A Family Historian source-template collection that implements (as far as possible) the citation framework set out in the Stripped Bare Guide: Citing and Using History Sources by Elizabeth Shown Mills.

What it is

The Stripped Bare Guide builds a complete citation system on a single ‘Basic Publication’ template and adapts it for fourteen specific source types. The same seven building blocks — author, title, descriptor, place, publisher, date, specific item — recur throughout, with extra blocks added where the source demands them, e.g. a chapter author for an edited collection, a folder and a collection for an archived document. It’s designed to cover every type of source you’re likely to encounter in historical or genealogical research.

This collection ports the framework into Family Historian as nineteen templates rather than fourteen, mainly because Family Historian needs a separate template wherever the underlying field set differs. The collection is by default ‘lumper’-leaning: it will produce one source for e.g. a Parish register, not a Parish register entry. More on what that means and what to do if you’d rather split, below.

What’s included

Templates are grouped in categories by source type with a subcategory marking the access path (Original, Online or Microfilm).

Category	Subcategory	Template	Use for
Publications	Original	Basic Publication (Book)	Books and other standalone print works
Publications	Original	Book with Parts by Different Authors	Edited collections; chapters in a book
Publications	Original	Journal or Magazine Article	Articles in scholarly journals or magazines
Publications	Original	Newspaper Article	Newspaper articles, named or anonymous
Publications	Online	Basic Publication (Website)	Simple websites with one author or organisation
Online Sources	Online	Complex Website	Multi-layer websites — databases, articles, AI tools
Manuscripts	Original	Basic Authored Manuscript	Theses, dissertations, unpublished reports
Manuscripts	Original	Private Holdings (Artefact or Manuscript)	Family letters, photographs, heirlooms in private custody
Archives	Original	Formal Archives (Artefact or Manuscript)	Documents held in a formal archive
Government, Church, or Corporate Records	Original	Government, Church, or Corporate Office (Record Book)	Bound register
Government, Church, or Corporate Records	Original	Government, Church, or Corporate Office (Loose File)	Unbound files
Government, Church, or Corporate Records	Online	Government, Church, or Corporate Office (Record Book) (Online)	A record book imaged on a database website
Government, Church, or Corporate Records	Online	Government, Church, or Corporate Office (Loose File) (Online)	A loose file imaged on a database website
Government, Church, or Corporate Records	Online	Census (Online Image)	Census images on a database website
Government, Church, or Corporate Records	Microfilm	Government, Church, or Corporate Office (Record Book) (Preservation Microfilm)	A record book consulted on preservation microfilm
Government, Church, or Corporate Records	Microfilm	Government, Church, or Corporate Office (Loose File) (Preservation Microfilm)	A loose file consulted on preservation microfilm
Government, Church, or Corporate Records	Microfilm	Census (Preservation Microfilm)	Census schedules consulted on microfilm
Vital Records	Original	Birth, Death, or Marriage Certificate (Not a Family Artefact)	Vital records from a register office
Artefacts	Original	Gravestone (Viewed Personally)	A gravestone you’ve read in the field

Installing

1. Download the file
2. Either double-click to open the file, or in Family Historian go to File > Import/Export > Import > Source Template Collection…

How to use these templates

You’ll probably want to use these templates in conjunction with the book until you’re well-practised; I don’t recommend using them if you don’t have the book to hand and are not already familiar with the Evidence Explained way of doing things.

Lumper, not splitter

Citing Sources: Method 1 and Method 2 describes the two methods of citing sources:

• Method 1 ‘source splitters’ mode where each specific document has its own Source record
• Method 2 ‘source lumpers’ mode where an entire class of documents has one Source record

The Stripped Bare templates lump sources by default.

Splitter conversion path

If your preference is to split — perhaps because you want each source variant to show up under its own descriptive Source Title in the source list — the collection accommodates that with minimal pain. Four template families are splitter-eligible by design:

• Birth, Death, or Marriage Certificate (the Vital Records template)
• Record Book and its Online and Microfilm variants
• Census Online and Census Microfilm
• Gravestone (already a splitter by construction, since the template is for a single inscribed marker)

For these, the Record Title and Bibliography formats already include the citation-specific fields that splitters typically promote to source level. Convert by editing the template in Family Historian: change the Citation flag on the relevant fields from Yes to No and the template now treats those fields as source-level identifiers rather than per-citation locators. The source formats stay meaningful in both modes because of the way the templates are written. (Your Bibliography will no longer be strictly compliant with the principles of the Stripped Bare Guide, but it’s unlikely the citation police will prosecute.)

The other fourteen templates are inherently splitter-at-source-level: each Source you create represents one identified source, and there’s no per-citation locator that could sensibly be promoted.

Colon vs comma before Specific Item

The templates use a comma as the separator before the Specific Item field. The Stripped Bare Guide (and the wider Mills-influenced citation tradition it draws on) distinguishes between two separators (colon and comma) in that position, but not in any way that can be reliably encoded in the template. Sorry.

For the record, the colon means ‘and within that, at’. It’s used when the preceding element names a numbered container (a volume, a folio range, a microfilm reel) and what follows pinpoints a place within it. The colon lets you drop the ‘p.’ or ‘fol.’ label because the contained-by relationship is already established. The comma means parallel locators, each labelled in its own right. Several coordinate elements that together identify a place in a structured record.

So:

• vol. 3: 145 — colon, no need for ‘p.’, because page 145 is within volume 3
• vol. 3, p. 145 — comma plus label, less compact but unambiguous
• ED 8, sheet 6A, dwelling 99 — three coordinate locators in a census reference, each labelled

The templates default to the comma because it’s the safer choice: it doesn’t promise a contained-by relationship that may not exist.

Italics and conditional sections

Italics on book and journal titles use the BOOK and TITLE style qualifiers. The default Family Historian display setting renders both in italics; if you’ve changed that in Preferences, the templates pick up your setting automatically, and you may want to revert to the defaults for those style qualifiers.

Author / Creator field — name handling

The guide’s printed examples switch between ‘Joan DeJean’ in footnotes, ‘DeJean, Joan’ in the source list and ‘DeJean’ alone in subsequent reference notes. The templates handle this by giving the Author/Creator field Family Historian’s Name type and using its :REVERSE and :SURNAME qualifiers in the format strings. You enter the name once as ‘Forenames Surname’ (Joan DeJean); the templates produce the right form in each output: ‘Joan DeJean’ in the footnote, ‘DeJean’ in the short footnote, ‘DeJean, Joan’ in the bibliography.

This applies to the templates whose Author/Creator is a person: Basic Publication (Book and Website), Book with Parts (chapter author), Journal or Magazine Article, Newspaper Article, Complex Website (database author), Basic Authored Manuscript and Private Holdings. The other templates have institutional authors — a county registrar or a cemetery, say — and use plain Text fields, entered as you want them displayed.

The personal-author templates also provide an Additional Authors field (optional, Text) for co-authors after the first. Type them exactly as you want them to appear, including any commas and ‘and’ before the last name: and Jane Smith, or Jane Smith, John Brown and Bob Jones. The footnote and bibliography both display this verbatim — the bibliography does not reverse it, so the first author’s surname-first order is preserved while co-authors stay in natural order. (The reason this needs a separate field rather than letting the Name field handle multiple names is that the :REVERSE qualifier only parses a single name; given ‘John Smith and Jane Doe’ it returns ‘Doe, John Smith and Jane’, which is no use to anyone.)

Index entries and finding aids — use Complex Websites, not Certificate

A common first move when adding a GRO BMD index hit is to reach for the Birth, Death, or Marriage Certificate template. It doesn’t fit, and the template’s description says so explicitly. Use Complex Website instead.

The reasoning is that an index entry isn’t the underlying vital record — it’s a derivative finding aid produced from that record. The database (or website) is the thing you actually consulted; the underlying GRO index is what the database cites as its source of source. That maps cleanly onto Complex Website’s structure: the database is Layer 1, the website that hosts it is Layer 2, and the underlying records are reported as Source Descriptor (Layer 3). The same logic applies to FreeBMD, FindMyPast, Ancestry, GRO’s own search interface and any other catalogue search or online index to a record series.

When you go on to order the certificate itself, cite that with the Birth, Death, or Marriage Certificate template. If you ever consult the underlying register entry in person, cite it with the Record Book template. The index entry, the certificate and the register entry are three separate sources; treat them as such.

Known limitations

The templates work within Family Historian’s source-template format language, which has some limitations. They’re worth knowing about so you understand why a particular template behaves as it does, or so you can work around them in your own data entry.

Bibliography fields can’t be reliably auto-capitalised. Where a field appears after a top-level full stop in a Bibliography format, you’d expect the first letter of the field’s content to capitalise automatically. It doesn’t. An expression workaround in the templates force-uppercases the first character, but it can’t tell whether capitalisation is contextually right, so it’ll wrongly uppercase content that should stay lower-case (‘iPhone’, ‘eBay’, ‘von Neumann’).

Private-details syntax \[\[…]] is not honoured in source-template formats. Text inside double square brackets is meant to be suppressed in citations but visible in your data. Inside source templates it isn’t — the text appears in the citation anyway. This particularly affects Private Holdings, where you might want to mark a holder’s name or address as private. The workaround is to keep private details out of template fields entirely and put them in the Source Note instead, where \[\[…]] is respected. The Private Holdings template carries warnings about this in several places.

Short footnotes aren’t always as compact as the printed guide. The canonical short-footnote form assumes predictable content shapes — a clean short title, a descriptor that can be abbreviated. Where the field contents are too variable to abbreviate reliably, the templates fall back to a fuller form rather than producing something misleadingly truncated. If you cite heavily from one source and want a tighter short form, clone the template and edit its Short Footnote string by hand.

Feedback

If a real-world citation comes out malformed, please flag it on the Sources Citations and Repositories forum on FHUG and I’ll fold the fix into a v2 of the file.