Citing multiple yearly periodicals for the same fact

By waterboysh on Wed, 09/30/2020 - 08:47

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Hopefully the subject makes sense. I wasn't really sure how to word it best. Here's the situation; I found my great great grandfather in a city directory on Ancestry. So I went forward and backward from that year and pulled every image for the years I found him. The citation for the original I found, before I started looking for more, looked like this.

Polk's Memphis (Shelby County, Tenn.) City Directory 1941 (St. Louis, Missouri: R. L. Polk & Co., 1941), p. 477; database with images, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : downloaded 26 March 2020), "U.S. City Directories, 1822-1995", Tennessee > Memphis >1941 > Memphis, Tennessee, City Directory, 1941 > image 554 of 938.

I am using these entries in the city directory as proof of residence and occupation. But now I also have images for 1934, 1935, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1943. That's just for one address. He apparently moved sometime between 1943 and 1946 to a new address and lived there until he died in 1963. I have about a dozen images from various images of the City Directory between 1946 - 1963.

All the information would be the same in the citation from year to year. The only thing that changes is the year, and the exact path in the database at Ancestry. Is there a good way to cite them all in one fell swoop? Another reason I want to do this is so I don't have to create a bunch of sources in my database, one for each year. If there's not really a better way to do it, maybe I will just cite the earliest year and the latest year and in my research notes put that I found him for various years in-between. Thoughts?

I had not, but I'm looking at it now. When I first crafted my citation several months ago, I had only a single year and didn't think to go back and look. I should have known there'd be something in there. I have 2 followup questions.

1. I see the section that mentions what to do if there are slight variations in titles. For the directory I'm using, the year is part of the title. At the start of the citation, does this mean I can just use Polk's Memphis (Shelby County, Tenn.) City Directory [varying years], ? Would I keep my note in angle brackets italicized to indicate that the year is part of the title?

2. What about the 2nd layer of the citation that points to the image on Ancestry? The path in the database will be different for each image. The access date could technically be different too.