The Art of Self-Editing for Genealogists
Pam Anderson

“The Art of Self-Editing for Genealogists” focuses on editing genealogical manuscripts. Elizabeth Shown Mills first wrote in Evidence! Citation and Analysis for the Family Historian, 1997, “Effective source citation is an art, not a science. No formula can cover all situations.” The same applies to the skill of self-editing, which must be honed. This presentation begins with assessing our genealogical writing as a whole, progressing to paragraph development and organization, then to sentence structure, and finally to word choice, using Evidence Explained and The Chicago Manual of Style as our guides.

Pam Anderson owns Anderson CoGen in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. She used her master’s degree in Speech Pathology until 1991, becoming the owner of Anderson Construction until 2016. She began studying her family history in 2010, went professional in 2014, and obtained her Certification in 2018. Pam mentored ProGen 47 and GenProof 95; and taught self-editing classes for the Applied Genealogy Institute (2023, 2024) and the Association of Professional Genealogists (2024, 2025, 2026). She is a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, National Genealogical Society (NGS), New England Historical and Genealogical Society, New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, and the Maryland Genealogical Society (reviewer), Genealogical Society of New Jersey, and Utah Genealogical Society (editorial team). Pam has written articles for and presented to these and many other local organizations. She received the NGS “2025 Family History Writing Competition” award and “2024 Award of Merit.”