Fold3 "War of 1812 Pension Application" citation

Stokesy, turn to 11.40 Pension Files, particularly p. 606, where you'll find models for online images. A few things jump out in the draft above:

• The National Archives did not create the database called "War of 1812 Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files." That is a creation of the company that owns the website Fold3.
• After the name of the database, you should identify it as such so that your readers (and you at some later date) will know what the citation refers to. (No, not even a wonderful site like this one is guaranteed to last forever!) In this case, you are citing a "database with images."
• The name of the website is missing. That should be Fold3. Ancestry is the corporate owner of the company Fold3, but Fold3 is the creator of the same-named website.
• Fold3's job number is not consequential. What is essential is the set of basic details by which pension files themselves are identified. (See 11.40, as mentioned above.)
• Your citation needs to indicate that you are citing an image of the NARA-created card, so that no one will presume you are referring to a Fold3 database abstract.
• Your phrase "National Archives Catalog 564415" needs to have an added word for clarity. NA does not have 564415 catalogs. Clarity would be improved by using the full phrase shown in Fold3's "Info"—i.e., "National Archives Catalog ID: 564415.

Hope this helps. Citing NARA material is always complicated, no matter what form we find it in.

Stokesy, as much as we hate the thought, brevity is never a virtue when citing NARA material. What brevity creates is usually (a) an inability to understand what exactly the source is; and/or (b) an inability to relocate the source.  Accessing NARA records online now adds to that complexity because we have to identify the online source completely enough to locate the imaged record.

You've done well. In your citation, EE would make only a couple of tweaks:

“War of 1812 Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files,” database and images, Fold3 (https://www.fold3.com/image/313179761 : accessed 22 Dec 2016); image of abstract cards? for bounty-land warrant W016859 and WC14115; in widow Rebecca Gilbert’s pension claim (file?) 14113, service of Kenus Gilbert (Private,Capt. Andrew Breden’s Co., TN Militia), identifying Elizabeth Stokesbury as 1st wife; citing "War of 1812 Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files, compiled ca. 1871–1900, documenting the period 1812–ca.1900, National Archives Catalog ID: 564415, Record Group 15, Roll RG15-1812PB-Bx1378, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Discussion points:

• If you have two bounty land warrants, would you not have two abstract cards?
• If you use a semi-colon after the warrant numbers, you are saying that everything that comes after that is a new layer, involving a new source, but the bounty land warrants are in the pension file. No semi-colon is needed until you finish out the citation to the file and get ready to start your "source-of-the-source" layer.
• Was this  pension claim or a pension file? 
• Was there actually a list of wives for the man, or simply a statement identifying Elizabeth as his first wife?
• A close quotation mark needs to be added somewhere to indicate the end of the words you are actually quoting from Fold3's source-of-the-source data.

End of nitpicking. As I said: You did well.

Stokesy, your citation serves your needs. It's lengthy, but all those details are needed. Ideally, you would add one point more: the date of the affidavit that identifies Elizabeth and the name of the person who gave the affidavit.

More questions on this.  I have a pension file for Hiram Crain and his widow Susanah (Collen) Crain found at https://www.fold3.com/image/306592049, containing 42 images of various documents, including the index card.  I have been struggling for months trying to figure out how to distill this file into its component documents and construct source citations for each document.  First question:  Does it make sense, if I plan to cite all the documents in the file, to extract the data from and then cite the index card?  And I guess my second question is how the heck do I cite all the different documents contained in the file?  I have read over the section on pension files in EE, but for some reason, I still cannot wrap my poor brain around how to cite the different documents, some of which appear to be outer sleeves for other documents containing no identifying info but which are full of notes and scribbles.  Third question:  When citing images from Fold3, should we include Ancestry as the author, as you've done above [Ancestry (https://www.fold3.com/image/313179761]?  And when I copy the website address from my browser address bar, I do not get the "www", only "fold3.com/image/xxxx".  What is correct?  Please help...  I am starting to need therapy on this...  :-)

Hi, Greg.

As a starting point, remember two points made in the QuickStart Guide. On the page “The Basics: Manuscripts & Online Images,” we see this:

• “When an original manuscript is digitized online, we have two sources to cite in full—the original document and the website.”  This guildeline is then followed by two examples that cite the original document in Layer 1 and the website in Layer 2.
• “When we use a database with abstracts of records rather than images, our citation emphasizes the database and its entry, rather than the document. Then, as a second layer, we cite whatever source-of-the-source information our database provides.”

In the thread above, Stokesy preferred to begin his citation with the database in which he found the card.  Things would be clearer to you if we follow the QuickStart Guide and put the document and file in Layer 1 and the website provider in Layer 2.

Q1:Should you cite the card to represent the whole file?

No. the card is one document within the file.  If you intend to cite the file as a general reference—not to support a specific fact—then you cite the whole file.  In another reference note, when you need to cite a specific document (a card, an affidavit, etc.) you use the citation you’ve already created and simply add that document’s identity to the start of the citation. Turn again to EE11.40 (“Pension Files”). You will notice that Example 1 demonstrates how to cite the whole file, while examples 2 and 3 demonstrate how to cite specific documents within the file.

One caveat here:  These basic citations at 11.40 are to documents found at or received directly from NARA. They include the full “path” (file > collection > series > record group > archive & city) that NARA uses to organize its original manuscripts. However, when we are citing a file imaged online, we do not know from our personal experience the organizational path that NARA uses. Our website provider typically gives us some form of citation that identifies at least part of the NARA organizational data, but we do not know that the information it gives is complete or correct (yes, it does sometimes err).  Therefore, in our Layer 1’s identification of the document and file, we do not include the NARA path in that layer. 

Q2:  How do you cite all the different documents?

As noted above, you cite the specific document first, then tack on the citation to the file. As for how to cite a specific document, EE’s QuickStart Guide, same page as referenced above, begins with this guideline:

Most archived manuscripts … follow a basic pattern:

1. Author-creator, “Document Title,” specific page and/or date: file, collection, series; repository, city, state.

That’s the pattern you follow for citing anything at NARA. As also noted under Q1 above, you would not include the archival path, since you are not using the originals at NARA itself. Deleting the path would leave you with this:

1. Author-creator, “Document Title,” specific page and/or date …

If the piece of paper you are using does not have a specific title, then you use your own words to describe it. EE 2.23 (the basic chapter that lays down ground rules for citing everything) tells us this:

UNTITLED, UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT, REGISTER, ETC.

When a manuscript or record book has no title, you should create your own generic description. You do not place your words in italics, because the item is unpublished. You do not use quotation marks, because you are not quoting anything.

That’s all you have to do for individual documents: take the basic citation to the whole file, then add in front of it the three or four pieces of information that distinctively identify the individual document.

Q3: Should Ancestry be cited as the author of Fold3?

No. Ancestry is not the author/creator of Fold3’s database.  Apparently, in the long discussion of other points with Stokesy, I failed to replace his word “Ancestry” with Fold3. I have corrected it so it will not confuse anyone else.  Thank you for catching this.

As for why, when you copy the URL from the citation (https://www.fold3.com/image/313179761) into your browser address bar, “www” is dropped. That’s an IT issue. Some websites now are making that deletion, some are not. Thoughtful sites that have quit using the www make the correction automatically so that older URLs still work. When we use material at a website, we cite the URL currently used by the website for the material we are citing.