Online image of ship's manifest

Shannon you write:

When I go to my print version of EE, section 11.17 is "Port Manifests (Inland Ports)." On this EE website, it is "Passenger Manifests: Online Images" which is what I need.  Can you point me to the correct section? Thanks!

Can you point me to the exact page you are referencing at this website? There are many thousands of pages here at this website, now. When I query for "Passenger Manifests: Online Images" I get a number of hits, including this one:

https://www.evidenceexplained.com/node/1648

If this is what you are referring to, is there something about History-Hunter's example (also based on an Ancestry data base) that does not work for you?

 

Shannon, you have opened a can of worms.  Go get a cup of coffee or a glass of wine. Then come back. By the time you read through all this you may shreik: Ye gods! Do I have to go through this with every Ancestry citation to National Archives Records?!!   Fortunately, you won't. Once we get these basics under our belt, we can fairly quickly pick through the dumpster of information Ancestry provides and extract what's essential.

First you ask: “When I am looking at the actual image from a database is that preferable to citing the image itself.”  In response, I will ask a question: If you did not “cite the image itself,” what would you be citing?

Two sources are involved here:

1. The original record, which you are viewing as an image online;

2. The database that provides that image.

Both need to be cited. Readers (and you at a later date after your recollection has grown cold) need to know where that imaged record can be found and the format in which you viewed it. You did not go to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to view it. You viewed it in an Ancestry database. If you were to find it in a different database, it might be more legible or less legible. One or the other database might arrange the documents differently or identify them differently.  That is why we cite what we are using; and in this case, we are using two things: an image of the original and the database that provides the image.

EE would recommend a few tweaks to your draft citation to tighten it.  They primarily address three issues:

Difference between a citation and a research note:

A citation is not the place to record all the details that a source provides. A citation’s purpose is two-fold:

• To record the information needed to relocate the source.

• To record details about the source that affect our evaluation of the source.

From this perspective, some of the details in your draft citation should be moved into your research notes—whereever you put  your abstracts, extracts, or transcriptions—be it a research report or a database.  Several sections of EE give examples of similar details that would go in our research notes, rather than citation—e.g., 6.4, 6.27–28, 8.11, and 13.37.

 

Citing a database (or book chapter) that’s part of a larger standalone work vs. citing that larger work itself.

The basic rule—not just in EE but in almost every style guide—is this: Titles to standalone works are italicized; titles to parts of a larger work carry quotation marks. (EE 2.22)

Thus,

• When we cite titles of books or journals, we italicize them. When we cite titles of chapters within books or articles within journals, we place those smaller-part titles in quotation marks.

• When we cite a website (a standalone item), we italicize the title. When we cite a database or article at a website, we place that smaller-part title in quotation marks.

In Layer 2 of your draft citation, you'll note that you have two different titles italicized.

 

Whether to focus our citation on the original document or the database that provides the image:

As a general rule,

• When we eyeball the online image, if that image or set of images contains all the data we need to create a full citation to the original document, we can feature the original; then we would cite the website provider in Layer 2.

• When we eyeball the online image, if we don’t have sufficient data to create a full citation to the original, then we begin our citation with the website that provided the image and we state what we found there; then in Layer 2 we state where the website says the image came from.

QuickLessons 25 and 26 explain this in more detail.  Especially read QL 25, which deals with Path citations because that is the way Ancestry has structured the database you are using. (Yes, it would be nice if every provider structured every one of their databases the same way so that one pattern would suffice for everything. But that's not the reality we deal with.)

Also in your specific case, when we examine the image you are using, there is no way to create a full citation to the original source. The three-page manifest has been stripped out of the collection that it belongs with. Ancestry tells us that it came from thus-and such, but we have no way of knowing whether that information is accurate or not without doing additional research in outside sources. (And no, we cannot just “take the word” of a provider that their information is accurate. We would not “borrow” the citation of a book author because, being human, they err far more frequently than we would like; likewise for online image providers.)

All things considered, the clearest and cleanest way to cite anything from this database would be this:

“New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (Including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820–1957,” database with images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7488/ : accessed 4 November 2021) > Date > 1904 > Sep > 23 > Caribbee > image 2,  “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the Commissioner of Immigration,” S.S. Caribee, arriving 23 September 1904; citing …

Now this is the point at which we wade into troubled waters—trying to figure out exactly what it is that Ancestry is citing.  Ancestry actually gives us this for its own source.

Source Citation 

Year: 1904; Arrival: New York, New York, USA; Microfilm Serial: T715, 1897-1957; Line: 1; Page Number: 19

Description

Ship or Roll Number: Caribbee

Source Information

Ancestry.com. New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820-1957 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010.

Original data:Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820-1897. Microfilm Publication M237, 675 rolls. NAI: 6256867. Records of the U.S. Customs Service, Record Group 36. National Archives at Washington, D.C. Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1897-1957. Microfilm Publication T715, 8892 rolls. NAI: 300346. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service; National Archives at Washington, D.C. Supplemental Manifests of Alien Passengers and Crew Members Who Arrived on Vessels at New York, New York, Who Were Inspected for Admission, and Related Index, compiled 1887-1952. Microfilm Publication A3461, 21 rolls. NAI: 3887372. RG 85, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787-2004; Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service; National Archives, Washington, D.C. Index to Alien Crewmen Who Were Discharged or Who Deserted at New York, New York, May 1917-Nov. 1957. Microfilm Publication A3417. NAI: 4497925. National Archives at Washington, D.C. Passenger Lists, 1962-1972, and Crew Lists, 1943-1972, of Vessels Arriving at Oswego, New York. Microfilm Publication A3426. NAI: 4441521. National Archives at Washington, D.C.

Source Description

This database is an index to the passenger lists of ships arriving from foreign ports at the port of New York from 1820-1957. In addition, the names found in the index are linked to actual images of the passenger lists. Information contained in the index includes given name, surname, age, gender, arrival date, port of arrival, port of departure and ship name.

Using all of this in our own citation is overkill to the nth degree. If we use the first part, which Ancestry labels “Source Citation,” we still don’t have enough data to fully identify Ancestry’s source—and we also have data that does not “belong together.” 

• Ancestry’s “citation” identifies the microfilm publication number but does not identify the microfilm publication’s title. In fact, that “citation’ does not even tell us who created and published the microfilm.

• The cited microfilm publication actually consists of 8,892 rolls of film. But the “citation” does not tell us which roll the Caribbee’s list appears on.

• This “citation” tells us that it’s somewhere in microfilm publication T715 at Line 1 of page number 19. But every roll of T715, has a page 19 and a line 1

As we plow through the “Source Information” paragraph, we learn a bit more about microfilm, we learn more about T715:

• This is where we learn that T 715 consists of 8,892 rolls of film; but we still are not told which specific roll has the Caribbee’s manifest.

• We’re also given a curious and unexplained number “NAI: 300346.” To understand this, the user of Ancestry’s “source information” would have to know about the online National Archives Catalog and the fact that each record set or microfilm collection or book entered into this online catalog is assigned a distinctive NAI number.  With this number, an Ancestry user can go to catalog.archives.gov, query for the number, and get a fuller description. But they still will not know what microfilm roll has the Caribbee’s manifest.  For that, the user would have to go to yet another publication, not online, that is cited in the online catalog.

Have I lost you yet?

All things considered, the last layer of EE’s citation—where we report the source-of-the-source info given by the provider—would have to settle for citing publisher, microfilm ID number, Title, and catalog number.  These are the four most-critical elements to the identification of what you are using.

“New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820–1957,” database with images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7488/ : accessed 4 November 2021) > Date > 1904 > Sep > 23 > Caribbee > image 2,  “List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the Commissioner of Immigration,” S.S. Caribee, arriving 23 September 1904; citing National Archives microfilm publication Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 6/16/1897 –7/3/1957, micropublication number T715 (8,892 rolls; exact roll unidentified), National Archives catalog identifier NAI: 300346.   

This is still long, but at least we shaved 41 words.

Your draft citation also included the following in your source-of-the-source layer:

Supplemental Manifests of Alien Passengers and Crew Members Who Arrived on Vessels at New York, New York, Who Were Inspected for Admission and Related Index,” compiled 1887–1952, microfilm publication A3462, 21 rolls.

Why do you think this is part of the citation? Did you find something to indicate that the Caribbee’s manifest appears in two separate microfilm series—T175 and A3462?

Shannon,

Yes, the NARA catalog entry provides the exact title of the microfilm publication. Here, we would have two option, neither of them ideal:

1. Add it from the NARA catalog entry that we ferreted out on our own (which is rarely the best practice); or
2. Give the incomplete title, as given by Ancestry, and put quotation marks around the quote.

The problem with Option 2 is that the title of the microfilm publication has be italicized, not put in quote marks. Using italics to say those words represent a published title and then adding quote marks (which normally mean a part of a standalone publication) but in this case would be put there to show that we were quoting what our provider offered) would confuse our readers and look stupid. If Ancestry had given a succinct source-of-the-source citation that could be simply quoted, by using it all and putting quote marks around the whole, then there would not be that confusion. But because we have to pull bits and pieces of data out of Ancestry smorgasbord of info, there was nothing we could succinctly and clearly quote. (This is why EE 2.1 cautions that citation is an art, not a science!)

Re Ancestry's lumping of microfilm publication A3462 with T715 (and several others):

Providers such as Ancestry often create their own arbitrary "collection" that is significantly different from the original record set. We see that in this case, where Ancestry created its own collection that covers several different NARA film, simply because Ancestry saw a commonality between them. Ancestry combined them, even though they are not combined at NARA and they are not combined on the film. Then Ancestry gives us that long paragraph that identifies all the film, even those that have nothing to do with the one film on which our one ship manifest appears. We have to pick out what pertains to our citation and ignore the rest.

I note that the National Archives film was cited, and I think it's important in the case of a ship manifest.

I also recall a post that said we didn't have to cite the National Archives film information for census images we view at online providers because we didn't view the image at the National Archives.

Is there a difference in these instances, or must we always cite the film from which an image derives?

kohlerbj, U.S. census images (population returns) are so ubiquitous on the web. Identifying them is straight forward. All images go back to those produced by NARA and matching the derivative to the original film is simple.

Not so, the situation with passenger manifests.