Layering Citations

Jennifer, I’ll take each one separately …

"Manchester, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1930," database with images, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.ca : accessed 10 November 2019); database entry for Garner-Barton marriage, 25 January 1902, Heaton Norris, England; citing reference GB127.C23/1/2/5.

This is almost perfect. EE would tweak in two ways;

• Take out the semicolon after the parenthetical publication data and replace it with a comma. Semicolons mark divisions between layers. Your phrase “database entry for Garner-Barton marriage …” is all part of the database layer. You now have a two-layer citation: Layer 1 for the database and Layer 2 for the source-of-the-source data that the database cites.
• In the source-of-the-source layer, the phrase “citing reference GB127.C23/1/2/5” will leave your readers (and maybe you, after your memory of this source has gone cold), wondering WHOSE reference number is being cited. At what archives would one find “GB127.C23/1/2/5”? Where is that archive located?

Secondly, you adapt EE’s 7.38 (which illustrates citing English records using traditional English cataloging codes), to create this for the image itself.

GB127.C23/1/2/5, p. 152, Garner-Barton marriage (1902); digital image, Ancestry.ca   (http://www.ancestry.ca : accessed 10 November 2019).

We have more problems here. Both of EE’s 7.38 examples cover manuscript material used onsite. The examples are these:

First Reference Note

     1. Egloshayle Parish (Cornwall, England), Parish Registers, vol. P52/1/1, p. 103, Mullis-Anney marriage (1656); Cornwall Record Office, Truro.

     2. Michaelstow Parish (Cornwall, England), Bishops’ Transcripts, vol. BT151/17, unnumbered 8th p., baptism of Catherine Mullis (1700); Cornwall Record Office, Truro.

Do you see the difference?

• A standard citation begins with identifying the author. (In this case, the parish is the author and, to fully identify the parish, we place the geographic location in parenthes.) Then we identify the book/document/whatever that the parish created. Then we say where within that book/document/whatever the relevant information can be found—page number, entry number, etc. Then, in the last layer of the citation we say where to find that manuscript material.
• Your draft begins with “GB 127.C23/1/2/5, p. 152," rather than the author. Who is the author? What’s the identity of the manuscript or register or series or whatever it is? A cataloging number in some archive is not the identity of the manuscript. It’s a cataloging number. If, say, I made a typo in your citation and referenced “GB 127/C3/1/2/5,” then anyone who used that citation at that archives would get the wrong register. And, again, we need to know where to find GB 127.C23/1/2/5, in order to search it's p. 152.

Going back to basics for those who are following our discussion, we have two ways of citing something in a database that offers images:

1. We may cite the database first, then the specific item of interest within the database.
2. If the database offers an image of the original, we may cite that original in layer 1, or at least as much information as we can verify from what is imaged. Then in Layer 2, we cite the database that provides the image and, in layer 3, we give whatever source-of-the-source data the provider gives us.

Your first example covers type 1, the citation to the database.  Type 2, the citation to the image, is what your second example aims for. Let's walk through what we actually see and use that exercise to assemble a citation.

First, when we use that database, we don’t see all that cataloging data that you've used to identify the marriage. What we see is this:

Our page of interest appears at image 82. (It’s page 152 in the original register, but image 82 in the Ancestry database.) This image of the original tells us the name of the church, the parish, and the county.  It doesn’t tell us whether this is a book of marriages or a church register that combines baptisms, marriages, and burials for a specific time frame. It doesn't tell us whether this register might be a transcription done by some entity. It doesn’t tell us the time frame or the volume number by which the original register was identified.

Above the register page, we see Ancestry’s database identification, but that’s Ancestry’s own data—that’s not part of the image. If we were to use Ancestry’s header as our identification for the register, we could get burned. Sometimes Ancestry's identification errs; humans input their data and humans aren't perfect.

Sometimes, with a filmed register such as this, if we flip back to the first several images in the database, we find more details about what we are using. In this case, image 1 gives us this:

This is the register’s cover, with nothing else to identify it. We do see in the upper left corner a stick-on tag on which a long-ago archivist penned C23/1/2/5. That's part of the cataloging number given to us by Ancestry. But Ancestry's cited catalog number is GB127.c23/1/2/5, some of which we can't verify from the image because it doesn't appear on that imaged tag.

As we continue examining the images, we find this at image 5:

This gives us the publication title and publication data for the pre-printed form-type register that the parish was using, but few parishes identify their registers by this pre-printed title. They normally identify their registers as, say, “Marriages, 1817-1862” or “Marriages, Book 8.”

At image 6, we find the first marriage record in the volume, dated 1897. When we flip to the end of the database, image 131, we see that the last record is dated 1906. That gives us a time frame for the register, as opposed to the far-broader 1754–1930 timeframe of the database.

When we scan all the pages, we see that the entire register consists of marriages with the same header on every page.

From all of this, the data we can verify with our own eyes, would create this citation:

     1. Christ Church Heaton Norton Parish (Lancaster, England), Marriage Register 1897–1906, p. 152, Garner-Barton marriage, 25 January 1902;

This is our Layer 1, our identification of the original—as much as we can verify from our examination of the images.  Notice that the identification of the register does not appear in quotation marks because we're not quoting anything. We don't have an actual register title or number by which to identify it. We're using our own words to identify what it is we have used, based on our examination of the whole register.

Then for Layer 2, we identify the database in which we found these images, along with the exact image in the database. Let's color that red:

      1. Christ Church Heaton Norton Parish (Lancaster, England), Marriage Register 1897-1906, p. 152, Garner-Barton marriage, 25 January 1902; imaged in "Manchester, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1930," database with images, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.ca : accessed 10 November 2019), image 82;

Note the inclusion of the image number. Because we're citing a specific image in that database, we need to cite the specific image. (In your first example, where you cited the database entry rather than an image, no image number was needed.)

Then in the last layer, we add the source-of-the-source data that Ancestry provides. Here, it's colored green:

      1. Christ Church Heaton Norton Parish (Lancaster, England), Marriage Register 1897-1906, p. 152, Garner-Barton marriage, 25 January 1902; imaged "Manchester, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1930," database with images, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.ca : accessed 10 November 2019), image 82; citing GB127.C23/1/2/5, Greater Manchester Record Office, Manchester, England.

The Ancestry header that we see above each image does not identify the archive or its location. For that, of course, we have to go back to the database page to read Ancestry's information about the collection itself.