Practical Citation for Reunion 10, Family Tree Maker 3 available on Kindle

Practical Citation Ben Sayer at Genealogy Tools, and more importantly, Practical Citation, has released on the Kindle platform (compatible with Macs, iPads, etc., see below), two important books for Mac fans of Reunion 10 and Family Tree Maker 3, along with one for Family Tree Maker 2014 (the Windows version). The full title of the three ebooks is “Practical Citation, A Guide to Simply and Safely Recording Sources and Citations” and are available right now for download:

The books are exactly what they sound like – a guide to recording important source/citation information, including non-Internet sources, and what information you need to record. They also cover moving/converting source/citation information between programs, and testing the information.

It’s easy to find a genealogy application that you like, and to start using it, plugging in all kinds of information. I won’t say it’s “too easy”, but if you’ve been closely following the whole “Genealogy Do-Over” movement, you’ll have seen numerous people on blogs or in comments, who talk about one of their biggest problems with their genealogy research being a lack of sources (proper or otherwise) after plugging in all kinds of information over many years.

In his Genealogy Do-Over Announcement, Thomas MacEntee directly mentions this:

How many times have you thought about doing the same thing? Did you start your research the same way I did, by just collecting names, grabbing stuff from other online trees, or pasting text into your genealogy software? Lately, has the prospect of going back and citing sources and proving facts and evidence brought you down and ruined your genealogy buzz? Do you throw up your hands and say, “I give up!” only to return to the same review and edit process days or weeks later?

Most of you who have been doing genealogy research for many years, or who have changed genealogy programs (in particular) have probably encountered the two big problems that Sayer discusses:

  1. Citations don’t need to be as complex as people are making them.
  2. Transferring information between leading genealogy applications is unsafe.

These books/information are already available to you if you have a subscription to Practical Citation, but this is the first time they’ve been made widely available in book format.

If you are interested in these ebooks, and you do not have a Kindle, fear not – Amazon has provided free software to view Kindle titles on your Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, etc.