What about the bibliography?

Lisa Fair, one of our Research Like a Pro graduates is sharing this guest post about her experience writing a family history book and formatting a bibliography. As she discusses, bibliographies usually get only a passing mention in citation lessons! She shares how she came up with her chosen format. I hope you enjoy her post. – Nicole

I’ve decided that the bibliography for a family history book gets the short end of the stick when discussing documentation.

I had an idea for a book in 2015, the 150th anniversary of our family’s ownership of our farm in SE Ohio. My plan was a 20-ish page photo book with captions.

Then I thought it might get my family interested in their history if I included more information about the farm owners, some of what life was like, and the essential events of their lives. I asked some cousins to write their memories of the farm and have included those, too.

I now have a book with a section about the farm itself and a section about the eight farm owners. This is about 70 pages. Then, I have an appendix, end notes, a bibliography, and an index, adding another 60 pages.

My primary audience is family. I will give the book to libraries in the areas where my family has lived. The book can be purchased online, too. I documented every fact in the book so readers would be confident the information was correct, at least to the best of my knowledge.

I took classes to help with this process, including Research Like a Pro. I listened to the RLP podcast. The citation-building episodes helped, as did the one with guest speaker Lisa Stokes (RLP 200). Among my takeaways were what elements to include and that consistency matters.

When it was time to add the bibliography, I encountered a problem. I have multiple sources for the same type of information. I’ve documented many birth and marriage records from the same county. I found those records at the county courthouse, on microfilm at the local library, and online at Ancestry and FamilySearch. I wanted to include all of my source locations in a way that would be easy for the reader to follow. Given my audience, I considered eliminating the bibliography, but I liked the idea of a short list of the sources, given how long and detailed the endnotes are.

That’s when I realized there is so much discussion about citations, but the bibliography only gets a passing mention. I contacted Diana and Nicole about the bibliography and how to format the list. They gave me several ideas and resources for creating the entries. But I still had the issue of readability for my family audience. Ultimately, I played around with ways to format the source list and decided that grouping by location would be the most straightforward. I wanted to give credit to the places I found the information and, at the same time, emphasize the original source location. I tried several arrangements and settled on this:

I’m embarrassed to say I’m just wrapping this book up—almost nine years after I began. What happened? Why has this taken so long? In a nutshell, I changed the scope and objective of my project mid-stream. Lessons learned:

Build a solid outline of the project and stay within scope.
Give serious thought to any additions to the project. Do they add valuable information? How much additional work and time will be involved?
If the objective of your project changes, write a new, more comprehensive outline. For example, on a whim, I added a four-generation list of descendants of the original land purchasers. I thought anyone who stumbled across the book would like to see how they relate. For each descendant, I listed the birth, death, and marriage for them, their spouse(s), divorces, and children. It sounds simple enough, but it’s a minimum of three pieces of data to document for each person. I’m glad the information is there, but it added research time and blew up my notes section. The descendant list is only two pages long!
As Diana and Nicole have often said on the podcast and in the RLP class, write as you research. I didn’t do that. I’d write and add a sentence about something based on something I’d seen somewhere; then, I had to dig to find my source for that random sentence I’d added. Sometimes, I had to do even more research to substantiate my claim. If I had written as I researched, I would have had less back and forth.
The first project is the most difficult (I hope that’s true).