As readers know, I’m a big fan of Evidence Explained.  Even if you never intend to publish anything and never have anyone proofread your citations, reading the book can make your research better.

There are sample citations for how to cite just about every document a genealogist might encounter, even the church records from Salzungen that we’ve been discussing on this blog lately. The section about analysis and methodology is definitely worth an occasional revisit as well. It’s not a book that one sits down and reads from to back.

Evidence Explained has gone to a new edition and I’m anxious to receive my copy.

I’ve been thinking about page numbers while using records from Salzungen, Germany, and Evidence Explained does discuss page numbers and church records. The citation included in the 1798 church image isn’t in proper Evidence Explained fashion, but the essence is there. As the image indicates, the page number appears to be contemporary. But sometimes that’s not the case and page numbers may appear to have been written in later.

While I’m not certain on what page of Evidence Explained page numbers are discussed, I’m pretty certain they are and it may even be in a section totally unrelated to church records. This is one reason why browsing through Evidence Explained  is a good idea. There may be something in a section on one type of record that applies to a problem I have on a totally unrelated set of records.

The Evangelical records from Salzungen contain a partial index to baptisms, giving the year of the baptism and the page on which the entry appears. This page is hand-stamped, possibly sometime after the index entries were made. One may wonder why such an index page would ever have to be cited–after all, there’s the actual baptismal entry which would be the record to view.

Usually.

In this case, the actual baptisms could be located and read. But it could have been that some were not able to be read–or that pages were missing. In those cases, I still could have cited this index page as it does provide a year of birth and a name. And had I cited this page, I should have made a note about the hand stamped page number. And I would have made certain that the page number was consistent with the page numbers that were already written in the book. That’s something I should do when using the record and making digital images, especially when some page numbers are handwritten and others are hand stamped.

The complete title of the most recent version of Evidence Explained is:

Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, Third Edition