I understand why readers want sources: Some need the reassurance that a document or editorial claim is legitimate before they pass along a story to others; many discover a previously unknown event or statement that they want to use in their own projects.

Understand, though, that I earn my living through my research, and my reputation through my writing.

Keepa is an informal venue. It is not a formal publication with the same standards of scholarly citation as a book or journal article. Keepa is primarily a social gathering place for those who share my faith, and is not a database to be mined for others’ projects.

If you are a scholar yourself, you recognize the skill and knowledge and labor and sheer time that goes into uncovering new sources and piecing together new stories from scattered primary records. Just as you would find it out of place for a fellow historian to approach you after a paper on current work at a professional association and demand your sources for use in his own work, I find it as unseemly to be requested to turn over the fruits of my research, and the raw materials of my business, to someone who stumbled upon Keepa in a Google search.

Your welcome to cite to Keepa as your source, and every post now includes a citation guide in both MLA and APA styles to help you with your citations.

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That said, I do sometimes share my sources – sometimes for payment (that is my business, although not everything I share on Keepa is automatically for sale); sometimes for collegiality; many, many times because I love to restore a piece of someone’s forgotten family history. Understand that such courtesy is entirely at my discretion and is always based on the reasonableness of the request.

And by golly, if you do ask for my sources or anything else, and I do send them to you, please have the decency to send an acknowledgment of some kind. Every time someone treats me like a vending machine instead of a human being, the next dozen requests get ignored.