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My great-grandfather led a fairly ordinary life. A child of German immigrants, he grew up in Indiana, served in the regular Army during the Civil War, then headed west to Kansas.

He married, had children, worked as a farmer, then he died.

For some family history researchers, the basic outline of a person's life is enough in their quest to collect more and more names to add to their ancestral database.

For others, though, the bony outline isn't enough. We want to add some meat and flesh to that skeletal ancestor.

In order to turn those names on our pedigree charts into three-dimensional characters, we hunt down all of the historical residue they left behind.

So, to flesh out my great-granddad I used these sources: a christening record in New York City; census records in Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma; city directories in Fort Wayne and Kansas City; newspapers in Kansas; military service and pension records; probate records; land records; court records; a marriage record; a death record; photographs; and a biography written by his daughter.

Even an ordinary life can produce an extraordinary amount of ancestral minutiae.

We genealogists have a jolly time wearing our detective hats and finding all of those family factoids. But if you're in the genealogy game to produce results and to share your research, then you need to remember to document what you found and where you found it.

You might think you'll never share your research with anyone. You might think the whole hunt is just for your own amusement, so why bother with documentation?

You may start out thinking that, but once you dig deeper into genealogy, you will eventually want to preserve your research for your family or to share all the colorful details about your ancestors with a genealogical society.

Plus, because of the twisting and turning nature of genealogical research, you will need to go back and look at records more than once. If you didn't document where you found something, you'll tear your hair out looking for that obscure clue again.

In order for your research to be considered valid and not ancestral fiction, you need to include a citation for every detail that isn't common knowledge. So unless your family is full of famous people, you need to document everything.

A new book, "Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace," answers all of the questions related to documenting your family history research.

The author, Elizabeth Shown Mills, illustrates what details we need for each source and how to format those details when we record our research.

The 800-plus-page book deals with dozens of resources ranging from bound corporate records to ships' passenger lists to inmate case files to podcasts.

Mills asserts that "citation is an art, not a science." She's right, of course, because genealogists are a clever bunch and we're always discovering some new and obscure type of record.

So, sometimes we may have to wing it when it comes to formatting a citation. The key thing is to remain disciplined about writing down all of the major identifiers about every source we use.