Page 18 - index

Genealogical Research Standards 1 7
Sources
Sources provide us with information; they are the form in
which we obtain information. The most desirable sources
for the events that identify a person or relationship are
original records of a contemporary nature - written or
verbal accounts, usually created or witnessed when an event
occurred or as close as possible in time to it. Original sources
are thejrst recording of an eltent, not derived from an earlier or
previous statement of record.
But original, contemporary records are not always
available or accessible when we search for them. Parents
may have failed to register the birth of a child according to
local government requirements. The church where a
marriage was recorded may have lost its registers in a fire or
through other damage. It is a sad fact of life that cemetery
stones become illegible through weathering or sometimes
are destroyed by vandals. In more recent times, many
governments withhold access to records because of right-
to-privacy legislation.
Our searches for identification also broaden to derivative
sources. These are sources that contain information that is
repeated from a prior source. They include all transcribed
copies of original material, indexes, abstracts and extracts,
compilations, published information (print or electronic)
and family hearsay. It is not good research to take a name
and a date from an index or a Web site without searching
out the material it was based on. (Sometimes this search
involves a trail of provenance back to an original source.)
A person's duly executed will is an original source. The
register or copybook where the local court clerk copied it
is a derivative source, even if he copied it the same day.
Each time a record is copied or repeated, the risk of error is
present. \Xie must always be aware of what kind of source