About

This site was established on February 6, 2012 and was created to present family historians with a simple way to cite genealogical sources. Previously, it has been nearly impossible to accurately and consistently cite the broad variety of materials, and other supporting evidence, relevant to documenting a family tree without spending countless hours trying to determine an appropriate way to do so. Even then, there simply were no standardized approaches that adequately addressed the problem.

Simple Citations is the creation of Jeff La Marca, Ph.D. who has pursued genealogy as a hobby since the 1970s. Indeed, he put up his first Internet web site that pertained mostly to his family history in the early days of the Internet, on January 11, 1996. He also haunts several other genealogy-related sites, particularly Find-a-grave, and provides an example of Simple Citations on his RootsMagic site. Although he has always been concerned with citing sources and he ascribes to the belief that all genealogies are worthless without documentation, he finally gave up trying to do so reliably after attempting to adequately cite an obituary in which the newspaper, publication date, as well as the author could not be determined. Although he was familiar with many other citation systems pertaining to genealogy, none addressed this issue.

To address the lack of standardization, while also recognizing that citing sources is critical to constructing a meaningful genealogy, he spent a few weeks examining a large variety of disparate sources that genealogists might come across. He examined common sources (i.e., censuses, vital records, books, etc.), as well as those that are unique to genealogical research (i.e., cemetery records, personal letters, old photos, etc.) and tried to isolate information that would be required to cite them consistently. Although the types of sources that are utilized in genealogies are nearly infinite, the specific data required to document these sources are not. Indeed, it is possible to cite essentially everything with a very limited set of descriptors. Once common factors that are shared by essentially all sources were identified, he created Simple Citations for his own use, Since then, he has never come across an instance (at least not yet) where a source cannot be cited quickly and easily. Furthermore, the approach is standardized and allows others to also easily understand the information provided in each citation. This web site was created to assist family historians frustrated with other approaches, especially those that require excessive effort, to reliably identify and catalog their genealogical materials.