TRANSITIONAL-GENEALOGISTS-FORUM-L Archives

From: <>
Subject: Re: [TGF] Improved citation?
Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:52:08 -0700

Elizabeth,

This is an interesting citation example.

What are you trying to write a citation for?

a list of individuals? There are 149 individuals listed starting with
Milton Raynir and ending with Dexter Parks. Are these the individuals
the citation is for?

a list of adjacent families?

a list of adjacent dwellings?

I'd like to understand better the exact purpose of this citation.


Your current draft:
===
1860 U.S. census, Hampden County, Massachusetts, population schedule,
Russell, Russell Post Office, pp. 9-12, (penned), pp. 599-602 (penned),
Dwellings 74-93, Milton Raynir-Dexter Parks families; digital images,
Ancestry.com(http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 6 Feb 2011); citing
National Archives microfilm publication M653, roll 504.
===

Assuming you want to provide a citation for every dwelling/family in the
census starting with the one including Milton Raynir and ending with the
one including Dexter Parks, this would be my version:

===
1860 U.S. census, Hampden County, Massachusetts, population schedule,
Russell, pp. 8-12 (penned), dwellings 72-93, Henry Raynir-Robert Parke
families (70-93); digital images, Ancestry.com(http://www.ancestry.com:
accessed 6 Feb 2011); citing NARA microfilm publication M653, roll 504.
===

Milton Raynir is in Henry Raynir's household (dwelling 72, family 70).
The enumeration for this household starts on page 8.
Dexter Parks is in Robert Parks' household (dwelling 93, family 93).


dropped "Russell Post Office"
retained your decisions to use the "pp." abbreviation" and the word
"penned"
changed the beginning page range to 8, because that's where dwelling
72/family 70 begins.
deleted the comma from "pp. 9-12, (penned)"
dropped "pp. 599-602 (penned)" What model are you following that
includes these numbers?
changed "dwellings" to all lower case
changed the dwelling & family ranges to reflect the beginning and end
households you've indicated

I'm not sure what the benefit is to giving individual names in this
citation. I've shown how I would do what you were trying to do. But I
don't know why you decided to include names rather than just list the
range of family numbers. I need to understand better what this
citation's purpose is.

I left your use of a semicolon to set off the "citing NARA" phrase.
changed "National Archives" to "NARA" because this is the reference I've
seen used most often. "National Archives" is neither the full name of
the agency, nor an accepted abbreviation, as far as I know.

If the citation is for the 149 individuals starting with Milton, ending
with Dexter, I'd say something like "line 1, page 9 (penned) through
line 32, page 12 (penned)" I just made that up because the current
census citation models don't talk about referencing line numbers very
often, and I don't know how this is usually handled. The "(penned)"
makes it somewhat awkward, but I would think there's no reason to
include dwelling or family numbers, or names of individuals if what you
want to cite is a portion of the enumeration that can't be easily
expressed in those terms (dwelling or family numbers). I would imagine
that there would be a need for this type of citation for transcribing or
abstracting projects, etc.

Hope some of this helps,

Linda
____________
Linda Gardner
Massachusetts


> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [TGF] Improved citation?
> From: Elizabeth Banas <>
> Date: Mon, February 07, 2011 8:08 pm
> To: TGF <>
>
>
> Dear TGF Members,
>
> This morning I submitted a citation which caused quite a stir.
>
> The Home Study Course assignment is comprised of two reports based on statistical information gleaned from 150 people in two census' years. The objective of the reports is to support the conclusions drawn from the census data, by way of other sources such as town histories.
>
> After much thought and reading, which included EE and on-line citation resources, I decided to approach this citation from a slightly different direction. (I am probably way off base.) I used the model for census images from Quicksheet, Citing Online Historical Resources, Evidence! Style*, publiished in 2007 for the citation I presented this morning. However, it just didn't seem to work for me or anyone else. I have to bear in mind the instructions the grader gave me (after trying to make sense of my grossly deficient census citations for this lesson). Therefore, I could not incorporate some of the suggestion given by this list.
>
> I used dwelling number 74 which appears on page 8 , though I cite page 9, because Milton Raynir resided in that household which carries over to page 9 where his name appears.
>
>
> 1860 U.S. census, Hampden County, Massachusetts, population schedule, Russell, Russell Post Office, pp. 9-12, (penned), pp. 599-602 (penned), Dwellings 74-93, Milton Raynir-Dexter Parks families; digital images, Ancestry.com(http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 6 Feb 2011); citing National Archives microfilm publication M653, roll 504.
>
> Please comment. I need guidence.
>
> Thank-you!
>
> Elizabeth Banas
> The Transitional Genealogists List was created to provide a supportive environment for genealogists to learn best practices as they transition to professional level work. Please respect the kind intentions of this list.
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This thread:

• [TGF] Improved citation? by Elizabeth Banas <>
  • Re: [TGF] Improved citation? by "Carl Oehmann" <>