Semicolon usage when citing an Ancestry image of a NARA document.

Hi, Robert. Welcome. You're observant. You’ve noticed one of those situations in which one set of standard rules can bump into another set of rules and something has to be altered.

Long-standing rules:

• A semi-colon is used when items in a series have smaller parts that have to be separated by commas. The larger parts are then separated by semi-colons.
• From the start of the National Archives, NARA citations have used semi-colons for this same function.  

Digital-age problem:

When we cite an original document, imaged at an online site, we usually have two or three separate things to cite.

If our citation focuses upon the database, then we have two to cite to cite (using two “layers”):

• “Database Name,” Provider’s Website (URL=place of publication : date) > specific item of interest (or path if we have to drill down through menus to get to the specific item);
• Source-of-our-source data.

If our citation focuses upon the record, then we usually have three things to cite (using three “layers”):

• Original document in standard form for that type of manuscript;
• “Database Name,” Provider’s Website (URL=place of publication : date) > specific item of interest (or path if we have to drill down through menus)l
• Source-of-our-source data.

In either case, the largest elements of our citation to digitally-published records are the layers. Semi-colons are used to separate the two or three layers.

When we cite a document from NARA that is imaged in a database, we rarely have all data needed to make a complete NARA citation that would require the use of semi-colons. Therefore, we do not try to structure a NARA citation as though we had gone to the archives and used the original.

What we do is use the “specific item of interest” field to identify the imaged document as fully as possible, using only the evidence that we can discern for ourselves from those images. We do not insert in this field the source-of-the-source data given by the provider (which may or may not be accurate). We save that for the last layer of the citation.

You have well grasped those basics. I’m detailing them here for the benefit of our readers. In your draft citation, however, there are a couple of other points to clarify.  EE’s layer 1 would be this:

"California, Passenger and Crew Lists, 1882-1959," database with images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7949/ : accessed 9 October 2020) > “A3619 - Los Angeles, 1957-1964” > 134, > image ___, 6 March 1961, Airline & Flight PAA 516, arriving ______, Robert A Stowe; citing  ….

 Reasoning:

• The website title (the title of the publication) goes in italics. No comma separates the title from the publication data.
• The details that intervene between the parenthetical publication data and the specific item of interest is the path that we must take through Ancestry’s fly-out menus. The standard format for showing that is to use the > (greater than) sign to separate the exact words of each part.
• The last item in the path should be the provider’s image number. Once we've arrived there, we give the essential details that identify that item of interest.
• The place of arrival is one of those essential details.

As you will note, all the details in the “specific item of interest” field can be separated with commas, with no need for a semi-colon. To make this happen we state the date in standard genealogical format day MONTH year. That requires no internal commas as with March 6, 1961, ….

You do lose the reader of your citation in the second layer. When readers eyeball the relevant image, they do not see the data in your source-of-the-source layer. If they backtrack to the landing page for that database, where the source-of-the-source information usually appears, they still do not see the data you provided—i.e.,

NAI 2788930: Passenger & Crew Manifests of Airplanes Arriving at Los Angeles, California , 12/1/1957 - 11/3/1969; Record Group 85: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787-2009; National Archives, Washington, D.C.

What they see is this:

If they click on the hotlink “View All Sources,” they get a lonnnnng list of various collections at NARA, none of which are labeled 134. Most of your readers will be bewildered (and you may be a year or five from now when your recollection has gone cold) as to how you decided which item on this list was the relevant one—especially since your “citing …” data leads with an unexplained number “NAI 2788930.” One way to handle that would be to omit the word "citing" and add an explanation at the beginning of the source-of-the-source layer:

… Robert A Stowe; Ancestry’s source list for this collection (https://search.ancestry.com/search/dbextra.aspx?dbid=7949) identifies the source as “Passenger and Crew Manifests of Airplanes Arriving at Los Angeles, California, 9/1957 - 11/1969. NARA microform publication A3619. NAI [National Archives Identifier] 2788930. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787–2004, Record Group 85. The National Archives at Washington, D.C.”

Note two things here:

• The entire source-of-the-source data is cited exactly as provided and placed into quotation marks to indicate that you are quoting it exactly. This relegates the new and confusing NAI number to its secondary place in the citation and leaves in the primary position the collection name that the user is already familiar with.
• Any time we introduce an acronym sucy as NAI, we have to explain what it means at first usage. We do that by putting the full name in editorial brackets.

Glad to help!