The idea of writing citations may take you back to college or high school. I’m not sure anyone likes writing citations, but they are important to completing quality family history records! Have you ever seen a newspaper clipping about your ancestor somewhere online, but there’s no indication of when or where it’s from? This drives me crazy! I always have to take the time to try to find it so I know when and where it came from and I’m not always successful. Citations are a great way to spare yourself and others from this headache.
Generally speaking, Chicago style citations are the norm for family history. However, Chicago style doesn’t address every type of record that is used in family history research. How do you cite a World War II draft card? What about the records you stumbled across in your grandparents’ attic? If you want to take a deep dive into these questions, Evidence Explained by Elizabeth Shown Mills is the book for you. Here in this blog post, we’ll just cover some basics. That way you can write your own citations that capture the important details about the records you find.
Citations consist of five basic components—who, what, when, where, and where in.
Who made the record?
What kind of record is it?
When was the record created?
Where was the record created?
Where in the record collection is the record located? This often has two components, where the record is physically (the subject of the record, the page number, etc) and where the record is digitally (on Ancestry, FamilySearch, etc).
Let’s apply this to a common record, the census. I wanted to cite Isaac Williams on the 1870 Census. This is the citation I created:
United States Federal Government*, 1870 United States Federal Census, Dunklin, Greenville, South Carolina, p. 548 (front), entry for Isaac Williams; database with images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 12 May 2022).
Now, looking at the above citation for this one entry in the census, you might think it’s an information overload, right? Admittedly, the citations will be long, and may even seem tedious to create. However, keep in mind that there are literally hundreds of census pages and we want to include all pertinent information to help us (and other researchers) quickly locate the correct entry. It will take less time to cite a source correctly than it will to relocate the source.
Another common record you’ll need to cite is a death certificate. This is the citation I created for Nancy Ada Yager’s death certificate:
Texas*, “Texas, U.S., Death Certificates, 1903-1982,” death certificate of Nancy Ada Yager, state file no. 30305, 10 Apr 1968, Albany, Shackelford, Texas; database with images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 28 Jul 2022).
*Technically we can omit “United States Federal Government” from this specific citation because it is implied that the census was created by the federal government. It is not incorrect, however, to include this information. In this instance, it was included in order to maintain the integrity of the citation format when giving an example.
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