Compiled Sources & Where to Find Them: Difference between revisions

'''Introduction<br>'''Regardless of your experience as a family history researcher in using primary and original records, and no matter how many years of research experience in proving your family tree, this important checklist of Compiled Sources will help you more comprehensively search for already compiled data on your family lines. Family history seekers are guaranteed a pleasant surprise as they strike ‘gold’ by discovering already completed research on at least one or some in-common ancestral family lineages. This list helps you to more meticulously search in secondary or what genealogists call compiled sources. It’s to help you identify, then search as many of today’s offerings for completed family genealogical (research) work which in especially more recent years&nbsp;has become a quantumly&nbsp;complex and unwieldy task than ever. The "task" requires scanning&nbsp;the whole spectrum of&nbsp;library and archival catalogs and published inventories of record office collections, to online databases, family websites and surname-specialty sources (mostly online)! So, how does one keep up on all the new websites, and places to find critical sources?

This ‘list’ of compiled sources is hopefully a good start. Collectively, it literally represents well over a billion ancestors with already compiled data about them!  

<u>The Standard in "Preliminary Searches" <br></u>In thoroughly scouring all home sources, in closets and attics—for family history papers, copies of records, pictures, old letters, journals/dairies and memorabilia, we cannot honestly say that our search in ‘compiled sources’ is completed. It is absolutely not completed until you initiate the next vital step, on to the next standard procedure—the&nbsp;phase called the preliminary search for and in compiled sources. To some, this is the often neglected or ‘ugly duckling’ aspect of the research process but nevertheless, a vital phase of doing standard (proper) due diligence. Such compiled sources for which to search&nbsp;includes published or deposited manuscript sources on families, pedigrees, biographies, autobiographies, town and local histories, and online family genealogies.<u></u>  

Like a research scientist before seeking an academic degree or a government-sponsored grant to fund forensic or frontier research or discovery, standards in protocol requires diligent and&nbsp;broad-spectrumed searches for and in compiled sources to determine ‘what’s already researched and thus far discovered in the chosen area of scientific research. Every researcher—beginning and scientific--must do the same, diligently! If your preliminary searches were mere ‘closet or attic or basement search’, on shelves and in boxes for family and home sources, that is but a first-step. And that’s only if you’ve sought for and searched family Bibles, pictures, diaries, journals, copies of vital records and certificates and records, interviewed extended family and close relatives’, searching their home records as well (even old neighbors--if living--can prove very helpful!), a giant step by itself—in the right direction, but too narrow in scope for what should be a comprehensive and more thorough search for other compiled sources outside the home! To smugly fold the arms, cock the head back and think, ‘That’s all I need to know; now&nbsp;start researching in original and primary record sources’—is naïve at least and, at worst, it short-circuits the comprehensive research process! Why would any true genealogist or passionate family history buff discard the standard of seeking and searching in compiled sources outside the home, by narrowly considering that no one else is “qualified” to research worth diddly? For every thousand family history compilers who may generate fuzzy genealogical ‘data’, there&nbsp;are&nbsp;also many&nbsp;very competent researchers and writers who have credibly researched and written professional-level family history compilations. It is&nbsp;especially for these latter "credible" compilations of competent researchers for which we all should seek and review.