A question came up recently about negative findings. That is, when you search for something but don’t find it, is it necessary to create a citation for this search, and if so, how do you do it?
Let me give you a scenario first.
According to one unsourced biographical entry in a book published in 1891, my great-great-great-grandmother died in 1883. As she had been living in Victoria, Australia, we naturally searched there for her death registration. Nothing was found. We then searched other states in Australia and still found nothing. One of her descendants even applied to the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Victoria to do a search of the records in case the entry was just missing from the indexes. He was sent back a letter entitled “No Record” Result.
I then went into the New South Wales State Library to look for any report of her death in the Victorian newspapers, as this was before the days of Trove which allows us to search newspapers online. Still nothing.
It wasn’t until several years later that one of my distant cousins found a record of her death at sea. She had died on board ship on her way back to visit England.
But until that point, we had a year of death, but it was unconfirmed. Did we need to cite the searches done?
According to Evidence Explained (4th edition)
“at a minimum, we should create a citation to each source we consult and add it to our Source List. We may annotate that Source List Entry with a discussion of the parameters of the search – or we may include that discussion of parameters, gaps in records, and other relevant issues in our research report, case study, or other type of narrative.”[1]
Diana Elder, in the Family Locket blog, not only says that we should cite the unsuccessful search, but the example she gives is a footnote reference, not a source list entry (also known as a Bibliography).[2] This, to me, implies that she is recommending a footnote, and a source list entry (if they are being included in a document).
The Evidence Explained Forum has some interesting posts. A reply in 2022 to an earlier post in the forum states:
“There is no basic template for citation of negative findings. Every search differs. For example:
Or
Another reply by EE from 2024 states:
“let me throw a couple of questions back at you:
And the final post I want to highlight from 2021 states:
“For those occasions when we, say, need to document a negative search:
The 2024 reply in particular implies that you don’t need to create a specific citation, but just make note of what you have searched in the report or document you are writing.
It is worth noting that it appears that Academic institutions and journals do not provide a citation for a source that was searched with negative results. At most, the unsuccessful search is recorded in the main text. Negative results to a test, however, are reported.
So is it only genealogical writings that need to cite negative findings? Perhaps. I think the key point to consider is the Genealogical Proof Standard.[6] The first component it states is doing ‘reasonably exhaustive research.’ By stating your negative findings you are documenting the scope of your research.
So what should you do?
There is no simple right-or-wrong answer to this, and ultimately you will have to make your own decisions. I definitely feel that had we not actually found my ancestor’s death at sea, I should have included the fact that every state in Australia, plus Victorian newspapers, had been searched with no success if I wrote any document or report about her. But do I actually have to list citations of all these searches (including each of the newspapers I had searched)? And I will admit now, that when I’ve been in a library idly looking at book indexes to see if they mention an ancestor, I haven’t made note of them. In my case, I think the difference was looking for a specific thing or piece of information that couldn’t be found, as against to randomly looking at things that I don’t have any particular expectation will mention my relatives.
But, as I said, there is no right-or wrong answer as to now to handle negative findings. You will have to decide how to handle it yourself in each individual case.
However, there is another component of this dilemma to consider. If you actually get a letter or a certificate from an archive or repository stating that the searched-for record had not been found, such as we had from the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages in Victoria, then that letter or certificate is an actual thing that needs to be cited.
What about Cite-Builder? How does it handle these situations?
Well, in the case of a letter or certificate as described above, Cite-Builder has created a new set of rules called Record of Failure to Find Record, which is located under Civil Births, Marriages, Deaths & Divorces.
We can’t create specialist negative findings versions for each of the 700+ rules we have in Cite-Builder. So our recommendation is that if you wish to have a citation like to cite negative findings, then create it as if you had found the record (omitting any information you don’t have, like an archive reference to the record). Then copy the resulting citation to somewhere you can edit it (like a Word document), remove the missing fields, and state somewhere in the citation that it is a negative search. This will give you a result like
Victoria, negative search for death certificate of Sarah Highett, died 1883; Births Deaths and Marriages Victoria, Melbourne.
I hope this helps.
[1] Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, 4th ed. (Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2024), 57.
[2] Family Locket; “Speaking Negatively: The Difference Between Negative Results and Negative Evidence,” blog post by Diana Elder, https://familylocket.com/speaking-negatively-the-difference-between-negative-results-and-negative-evidence/, 15 Dec 2018. The example she gives is: “Maryland Records, Somerset Parish, Somerset County, 1650-1825,” negative search for Ballard’s between 1666 and 1866, Family History Library microfilm 441,446 item 2.
[3] EE, “Discussing negative searches (reply entitled ‘No Gary. There is no basic…’),” Evidence Explained: Historical Analysis, Citation & Source Usage, Discussion Forum, 09 July 2022 (https://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/discussing-negative-searches : accessed 9 August 2024).
[4] EE, “FamilySearch Full Text search (reply entitled ‘Cryptoref, let me throw a…’),” Evidence Explained: Historical Analysis, Citation & Source Usage, Discussion Forum, 29 March 2024 (https://www.evidenceexplained.com/node/2254 : accessed 9 August 2024).
[5] EE, “Citing information gleaned from a page by page search or examination of a large record set (reply entitled ‘Interesting Questions, wfall…’),” Evidence Explained: Historical Analysis, Citation & Source Usage, Discussion Forum, 14 October 2021 (https://www.evidenceexplained.com/node/1955 : accessed 9 August 2024).
[6] Board for Certification of Genealogists, Genealogy Standards. 2nd ed. (Revised), Washington, DC: Board for Certification of Genealogists, 2021, p. 1.