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Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating:

Summary: Great Resource
Comment: This book is a must have for historical researchers and writers. Up-to-date it is a wealth of
information. I would recommend this for every researchers library.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Necessary Research Tool
Comment: Ms. Mills latest book is a great tool for evidence citation in genealogy research. I have used it
frequently since purchasing. I strongly recommend it.

Customer Rating:

Summary: The most comprehensive source citation guide I've ever seen
Comment: Evidence Explained is the answer to a genealogist's quest for citation guidelines. With the
ever-expanding Internet databases and records collections, it is becoming more and more important
for serious genealogists to understand how to properly cite these sources. Evidence Explained is the
guide everyone should own. Not only does it provide detailed guidance and templates for practically
any source you might encounter, it presents a comprehensive text covering the theory behind
citations. Evidence Explained covers far more than Internet sources, it includes use of obscure and
unusual sources encountered by genealogists. I highly recommend this book to any genealogist
concerned about properly citing sources.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Evidence or Evidence Explained
Comment: I was given the option to buy Evidence or Evidence Explained for a class I was taking. To save
costs, I started with Evidence, because it was much cheaper. As the weeks turned into months, I
found it lacking in citation examples I needed. I was constantly asking for help and having to wait
for an answer. I finally went ahead and bought Evidence Explained and when I got it was instantly
satisfied. There are examples of everything I needed for my research, including every situation I
ran into. I only wish I would have bought it first. It has saved me hours of research just to make a
proper citation. It is easy to locate examples for all your needs.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A good addition to your reference library
Comment: This book fulfills a long needed addition to Mills' 1997 effort Evidence! Citation and Analysis for
the Family Historian. Genealogy, as a discipline, has practioners that range from the casual gedcom
collector to professional and academic researchers. For the last several decades, there has been a
strong movement toward standards in genealogical research, in an effort to gain credibility on par
with historians and other social sciences. At 816 pages (884 total pages), reading it from cover to
cover is a bit like reading a dictionary, which few of us rarely do.

Judging from the
buzz on various mailing lists before the book was released, you might expect that Mills was
providing merely a reference manual or citation style manual for genealogists. However, the title,
Evidence Explained, hints at more. Throughout the text, Mills uses the term "historian" over the use
of the term, "genealogist." This shift in terminology is perhaps in keeping with the direction that
the discipline is moving. Additionally, Mills devoted the first chapter to the subject of evaluating
sources and evidence contained within them, a subject that still causes confusion for many
experienced family historians (i.e., genealogists).

For those of us who would rather
read a novel than a style manual, I recommend reading the first two chapters in their entireity.
Both chapters cover general concepts that are prominent in genealogical research and citation
writing. The remaining twelve chapters deal with the various types of historical records or
artifacts encountered while researching family history. Starting with Chapter 3, Mills provides the
historian with a section, entitled "QuickCheck Models." These models provide a simple,
"view-at-a-glance" template for the various types of records referenced by that chapter. The
"QuickCheck" models are easy to locate, appearing on pages with a greyed background to help them
standout while looking at the the edge of the book.

To aid navigation, each chapter's
title page contains a table of contents to the QuickCheck Models. However, supplying a TOC for these
brief sections seem unnecessary. The models, themselves, appear one to a page with the desciption
(or title) of the model at the top of the page. Rather, the user of the style manual would have been
better served if a TOC had been created for the main text of each chapter, which is much more
detailed and offers information not provided by the models.

Paragraphs within each
chapter are identified by a two level numbering system (chapter, paragraph). Mills mentioned that
she modeled her manual after the Chicago Style Manual (CSM), which also uses this numbering schema
for navigation purposes. Like CSM, Evidence Explained opens each paragraph with a run-in subhead
identifying the subject matter of the paragraph. However, nowhere is there a reference or
cross-index to the paragraph numbers, themselves, making them somewhat superfluous.
/>Each chapter contains a section called, "Guidelines and Examples." This is the major text
explaining issues related to each category of sources. Don't forego reading this part of the text in
favor of just using the models. Here, I recommend that the researcher employ the JIT approach to
reading. JIT (meaning "just in time") is a term borrowed from manufacturing whereby parts to make a
product are ordered and shipped to the factory "just in time" to assemble the product, saving time
and the expense of warehousing a large inventory of parts. When searching for the most appropriate
style template to use--and once you have identified the source type--,read the sub-section labeled
"Basic Issues" within the "Guidelines and Examples" section. Then, proceed to the paragraph that
describes the specific type of source. (This is where a chapter TOC would have helped.) Reading the
"Basic Issues" section will help the researcher see how concepts in citations relate to that
specific source.
Another feature that Mills employed in the text was the use of icons to
indicate explanations of citations related to microfilm, computer databases, etc. Mills did not
explain this feature in her preface, perhaps thinking that no explanation was necessary. For an
example of how these icons are used, refer to page 347. As a matter of fact, the lack of an
introduction and orientation to the book seems to be its greatest weakness. Any reference
manual--and this book certainly fits that description--should offer the reader an orientation to the
conventions used within.

Finally, Mills provided two indexes to the manual. The first
is the general index. It offers the best way to apply the JIT principle, sometimes directing you to
multiple examples on separate pages. In absence of a chapter table of contents, the index is your
only resource for navigating the book. The second index is to the QuickCheck Models only. It is
redundant of the general index, which also includes references to the QuickCheck Models. When
searching the index(es), be certain that you know which index you are purusing. The two indexes do
not have separate page headers.

Despite the above-mentioned weaknesses, it is a
monumental and welcomed improvement over earlier works and, no doubt, will help us all become better
writers of our family research. I can still highly recommend it.

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