City Directories - sections

By Eventide on Thu, 11/07/2019 - 15:10

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How would I approach citing an entry for a person in a city directory that appears in multiple sections - ie: an Alphabetical Listing and a Street and Avenue Guide, where the page numbers start over in each section?

I started the citation like this - but am not sure where to add where the person appears in the Street and Avenue Guide.

"Alphabetical Listing", Polks’s Hollywood Dania and Hallandale City Directory (Broward Couty, FLA.) 1969 Including Miramar and Pembroke Pines (R.L. Polk & C.O., Richmond, VA : 1969), Hollywood Historical Society (viewed: 18 October 2019), 416, "Maureen Kocak".

Also - I need to add 3 subsequent years. Without making it too complex, can I add the extra years all in one citation?

 

Submitted byEEon Fri, 11/08/2019 - 16:14

Eventide, the problem you're having with that city directory is one we face with many sources, published and unpublished. 

From your draft citation, I'm not sure how to sort out the details of what you have used. Typically, when citing a published book without an author, we begin with the name of the book and we always put that in italics so that our users will know that it it is the title. Your citation begins with a title in quotation marks, which suggests that it's a part or section of a book; but, if so, it would not be the first element of a citation.

EE's QuickStart guide, at the front of both the print and electronic versions, presents this basic citation for books:

Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015), 23.

That format—Author, Title (Publication Place: Publisher, date of publication), exact location within the publication—is adaptable to every type of publication or every type of unpublished book we use. To demonstrate, here are a few samples from EE:

Website with “sections”  (EE QuickStart Guide)

      1. Mary Ann Mason, “History of Child Custody in Virginia,” at Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Child Custody Project (childcustodyproject.org/essays/history-of-child-custody-in-virginia : accessed 1 April 2015), section “The Best Interests of the Child—1870–1950.”

Publication with “sections,” EE, p. 116:

“Some compilations, such as the Barbour Collection, are not consecutively paginated and entries are not numbered.  …  In citing Barbour’s bound volumes, you would identify the volume, the town (i.e., the section within the volume), and the specific entry (person, event, and date).”

Unpublished books with “sections,” EE p. 331:

     1. “San Antonio de Valero Parish (San Antonio, Texas), “Libre en que se Assientanlos Bautismos de los Indios de esta Mission de S. Anto de Valero," section Mission de Solano: unpaginated, entry 15, Xtobal [Christobal] Rangel (1712); Catholic Archives, Archdiocese of San Antonio.

Also in discussion of Swedish registers, EE p. 363:

“Individual ministerialbøker since 1812 have been divided into sections, with some variations. Typically, each section is paginated separately, so the section must be identified in a citation. …

      1. Fet Clerical District (Akershus County), vol. M I 10A, Section F, Vaccinered (Vaccinations), unpaginated, entry 94, 3 August 1855, Otto Pedersen; microfilm NOR 1-168, Statsarkivet, Oslo, Norway.

Or, when citing courthouse registers, EE p. 426, 452:

     1. Pendleton County, Kentucky, “Births, 1852–1859,” 1855 section, p. 1, for “Alexander,” black child attributed to “Father or Owner,” W. G. Woodson; Office of the Clerk of County Court, Falmouth.

     2. Walkill, New York, “1798 Assessment Roll—Third Division, N.Y., Towns of Minisink and Dearfork,” unpaginated section: "Slaveowners, Town of Walkill," for Thomas Eager; Town Assessor’s Office, Minisink.

Or, when citing a CD, EE p. 691:

     1. Carl A. Brasseaux, France’s Forgotten Legion: Service Records of French Military and Administrative Personnel Stationed in the Mississippi Valley and Gulf Coast Region, 1699–1769, CD-ROM (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), section: “Administrators, M–V," 2, “Maraffret Layssard.”

Do you see the common pattern?  We cite the source according to its type, with one small alteration: In the field for page number, we first cite the section name or number and then the page number. If there is no page number, then we say that it's unpaginated and give some other detail that specifies exactly where to look within that section.

Your last question (how to put three subsequent years into one citation, without making it too complex) is one I can't answer until we have a workable draft for just one year.

Submitted byEventideon Fri, 11/08/2019 - 17:08

I'm sorry I was not very clear in my message or citation. I viewed the actual directory in person. There was no author or compiler listed on the directory that I could find, which is why I had put the name of the section first. The person was listed in both sections of the directory - the "Alphabetical Listing" and the "Street and Avenue Guide". Each section had it own pagination.

Here's another stab at it, this time trying to reorder the components. I included the second section as well.

Polks’s Hollywood Dania and Hallandale City Directory (Broward Couty, FLA.) 1969 Including Miramar and Pembroke Pines, section "Alphabetical Listing,"  p. 416, entry for Maureen Kocak, also section "Street and Avenue Guide" p.376, entry for Maureen Kocak, (R.L. Polk & C.O., Richmond, VA : 1969).

Does that work?

Submitted byEEon Fri, 11/08/2019 - 19:16

Eventide, you're getting there. Let's go back to the basic format for citing books and other standalone publications (not just in EE but in almost all citation styles):

Author, Title (Publication Place: Publisher, date of publication), specific place or item.

Following this pattern, we need to move the publication data. (Publication data doesn't modify Maureen Kocak. It modifies the title of the book, so it's attached to the book.) Your citation draft is this:

Polks’s Hollywood Dania and Hallandale City Directory (Broward Couty, FLA.) 1969 Including Miramar and Pembroke Pines, section "Alphabetical Listing,"  p. 416, entry for Maureen Kocak, also section "Street and Avenue Guide" p.376, entry for Maureen Kocak, (R.L. Polk & C.O., Richmond, VA : 1969).

Moving the publication data would give us this.

Polks's Hollywood Dania and Hallandale City Directory (Broward Couty, FLA.) 1969 Including Miramar and Pembroke Pines (R.L. Polk & C.O., Richmond, VA : 1969), section "Alphabetical Listing,"  p. 416, entry for Maureen Kocak; also section "Street and Avenue Guide" p.376, entry for Maureen Kocak.

A couple of spelling and punctuation issues should also be addressed. I could not find this 1969 issue in any online catalog, to verify the exact title, but I did find a similarly titled 1974 edition. "Polk's" (one 's') is the standard spelling for all the thousands of directories the company created. The 1974 edition for Hollywood also abbreviates the state name in the title, but it does not use all capital letters for that abbreviation. The publisher uses the standard state abbreviation "Fla." (No commercial publisher would use all capital letters there.) The final results would be this.

Polk's Hollywood, Dania and Hallandale City Directory (Broward County, Fla.) 1969; Including Miramar and Pembroke Pines (R.L. Polk & Co., Richmond, VA : 1969), section "Alphabetical Listing,"  p. 416, entry for Maureen Kocak; also section "Street and Avenue Guide" p.376, entry for Maureen Kocak.

You handled well the addition of data for the second section of the book. Our only tweak there was to use a semicolon rather than a comma to separate the data for the two sections. (The standard punctuation rule for commas and semicolons that our teachers tried to instill in us back in fourth grade when all that was all boring and meaningless to us is that commas are used to separate similar items in a series. When we have multiple sets of items for which commas are needed to separate the items, we use a semicolon to separate the sets.)

 

Submitted byTamion Sat, 11/16/2019 - 12:21

Just when I thought I understood citing my sources, I come across information about city directories and discover that I really don't have a clue as to what I am doing. Help is needed please as I try cleaning up my citations. I am struggling with the below citation. How do I communicate that I was searching the Allen County Genealogy Society webpage and through a link was directed to the Internet Archive webpage to view an image of this particular directory? I believe I have cited the image and then the website, but the source of the source is where I get confused. Am I citing ACGSI website or the book and publisher or both?

 

Fort Wayne, Indiana, city directory, (1885-1886), database with images, Internet Archive (www.archive.org : downloaded 29 September 2019) entry for Frederick Belchner [Belschner] and Mary Belchner [Belschner]; citing Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center (www.acgsi.org/genweb/fort-wayne/city-directories.html); citing Fort Wayne City Directory, 1885-1886, volume 9 (Detroit, Michigan: R. L. Polk & Co., 1885), page 92.