Citing images from the Holbrook Collection

Ah, Kristine. We love that records are delivered to our desktops today, but the delivery mechanisms and the data provided by the suppliers (or lack of it) definitely complicate our work!

You've done a good job of analyzing what you're using, via Holbrook's preface to his fiche publication that Ancestry imaged. The set of records is almost certainly the ones on Holbrook’s fiche 2. His description of fiche 2 says that "vital and town records" for 1765–1832 end on p. 102. Your record is on image 51 (being p. 93). Image 56 (which is numbered p. 102) ends that set of VRs; and the rest of the old register consists of town records only. Following the pagination for the rest of the register, we can match that to fiches 3–10 which end at p. 156 (renumbered as 458, thereby matching the end of Holbrook's fiche 10).

All that aside, we still don't know what title is on the register itself because the cover wasn’t filmed. Holbrook, at image 2, has a list of record sets; and the record set that appears on fiches 1–10 is called by him "Charlemont Town Records 1765–1826, 102 + 458 pages," but we don't know that there exists a volume at Charlemont titled "Charlemont Town Records 1765–1826."

The "102 + 458 pages" that he added to this description, in other circumstances, might suggest there were two books involved; but in this case, it seems to reflect the fact that 102 pages were numbered in one direction, then the book was flipped and 458 pages numbered in the other direction (or vice-versa). Still, we don't know what label is on the cover because he gives another secondary label for the 56 pages that cover your record.

Your Layer 1 and your second "idea" for Layer 2 will handle the situation well, with just a bit of tinkering.

After Layer 1, in which you cite the Ancestry database that delivers the images, EE would not say "citing ...."  When we identify a database and a website provider and then say "citing ...," we are saying that the provider is doing the citing. In this case, Ancestry does not cite anything in particular.

“Citing …” is a bridge word between layers, used to explain the connection of one layer to the next. There are other bridge words that apply in other cases. In this case the appropriate bridge word would be “imaging … ,” after which we say what is imaged by that Ancestry database we've just cited.

All points considered would give us this:

"Massachusetts, U.S., Town and Vital Records, 1620–1988," database with images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2495/ : accessed 6 July 2021), > Charlemont > Town Records > image 51 (p. 92 of unnamed register), Thomas Judd, born 1812; citing imaging "Charlemont births and deaths, 1803-1843," in Jay Mack Holbrook, Massachusetts Vital Records, Charlemont 1765–1899 (Oxford, Mass.: Holbrook Research Institute, 1987), unnamed register, p. 92; Holbrook’s foreword identifies the record set as “Vital & Town Records 1765–1832,” a subset of “Charlemont Town Records 1765–1826.”

Clean copy would be this:

"Massachusetts, U.S., Town and Vital Records, 1620–1988," database with images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2495/ : accessed 6 July 2021), > Charlemont > Town Records > image 51, Thomas Judd, born 1812; imaging Jay Mack Holbrook, Massachusetts Vital Records, Charlemont 1765–1899 (Oxford, Mass.: Holbrook Research Institute, 1987), unnamed register, p. 92; Holbrook’s foreword identifies the record set as “Vital & Town Records 1765–1832,” a subset of “Charlemont Town Records 1765–1826.”