and I thought I have no idea what I’m doing here. As Diana mentioned, we were living overseas and I had the Kindle version of evidence explained given to me by my dear hubby. And that is written by Elizabeth Shown Mills. And she’s done a fantastic job. And so I thought to myself, perfect, here we go. All of my citation problems are solved, but I realized right away that I still had so much to learn.

Lisa Stokes (7m 46s):
And so like the first citation took me an hour and a half and I struggled through the entire thing. I thought my brain was gonna explode. And then the second citation wasn’t much quicker. And I thought really is this really expected of me anyway? Yeah, we can feel really overwhelmed as beginners.

Diana (8m 4s):
Well, I know that when I was starting work on accreditation, I felt the same way and I gradually, you know, got a handle on it, but I couldn’t tell you how I did. It was really just the struggle. Wasn’t it? You know, just studying evidence explained and looking at your source and then trying to put something down that made sense. I remember, well, those feelings

Nicole (8m 27s):
Agreed. And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to do difficult citations with like records that were a little different than the typical template for a census or something, or a vital record. Like when I came across records on fold three, those ones were always challenging for me. Like trying to figure out, you know, what national archives record group of my looking at really trying to understand the source. Sometimes it’s hard when you don’t know that much about it. So then if you don’t understand, it’s harder to write a citation about it. So that was one thing that I think was a steep learning curve at the beginning. So we said you must feel better about citations if you’re going to be teaching a citation course.

Lisa Stokes (9m 7s):
Yeah. Actually, sometimes I think that I could be called a citation nerd because I actually do love writing citations. Now. It never stresses me out anymore. And I find it fun and easy and I’ve cemented the habit of creating the citation. The first time I encounter it. And sometimes we have the tendency to say, oh, I’ll do it later. Sometimes that works. And you, you can recapture the information you need, but more often that requires that you revisit the source and this just wastes a ton of time. So I feel like I’ve come a long way and I don’t feel confused and I don’t feel overwhelmed anymore when it’s time to write a citation, I just jump in and, and do it.

Nicole (9m 54s):
It’s a really good point. You know, that we should not go back to the source leader to recreate it, unless we’re fine with wasting a lot of time because it does take time. You have to remember everything you already learned the first time you looked at the source.

Lisa Stokes (10m 7s):
Exactly.

Diana (10m 8s):
Yeah, I agree. I’m so annoyed at my phone. If I ever don’t create the citation that I’m right in the middle of writing the report and just want to copy and paste it and it’s not there. So that doesn’t usually happen for me with records, but sometimes it happens with reference material. You know, if I’ve looked at a website and been setting up on the history and I haven’t created a full citation, I just have a link that can be fine, but then I have to go back and look at it, create the citation, thought I 100% agree. All right, Lisa, let’s talk about what made the difference for you. How did you go from being overwhelmed and frustrated to confident and feeling like citations are fun?

Lisa Stokes (10m 48s):
So three major things were really made a big difference for me. First of all, was using templates. So I have a master template that I use to create all my record type templates so that my citations stay consistent. The second thing that made a big difference for me is learning about punctuation. And I learned about that by delving into chapter five of mastering genealogical documentation by Tom Jones. Then the third thing that made a big difference for me was I changed my master template into two distinct sections. So Paul Graham, he’s an AIG who wrote an article called cite anything in the APG, which is the association of professional genealogists.

Lisa Stokes (11m 35s):
And it was in the September, 2020 issue. And he encouraged two sections in your citation. The first section is to cover the source and the information that’s contained in the source. And the second section is to cover how you access that source. So the beauty of this is that when a shortened, subsequent citation is needed, that means that you’ve already used it in your report. And you’re going to use it again and you’d like to shorten it. It’s super easy to shorten it because you simply just omit the access section have either one of you read that article by Paul.

Diana (12m 11s):
Yeah, I do remember when that came out. I thought it was really interesting. So Paul is also a CG he’s one of the few, the NCD, so accredited technologists and certified genealogist. And he also works for ancestry genealogists. So, you know, he’s a professional genealogist writing citations all day long and came up with the structure to simplify and make it easier. I thought it was really interesting. And I’m, I’m interested to talk more about it,

Lisa Stokes (12m 41s):
Major light bulb moment for me.

Nicole (12m 43s):
Well, let’s talk more about these three major concepts. So tell us more about citation templates.

Lisa Stokes (12m 49s):
So when I first started, I consulted books and other researchers templates, and I started building my own template bank. So I had taken the NGS citation course. So I had some citations from there. I had found templates online that people had posted, and I also looked to evidence explained, and a good portion of my templates came from delving into evidence, explained by Elizabeth shown mills and following her guidelines on that. She has some amazing stuff in that book. And then also mastering genealogical documentation by Tom Jones was another one that I delved into a lot.

Lisa Stokes (13m 31s):
So I had a pretty good mosaic of different citation styles going on. And when I realized that I really wasn’t being as consistent as I possibly could be, I decided it was time to make all my citations consistent. And this was especially important for accreditation. One of the requirements that I kept Jen has is that your citations are consistent. They don’t specify that you have to follow a certain style or that you have to do it a certain way. They allow freedom to be able to use any citation style that works with the region that you’re researching in. I decided to make that one master citation template.

Lisa Stokes (14m 13s):
And then I used that to create all my record type citation templates. And my citations were much more consistent at this point and I felt much better about them. And I passed my accreditation. So

Nicole (14m 28s):
Consistency is really important with certification too, as you were talking about that. And I was thinking about my portfolio and how, you know, when I work on my work samples for that, I’m really cognizant of trying to be consistent in my citations. And one thing that helps me with that is just putting them next to each other in my air table log and comparing them and making sure that I’m doing them the way and kind of taking note of like, okay, I’m going to use this style kind of like a style guide and just keeping notes, like you said of I’m going to do it this way to remind myself because just the way that it is, I don’t work on it everyday all day for like three months, I am working on it one day and then take a break for a few days.

Nicole (15m 9s):
And so it’s helpful to remind myself of what I’m going to do, my plan for consistency.

Lisa Stokes (15m 15s):
Yeah. I like your idea of comparing them in your air table. I’ve done that too on XL where I just made the cell really long and was able to compare all the citations in and get them all consistent.

Diana (15m 27s):
Yeah. I think consistency is one of the things that really bothers me when I’m doing review of other reports, because I do look at the citations and if I see a census cited one way and then a different way, it bothers me. I think it makes your work more readable and understandable. If someone is reading a report and they get used to how you’re doing the citations. So there’s really a real purpose for consistency. And I love the idea of a template. You know, I don’t research unless I have my template open minds and Google sheets right now, some day I’ve thought maybe I should move it to air table, but maybe I’ll do that in the future right now.

Diana (16m 7s):
It’s still in Google sheets, but I love it. It makes it so much easier to create a citation. Just having something you’ve already done to copy. And somebody mentioned either you or Nicole, that sometimes you come to a really difficult one. Like I think it was the full three and I agree full three difficult. And sometimes you don’t have a template for something, but you can find something similar and say, oh, okay. I, I think this is a format that would work for this new source. And then of course you always want to add your new source to your template. Right. And keep building it.

Lisa Stokes (16m 40s):
Exactly.

Diana (16m 41s):
Okay. So your second concept was learning about punctuation. Tell us your take on punctuation.

Lisa Stokes (16m 48s):
Believe it or not. All of those Tallix parentheses quotation marks. And semi-colons actually means something you don’t just use them haphazardly. And as an I kept in study group leader and mentor, I saw a lot of very uses of punctuation. And in order to be able to give somebody proper feedback, I had to understand that punctuation myself and make sure that I wasn’t just following somebody’s template, but that I understood it. So I delved into chapter five of Tom Jones, mastering genealogical documentation. My chapter five is full of notes and markings, and I really spend a lot of time making sure he understood and that I was able to take all those different punctuation conventions and be able to make a valid comments on those.

Lisa Stokes (17m 40s):
I also purchased the Chicago manual of style so that I could look up items. There, there are some basic punctuation rules they’re not complicated. And so I thought maybe we could go over those for a minute. The first one is that we work with the reference note format as genealogists while we’re doing citations. So a reference note is going to be like a sentence. It starts with a capital and ends with a period. And all of the elements in between are separated by commas and semi-colons. So that’s just the first thing to keep in mind. Some styles do use periods throughout, but in general, most people follow that rule and a Tallix denote, a published source.

Lisa Stokes (18m 29s):
So we usually consider a website, a book journals, things like that to be published sources. So those are usually italicized and then quotation marks to note the parts of a published work. So let’s say you have a chapter in a book or a database at a website or an article in a journal. Those would all be put into quotation marks. Examples of parts of a website could also be files on a website page on a website or a collection or a record group of some sort on a website. You would probably use quotation marks for that quotation marks are also used for the title of an unpublished material.

Lisa Stokes (19m 16s):
So published or italicized on published would be in quotation marks. And let’s just say that that work didn’t have a title. Then you would just use your own words to describe that work. And you would not use quotation marks in that case. And then sometimes you do need to use an exact quote in your citation. And so that’s when you would use quotation marks also then parentheses surround a word or grouping of words that refer to the previous statement or word. So for example, we often put the URL and the access date inside parentheses, then right before that, you’ll see the website that you’re referring to.

Lisa Stokes (19m 59s):
And so that means that everything in the parentheses is referring to that website and the standard is to not put a comma between those two items. And then we have commas and colons and semi-colons so a comma separates items in a series and a colon announces the words or the list that follows. So you’ll see that with the access state, in a URL, things like that, a semi-colon group’s words are related sections and separates them from the rest of the citation. So often we’ll have a layered citation. And so we separate these sections of a citation with a semi-colon.

Diana (20m 43s):
One of the things that I see a lot is that comma in between like ancestry naming the website and then the print, the season, the URL, you know, putting that comment there. So I’m glad to clarify no commas needed because that part in parentheses is just clarifying the location information for the website, or if it’s a book, you know, it’s the publication information for the book. So isn’t it funny how these little things can make a difference? And I love how you talked about how they shouldn’t be used haphazardly and they actually mean something. I think that’s a great, that’s a great point.

Lisa Stokes (21m 18s):
Yeah. The most common thing that I see is people putting quotations around all sorts of different things in their citations. So yeah,

Diana (21m 28s):
Yeah. Confusing when to use the Tallix and when to use quotations. Yeah. It’s great. When you finally get it down because it gets easier and easier and then it really helps you understand the citation when you’re reading it when it’s punctuated correctly.

Nicole (21m 42s):
For sure. And it helps to understand the punctuation in order to write it correctly. It’s one thing to notice like that something maybe has done differently or maybe incorrectly, but it’s another thing to like give feedback and say why it should be different. You know, like this looks funny to be, you should change it. Isn’t as good of a comment as according to Chicago manual style, 17.2 0.1, this is how it’s done with humanities style citations. So it’s been a wonderful help to have Chicago manual style. And often there’ll be little things in citations that are included there that aren’t in evidence explained, or it just helps to kind of see the broader picture sometimes.

Nicole (22m 23s):
So

Lisa Stokes (22m 23s):
I agree.

Nicole (22m 25s):
Well, great. So that was punctuation really good. Now your last concept was about splitting your citation into two parts. So tell us more about that and Paul Graham’s article and how it helped you.

Lisa Stokes (22m 38s):
So he suggests the two sections, the one covers the information contained in the source and the second section covers how to access the source. So the beauty of this structure is that when the short and subsequent citations needed, then you just omit that last section. And I really liked this concept. It was just such a light bulb moment for me, it’s simplified my citation style and it took away all the confusion for me because so often I would look up in different resources where I was supposed to put that information that was contained in the source.

Lisa Stokes (23m 18s):
Like, let’s say it’s a marriage record and I have the marriage date and the two parties that were married in some citation that you see it’s before the website information and in some it’s after. And so that was so confusing to me. For some reason, I just got really frustrated with that. So now with my new style that I’ve been doing for the past couple of years, everything is just right there in front of all the access. And it was also confused by the image numbers. I always wanted to put the image numbers up where I stated more about the source when in actuality, that’s how I accessed it. So now I put the image numbers at the end, in that last section, because that’s more of an access information.

Lisa Stokes (24m 4s):
That’s just been really helpful for me. One thing that’s great is that if you need an extra layer, you just add that semi-colon behind the access information and then you can give more detailed, citing information as it’s needed. And that also can be cut off when it’s time to shorten that citation. And so that was another great concept for me to, to understand and, and to stop being confused about,

Nicole (24m 31s):
I love that concept. It does simplify it and adding another layer if you looked at the digitized image, but you also want to reference the fact that it’s a microfilm at the family history library. Yeah, you’re right. It’s not hard to add another semicolon and to include that information.

Diana (24m 48s):
Yeah. That’s a great way to put it. I think sometimes we just need a structure and it sounded like this was the perfect structure for you to organize every citation according to this. So that’s great. And we’ll link to that article in our show notes and also to the blog posts that you have on family locket about this, for anyone listening in, who likes to read and study a little bit more after listening to the podcast. So that brings us to your course. So you mentioned that you’re working on a citation course. And let me do, to say, to do that.

Lisa Stokes (25m 22s):
Well, last year in 2021, I had several of my accreditation clients ask me to create a citation course. So I did, I finally just dug in and said, okay, I’m going to do this. And it turned out that I had so much fun developing the course and teaching the course and probably one of the most rewarding things for me was watching the participants learn and feel confident and be able to write their citations without being confused and overwhelmed. It was a great experience for me. So I took their enthusiasm and their excitement, and I let that inspire me and give me the confidence to go ahead and launch a course this year.

Lisa Stokes (26m 6s):
So I have decided to get going on that.

Diana (26m 11s):
That’s so great. I know we did the same thing with research like a pro. We tested it on the small group cause we had no idea that would work for other people. And I mean, I knew having a process worked for me and it was so fun to see people actually get it. So I completely understand where you’re coming from. And we have actually had people wish that there was more on citations because we do the one module on citations, but this is going to be an entire course, which I think it sounds fabulous.

Lisa Stokes (26m 43s):
Yeah. I’m super excited.

Nicole (26m 45s):
So what is the course going to be called

Lisa Stokes (26m 47s):
Called genealogy source citation simplified. I hear from people all the time through the study group, my accreditation clients, for other people that I’ve worked with, how confused and frustrated and overwhelmed that they feel as they’re trying to learn citations. And so I want to share that knowledge and I feel like that title helps them understand that this does not have to be super confusing. You can simplify it and you can learn to all the basic rules that you need to know in order to write an effective citation.

Nicole (27m 23s):
That’s a great name and great goals. And I think there’s so many people that would want to take the course.

Lisa Stokes (27m 28s):
I hope so.

Diana (27m 30s):
so what are the concepts you’re going to teach besides using the templates?

Lisa Stokes (27m 36s):
We are going to start with the why of citations, of course. And why is it so important to write clear, consistent and professional source citations for all of your genealogy research projects, even those people who aren’t professional, if they don’t feel overwhelmed by writing their citations, they’re going to write them and include those in all of their research projects. And that really adds credibility to a project when it’s properly cited. We’ll also learn about structuring citations for consistency, speed and ease. We will go over punctuation rules in a little more detail than we did here today. We’ll also spend time learning how to evaluate a source.

Lisa Stokes (28m 19s):
This is such an important skill as part of writing your citation. The citation needs to convey what the researchers saw when they referenced the source. So I teach about effectively using what I call the researchers description section of the citation. Oftentimes you’ll see this as digital images or database website or something like that. And so I teach how you can use that section to convey the format of the source that you saw and maybe even the reliability, like, did you look at an index or did you look at an actual image? Those sorts of things we’ll cover also the URL and the do’s and don’ts when it comes to URLs.

Lisa Stokes (29m 2s):
Then several people have asked me about covering foreign citations. So I will show people how to develop a citation style that’s workable and consistent with foreign regions. And I do have some examples of foreign citations that they can look at. And one thing to keep in mind is that once you have your style down, you can take other people’s citations and you can adapt that to your style. And so that’s a really important concept that you aren’t stuck into a style that may not work for your region, especially if it’s a foreign region.

Diana (29m 41s):
I think so valuable because we see that in reviewing others’ work, say they are doing a whole research project in German records and they go to evidence explained, and there’s nothing that really correlates with exactly what they’re seeing and they feel lost. So that’s great that you’re going to help them develop a style for all the different kinds of records and whatever foreign language or record type that they’re using. You mentioned a little bit about your record type template and you have a term here called the template bank. Can you just explain a little bit about that and what that has to do with your course?

Lisa Stokes (30m 23s):
Yeah. So my template bank, I call it the record type template bank is what I use to keep all of my templates in. And so I have it divided into different categories and I use that to pull a template from, and then I adjust that template, however it’s needed for the specific source that I’m reviewing, that I’m looking up and that I’m citing. And so I have that ready to go. So I just pull that up whenever I’m working and I can grab the citation template and plop it into my project or my research log, and I’m ready to go to create that citation.

Diana (31m 7s):
Oh great. And you have it in Excel, right?

Lisa Stokes (31m 10s):
I have mine in Excel. I actually found when I was running the course last year, that it was easier to share out with everyone on Google sheets. And so I have it on Google sheets now. I generally work off that one, so I don’t have to change both of them.

Diana (31m 24s):
Yeah. Yeah. I know. It’s you don’t want to have to go back,

Lisa Stokes (31m 27s):
Right? Yeah. So I pretty much converted to Google sheets. Now it’s

Nicole (31m 32s):
Really handy for sharing when you use Google

Lisa Stokes (31m 34s):
Sheets. Well, and I did have a few of the students want it in Excel, so that was really easy for me to convert it, to Excel for them and send it to them that way too.

Nicole (31m 44s):
For sure. So with your record type template bank, have you been able to put any foreign citations in there yet?

Lisa Stokes (31m 51s):
Yes. So I’m working on Scandinavian sources. I have some friends that are helping me with this, obviously, cause I don’t do a ton of research in all these areas, but so far I have Scandinavian French, Polish, English, Canadian, and Mexican. I actually do a lot of Mexican research myself in my daily work. And so I have those citations ready to go,

Nicole (32m 18s):
How wonderful. And I’m sure that if people who want to take your course, don’t research in those areas, but in another country that you can work together and develop the right citations for their area.

Lisa Stokes (32m 31s):
Yep. Yeah.

Diana (32m 32s):
That’s so neat. Well, tell us a little bit of the structure. When is your course meeting? What are the dates? How does everything work?

Lisa Stokes (32m 40s):
So the first session is going to be run in June. So every Tuesday in June. So that’s the seventh, 14th, 21st and 28th. I decided that 6:00 PM mountain time is a good time, not too early for the west coast and hopefully not too late for the east coast. So that’s what time we’ll be running it. I tend to binge listen to podcasts. So there might be people listening to the podcast that it’s well past June of 2022. And so if it is just go to my website and see when the next course will be running and you can get more information there, students will have access to the recordings.

Lisa Stokes (33m 22s):
So let’s say you can’t make it to one of the lessons or you want to review it. You will be able to go watch the recording. And I also have a digital syllabus and we will have homework assignments. They’re not too hefty, but you will be creating anywhere from two to five citations each week that will get reviewed with your peers. And from me, peer review and mentor review really helps cement the learning. When you peer review, somebody else’s work, you kind of have to think what’s the rule here and it makes you think. And so doing peer reviews is actually a great way to learn.

Lisa Stokes (34m 4s):
So we will be doing a little bit of peer review and also I’ll give feedback on your homework. And of course, one of the major bonuses is that everyone who signs up for my course will receive my entire record types citation template bank. And they can either use that as their own and start using the templates there to create their own citations each time they need it, or they can use that as a reference when they want to adapt a template to meet their own style, that will be available to everybody. I’ve had multiple people ask me for a copy of my template and I’ve always felt hesitant to do that because it wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t consistent.

Lisa Stokes (34m 50s):
It wasn’t complete enough. And so my template bank is a work in progress. I’m always finding new templates to add to that. So the students will have access to that as well. So it was a very big motivation to run the course, to go through my template with a fine tooth comb and prepare to doing a course.

Diana (35m 11s):
That sounds like you really focus in on citations and have prepared some wonderful materials for everyone. And I think a template is so fun to look at because then you can adapt it to your own research or you could use it just like it is. So I love seeing how other people approach the same type of citation. That’s going to be really, really helpful for anyone in the course.

Nicole (35m 34s):
Alyssa, have you ever had a citation that really stumped you

Lisa Stokes (35m 39s):
When I first started? Yeah. You had them stumped me all the time, but over the past four or five years, I felt like I’ve really been able to dig down deep. When I find a citation that maybe is a little hard or a little confusing and I’m, I’m always able to come up with the best approach. One thing I love is that the principles I teach can help tackle any source that you run into. So sometimes you might think, oh wait, what? What’s what’s going on with this source? And by delving into it and really analyzing the source and really looking at each component and everything that you’re looking at, you can come up with something that will work.

Lisa Stokes (36m 24s):
And one thing to keep in mind, Elizabeth Shown Mills has stated many times I’ve heard her say this, that writing citations is an art, not a science. So there’s never an absolute one right way to do things. When you’re writing citations, you need to just each site, each source is going to be a little bit different and you may need to adapt your template as you’re working on that specific source. So remember there’s always flexibility. And the important thing is that you’re conveying the information you found in the source, how you found the source so that somebody else can go find it again.

Nicole (37m 2s):
It’s so liberating to think about the idea that there’s more than one right way to do it, as long as you understand the principles underlying it. So that’s great that what you teach applies to every source, it’s the basic principles of citations,

Lisa Stokes (37m 16s):
Right? And basically the only right way to do things is consistently

Nicole (37m 22s):
It’s kind of ironic.

Lisa Stokes (37m 23s):
Yeah, it is.

Diana (37m 25s):
Well, and I remember going to Tom Jones course at roots tech on citations. And I agree, cause he said they need to be consistent. And the other term he used was clear. And I guess the way that you have the structured will make it so that any citation is very clear because that’s one of the things I do see in citations is this muddling of the different layers and the different pieces so that they’re not separated out. And so this way you’re teaching really separates those out, makes it so much more clear and understandable. So that is the right way to do it clear and consistent. Right? So how can our listeners find out more about your course?

Lisa Stokes (38m 7s):
So you can visit my website, which is Lisa Stokes, heritage research.com. And you can read my blog posts and sign up for my course. They’re

Nicole (38m 17s):
Great. How much is the course?

Lisa Stokes (38m 19s):
So it’s going to be $99 for the four week course. I am running an early bird special at $79. If you sign up by May 15th and there will be early bird specials for all the other sessions that I run in, in the future as well.

Diana (38m 33s):
Great. And is there a deadline for registration?

Lisa Stokes (38m 37s):
The deadline will always be just the day before the course starts. It’s really not hard for me to add somebody to the course. So it’ll always be the day before the course starts

Diana (38m 46s):
Well, and it doesn’t sound like there needs to be any preparation, just come to the course, you’ll learn, get your assignments, work on it, do some feedback and just really cement your citation learning. Is that right? Yeah.

Lisa Stokes (38m 57s):
Yeah. Yeah. And then just a little bit of homework each week. It won’t be super overwhelming, but you’ll, you’ll have to put an hour or two or if you want to do more, you can always put more work into it. But yeah, it will take a little bit of effort in between classes.

Diana (39m 13s):
Well, it sounds like a perfect opportunity to maybe pull out a project or a report that you did in the past and go through and fine tune your citations so that when you’re finished, you actually have a work product you’re proud of rather than some citations you weren’t super proud of before. So I can think of a lot of great ways to use the course.

Lisa Stokes (39m 33s):
Yeah. I love that idea. Great.

Diana (39m 36s):
Well, thank you so much, Lisa, for being here and talking about it, it’s always fun to catch up with you and it’s been fun to learn and grow together. And it’s fun because as fellow educators, you know, we love helping other people and it’s fun to talk with you.

Lisa Stokes (39m 51s):
Yes. Thank you so much for having me. I’ve had a great time chatting with you too.

Nicole (39m 56s):
Thanks for all the citation tips, Lisa, we’ll talk to you again soon.

Lisa Stokes (39m 60s):
Bye. Thank you. Bye bye.

Diana (40m 2s):
Bye. Bye everyone.

Nicole (40m 41s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.