This information about Isaac Rucker (1780-1850) appears in a book. Apparently it was a book that someone at Ancestry.com digitized and indexed. It may have been a wonderful leather-bound book. It may have been a spiral bound photocopy of typewritten pages. There is just one question.
What book?
Based on the results at Ancestry.com it is anyone’s guess. The “Source information” does not say and the “Source information” itself is not very specific as Ancestry.com only includes a vague description for “North America, Family Histories, 1500-2000:”
Ancestry.com. North America, Family Histories, 1500-2000 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016.
This database does include images of actual books, most notably the DAR lineage books. Those books do have some actual practical uses for some genealogists (with limitations).
But this reference to Isaac Rucker?
If this had been information I had never located in any other place and if this Isaac had been a brick wall, I would have considered using this information as clues to try and find the actual book (full text searches at (http://books.google.com), (http://www.archive.org), and (http://www.hathitrust.org) would have been good places to start.
The theoretical genealogist in me wonders how to cite this database entry. The practical genealogist in me tells me not to bother because I’m not putting something like this in my database anyway.
I don’t cite things I don’t use and I diligently avoid using things that appear to have been dropped from outer space into a database.
This reference above is equivalent to saying “here’s something I found in a book. Just don’t ask me what book.”
6 Responses
Ya gotta love it. Ranks right down there with tree-assertions’ being attributed to “LDS site,” “FH Library,” “Library of Congress,” “GEDCOM file,” or indeed, “I found it on Ancestry.”
I hope this does not mean that Ancestry.com is adopting FamilySearch.org’s practice of automated citations that do not disclose the actual nature of a record or its subject matter.
No kidding! The only reason I would ever consider the information in one of those is something else to search for, never that bit itself. But it counts in their total item count, I guess, just like putting 6 or 8 transcriptions of the same item on familysearch. A couple of days ago the whole page of 20 was the same event for the same person at famiysearch. So I went for 75 instead. I quit counting how many times the same event was listed. I just gave up and left the site.
So I was also confused by this reference “North American, Family Histories, 1500-2000”. If you go to the search page for the supposed book:
http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=61157
you will find a drop down menu where you can locate the family name you are researching, when you go to that family, you will see the book that is referenced for that family.
For example: Choose W, then Willard, then choose one of the references. I choose, “Willard memoir : or, life and times of Major Simon Willard”, by Joseph Willard and the 485 page book is there.
So the images of each book in the collection, “North American, Family Histories, 1500-2000”, are there, you just need to dig a bit deeper to find the actual book to reference.
In Ancestry.com’s “North American, Family Histories, 1500-2000” I found that when the book image came up for review, at the bottom is what “image” you are on in the book Ancestry.com is presenting. If you select image 1 (hit GO), it should take you to the title page where the image is contained, followed by other pages about copyright, etc., from whence you should be able to compile your SOURCE information. As previously mentioned: you have to dig!
Thank you for the comments clarifying (?) what this reference “book” is! I will do more digging. I was searching for specific family and a 1,000 + references were made. But…
I could not locate the original source of all this amazing information!
Why can’t I copy a paragraph out of this book to include in a NOTE in my ancestry.com file? Irritating. Don’t want the whole book.