Formatting your Family History: Referencing

This post follows up on my previous two posts regarding family history: “Put Your Family History in Context” and “Formatting your Family History: Images and Documents.” This time, I will look at the different style-guides used for referencing where you got your information to help you decide which one is right for your own family history.

If you don’t reference where you got your information from, your reader has no way to tell if your research is correct, nor can they find the same evidence you found if they were working on a project that needed to use one of your documents in their own research. While it’s true that most general readers prefer no references, since they sometimes get in the way of the narrative, I’d certainly encourage anyone writing their family history to use them. After all, you’ve carefully researched your history, why not lend credibility to your efforts by laying all of your evidence out for people to see?

There are many different referencing systems used throughout scholarly writing that you could use in writing your family history. The most popular of these for humanities writers - as I would argue, family historians are, are the Modern Language Association (MLA) style-guide and the Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago). The major difference between them is that MLA calls for the author to put its references in the body of the text, and Chicago puts the reference either at the bottom of the page (footnote) or at the end of the book/chapter (endnote). First, let’s have a look at MLA.

MLA style has advantages and disadvantages. Many people like the fact that the reader doesn’t have to turn the page, or even look to the bottom of the page to find out the author’s source. It’s time consuming to flip pages just to check a reference. Also, aesthetically, many people dislike how footnotes can sometimes take over a page. I’m sure everyone who has read academic history has come across many books where the footnotes are longer than the work itself, which can be distracting and cluttered. MLA also has the advantage of being nearly invisible, if you’re a talented writer. For example:

“The record of Great Grandpa John’s marriage on May 18, 1894 is held in marriage registers in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, England.”

The preceding sentence contains all the citation information you’d need for an MLA style reference. It tells the reader what type of document was used (marriage registers), where in the document the information can be found (May 18, 1894), and where it is held (St. Paul’s Cathedral, London England).

However, more commonly, MLA tends to be invasive for the reader, much like my last sentence. Whereas most readers can choose to ignore the superscript little number that’s connected with an end note, it’s much more difficult to ignore the parentheses that MLA often demands:

“Great Grandpa John’s marriage in 1894 was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London England (St. Paul’s Records). He married our Great Grandmother Mary, who had moved to London in 1890 from Manchester (Mary’s Letters, June 14, 1890). She had met our Great Grandpa John while attending the opera (John’s Diary, August 19, 1893).”

These constant citations are important if anyone wanted to check your references in the future, but for the reader they make the narrative rather choppy and difficult to enjoy.

This is where Chicago Manual of Style has its advantages. As mentioned above, the reader can easily choose to ignore your footnotes or endnotes, but if they desire, they know that the information of where you got your resource is readily available. To my knowledge, all academic historical publications use a referencing system based on the Chicago Manual of Style, largely because it is so flexible. Footnotes or endnotes give the author the freedom to add extra information that would otherwise stifle the fluidity of the narrative that could be important to ensure readers can understand your history, and when using lots of sources that are tucked away in Archives or Museums all over the world, Chicago style makes it clear exactly where each document is held. The above paragraph written using MLA style would look something like this in Chicago Manual of Style:

“Great Grandpa John’s marriage in 1894 was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London England.[1] He married our Great Grandmother Mary, who had moved to London in 1890 from Manchester.[2] She had met our Great Grandpa John while attending the opera.[3]”

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[1] “Marriage of John Smith to Mary Jones, May 18, 1894” St. Paul’s Cathedral, Marriage Register. (London, England, 1894).

[2] Mary Jones. “June 14, 1890,” Letter from Mary Jones to Sylvia Cooper. Courtesy: Greater Manchester County Record Office.

[3] John Smith. “August 19, 1893” Diary of John Smith. Courtesy: Public Record Office. Mary also wrote about the occasion in a letter to her friend Sylvia, the same day. Mary Jones. "August 19, 1893" Letter from Mary Jones to Sylvia Cooper. Courtesy: Greater Manchester County Record Office.

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To the untrained eye, the footnotes can be a mass of confusion. However, if you don’t care about the reference, it’s easy to skip over it and just focus on the narrative. Your references may never get looked at by your readers, but they do leave a trail of your research in case you or anyone else in your family ever wished to pick up where you left off and continue the search for your family’s history.

Ultimately, it is your family history and its your hard work that will get it written. It’s up to you if you decide to use MLA, Chicago or no reference system at all. It’s also up to you if you take any of my advice about “Putting your Family History in Context” or about when and where to include “Images and Documents” in your book. But, by keeping in mind the needs and desires of your readers, you will be able to produce something that is worthy of your hard work; something that will be easier and more enjoyable to read and something that will act as a tribute to the family in whose name you wrote.