Practical Citation: Family Tree Maker 3 Edition: A Guide to Simply and Safely Recording Sources and Citations

The Internet and search engines have made existing citation formats outdated. Today, with only a few key pieces of information, you can find most sources. Those same pieces of information will also help you locate the sources that aren’t referenced on the Internet.

This guide will show you which key pieces of source and citation information to record.

Safe exchange of family history source information is important if you use multiple genealogy applications or share your files with people who use other software. Even if you aren't exchanging data now, you'll want your data to be safe for future sharing.

While modern genealogy software will exchange family history data, they don’t all do it the same way. This causes some misplacement or loss of information.

In this guide you'll discover simple methods for:

• Determining what genealogy source and citation information to store
• Testing citations to be confident they can be used to locate sources
• Storing information about sources and citations in Family Tree Maker 3 so they won’t be lost during export and import
• Converting existing sources and citations for safety and consistency