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Sources, citations and the research log

Genealogy without sources is a rumor with a family tree attached. StemmaFiles is built so that adding proof is the easy path — and so that, years from now, you can still tell why you believed something.

Attach a source to the fact, not just the person

Open anyone's editor and every fact — a birth, a marriage, an occupation — has its own little citation row. Pick a source you already have or type a new name on the spot and the app creates the source note for you. Alongside the source you can record the page or entry number, quote the exact wording, and say how sure you are (from "primary evidence" down to "unreliable").

That last part matters more than it seems: when two sources disagree about a date, a fact with a certainty attached is a decision you can defend — and revisit.

The Sources panel

Every record lives as its own note in Sources/. Click one in the Sources panel and you get a quiet preview: the repository and call number, your notes, the document scans as clickable thumbnails — and who cites it, fact by fact, with pages and quotes. It's an evidence index: you see at a glance what a source is actually carrying in your tree.

Ready-made citations

Writing to an archive, or a cousin who follows the rules? The source preview formats a ready-to-paste citation in Evidence Explained or Chicago style, built from the fields you've already filled in. Pick the style, press "Copy citation", done.

If you research Polish records: paste a result link from Geneteka, Szukaj w Archiwach or Metryki into the capture box (on a person's card or in the Sources panel) and StemmaFiles reads the register, years and names out of the link and drafts the source for you. No scraping, no login — it just understands the address.

The research log: remember your dead ends

The Research panel is for the questions, not the answers: "Who was Anna's father?" Each note keeps a running log of what you tried — including the searches that found nothing. Negative results are real research: the log records which registers you already swept and for which years, so you never pay for the same microfilm twice. Questions are marked open, solved or abandoned, and open ones stay on top.

Let the app check your story

Two views keep you honest:

  • Quality flags places where the story contradicts itself — a death before a birth, a marriage at age six, a child born after their mother died.
  • Research health shows how well-sourced your tree actually is: which facts have no source at all, and where sources disagree with each other.

Neither changes your data — they just point, you decide. Combined with likely-duplicate detection (and clean merging) you get a tree that can face an archive with a straight face.