Citation of online English Parish Register image with multiple entries of interest

History-Hunter,

As you suspected, EE does have a few suggestions. Let’s focus on the First Reference Note.

Your Layer 1 identifies the original volume this way:

Walton on Thames, St Mary Parish (Surrey, England), Register of Baptisms, vol. 2381/4/4, p. 10,

At this point, your reader would think: Volume 2381? Wow! That one parish had 2381 volumes? But, of course, the parish would not have that many volumes, which raises the question: 2381 volumes in what set of records? Searching the rest of that layer, we don’t find any further identifier to answer that question:

The answer is found in Layer 3 ("citing ...."), where you repeat what the provider (Layer 2) has to say about the source of its source. There in Layer 3 it becomes clear that the "volume" number—and those other slashes and numbers after it—represent the call number assigned by the Surrey History Center. 

That raises a second question: If this were a volume on a library shelf, when you cite the title would you then add the call number as part of the title?

And then, of course, there’s the issue of repeating in Layer 3 what has already been said in Layer 1.

The basic issue here is the need for a clear distinction between what we’ve actually used (Layer 1) and what our provider says about its source (Layer 3). We all love the websites that deliver images of records; but human nature being what it is, their source identifications are not always accurate. If we make a practice of assuming their data is correct and inserting it into our identification of the original, we can easily end up misidentifying our source.

When we flip back to the start of the database, we find the cover of this volume at image 2:

​

There we see the printed title, “Register of Baptisms,” along with two penciled notations:

• 1880–1892
• 2381/4/4  [the history center’s call number]

The date range is essential to your identification of the volume—and to your citation—given that the only date that appears in your citation is the much broader range from the database: 1813–1917. 

On the issue of dates, EE would elaborate a bit on the not-so-common situation that you’re dealing with here: the simultaneous baptisms of seven siblings of different ages. One way of handling it might be this:

Walton on Thames, St Mary Parish (Surrey, England), Register of Baptisms, 1880–1892, p. 10, April 1881 baptisms of seven children of Arthur and Ellen Colborne: Ernest Augustus (b. 1881), Arthur Francis (b. 1867), Frances Ella (b. 1869), Walter Percy (b. 1871), Ethleen Alice (b. 1873), Louis Adolphus (b. 1875), and Leopold Cyril (b. 1878); imaged in “Surrey, England, Church of England Baptisms, 1813-1917,” database, Ancestry (https://search.ancestry.ca/search/db.aspx?dbid=4772 : accessed 11 October 2019), image 10 of 58; citing reference 2381/4/4, Surrey Church of England Parish Registers, Surrey History Centre, Woking, Surrey, England.

As you’ll notice, EE would

• replace the string of consecutive entry numbers, which are not needed to find each entry, with the birth year of the child. That makes much clearer to your readers (and you at a later date after your recollection has gone cold) what is going on in this record.
• replace the identifier "vol." with "reference," the term actually used by your provider. We still don't know that there are 2381 volumes. The provider doesn't say that either. That 2381 might represent a record group number, or a series number, rather than the number of bound books. Typically, with British records we find that ____/___/___ represents a record group, series, and piece or item (EE 7.38)

I suspect that your discussion of the family event will also note one other silent but poignant issue: Across fourteen years of marriage, for whatever reason, the parents took none of their children to a church for christening. In January 1881, their seventh child was born. On April 11, that three-month-old infant died after a private baptism. That death surely prompted the decision, ten days later, to have all their children baptized.

As for your Source List Entry, which is always generic in comparison to the specific Reference Note, you have a choice. You might cite the database, or you might prefer to cite the parish and its individual register.

H-H,

Re point 2: The date range penciled on the image of the cover is 1880–1892. That matches exactly what you described for the first and last pages of the volume. So, yes, it's "really valid to use the penciled date range [from the cover] in the citation."

Point 3: Yes

Point raised in your final "note."  It would be highly unusual (in my own experience) to find this set of children being baptized twice. Two lists may exist in two separate churches, with one list being a copy of an earlier list; but that doesn't seem to be the case here. Even when parents married in the church, baptisms did not always follow for the children—particularly if one of the parents was not an adherent to the church in which they married. This (in my own experience) is most common when the husband (i.e., the family's "lord and master") was not an adherent or some life event distanced him from the church.

Ach, my right-hand fingers were on the wrong keys. Instead of 880 in the year I typed 779. My apologies! I've corrected it in the "EE citation" above, so that others who don't read long threads will not be confused.