Good documentation is what turns your research into a family history you, and others, can rely on.
Careful notes, citations, reports and family trees let you retrace your steps, pick up a research problem months later, and show others how you reached your conclusions.
Skip documentation, or leave it until later, and you risk losing the details behind your work, or having to redo research you have already done.
Good documentation happens throughout your research, alongside your searching and analysis.
Document early, strategically and comprehensively
Good documentation is more than source citations. It includes your research notes, copies of sources, family tree charts, software data, and any reports or narratives you write.
Purpose and audience determine the format, content and style. A private research file, a shared online tree and a published family history book all need different levels of detail and different approaches.
Create your source citations at the start of the notetaking process, not the end. The Six Question Model for source citations helps you build a complete citation, and each one should accurately match the information you have recorded.
Not every conclusion needs the same depth of documentation. An evidence documentation framework helps you match the effort to the complexity: source citations for straightforward data, supplemented by brief notes if needed, and more detailed evidence summaries or arguments for conclusions that rely on indirect evidence or could be disputed.
Family history software keeps your research consistent and organised, and the master copy of your tree should live on your own computer, not only online. Online trees extend your reach and enable collaboration, but carry privacy and control risks you need to manage.
Document DNA evidence systematically, alongside your other evidence, rather than keeping it separate.
Articles about documenting family history
Get started with these articles. They contain links to related articles.
Documenting your research
Building & storing your family tree
For more articles about documentation, click on the Documenting Family History link
on the right side of the screen when on a blog post page or use the search bar to search for a specific topic.
Tools for documenting your family history
Notion is not just useful for planning your family history, it can also be used to record research notes and evidence documentation.