Reliable Sources for Pre-1700 Quaker profiles

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Surnames/tags: quakers pre-1700 sources

Contents 1 General Guidance on Reliable Sources 2 Reliable Sources 3 Reliable with conditions - Secondary Sources - Use with Caution 3.1 Websites 3.2 Abstracts 4 Unreliable Sources

General Guidance on Reliable Sources

For general WikiTree guidance on reliable sources, please see the help page on Reliable Sources. This gives WikiTree-wide information about reliable and unreliable sources, and the advice in it should be followed.

This page supplements that guidance with some more specific information, much of it specific to Quakers.

If in doubt whether a source is reliable, please either ask a question in G2G with the Quakers tag and any other appropriate tag, or, if you are a member of the Project's Google Group, ask a question there. For queries about sources not specific to Quakers, G2G will normally be the better place - and there is also guidance in the reliable source pages of geographical Projects.

The Quakers Project Resources Page, and more focused pages to which it links, include lists of sources that may be helpful, and give other useful information. Some of these sources need to be used with caution, but may still be helpful aids to research.

Research Notes can be a useful way of drawing attention to information in less reliable sources that may merit further investigation or provide clues.

Reliable Sources

• Swarthmore College collection of Monthly Meeting records - images and indexes at Ancestry ($).
• World wide Quaker Records - images and indexes at FindMyPast ($).

Reliable with conditions - Secondary Sources - Use with Caution

Websites

• Find A Grave, Billiongraves and other cemetery sites: the general WikiTree guidance on reliable sourcing classifies these as general unreliable sources. Early Friends did not usually mark their graves with engraved stones. Most engraved stones have been placed many years later in memory of the ancestors. They can be used for clues but there are usually other good sources available.
• Wikipedia articles can also be problematic. Genealogical information in an otherwise well-researched article may not be supported by a source at all or the source may be one that WikiTree would consider unreliable. When citing Wikipedia as a source for parent/child relationship(s), birth, marriage, and/or death information, please include not only a link to the Wikipedia article and date accessed but also the source(s) cited by Wikipedia for genealogical facts from the article.

Abstracts

• Indexed Abstracts: Many websites provide searchable indexes to abstracts of Quaker records. Neither the abstract nor the index record is a source, both are clues. Hinshaw's Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy at Ancestry.com and Thomas Hamm's Abstracts of the records of the Society of Friends in Indiana at HathiTrust.org are examples. Enough information should be included in the abstracts to allow you to find the original record if they still exist. For instance, some of Ancestry's "U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681-1935" database includes images of Monthly Meeting records. Verify the abstracted records and cite the originals. The citation for the index and/or abstract can be placed in a See Also or Research Notes section.

Unreliable Sources

• Follow the guidance on the general WikiTree page on reliable sources.
• See also Category:Frauds_and_Fabrications