Newspaper Article w/ Ancestry Using Newspapers.com

Wayneson, have you used EE's chapter 14, which covers periodicals? EE14.22 (pp. 807–9) specifically covers "Newspaper Articles," including the essential elements for citation and the best arrangement for citing newspapers that are imaged online. That and several of the sections starting with 14.1 would answer your questions.  (The material here at this website is meant to supplement the instruction in EE; it does not cover the fundamentals that the book itself covers.)

Wayneson, your copy of the original 2007 edition is not out of date, when it comes to citing newspapers. The format for citing newspapers is so simple that it has not changed in the last 100 years, except for the modern expectation that column numbers be added.  These days, when we access newspaper images online, we also add a layer to cite the newspaper; but that does not change the format for citing the newspaper itself.

Note four things from both the 2007 edition and the Forum discussion to which you point us  (https://www.evidenceexplained.com/node/1679):

1. Citations to newspapers do not include a volume and issue number.  Newspaper issues are archived and located by date. The volume and issue number are not needed either to relocate the item or to analyze the accuracy of the information.
2. Citations to newspapers do not put the date of publication in parentheses. Parentheses are used in a newspaper citation to add the location of the newspaper when that location is not part of the paper’s title.  (In citations as in “normal” writing, a plethora of parentheses tends to be confusing. In a two-layer citation, a pair of parentheses might be needed in each layer; but we don’t use multiple pairs in the same layer.)
3. Citations to newspapers, as a standard, cite day, month, and year but not the day of the week.
4. Citations to newspapers do not normally cite a specific paragraph. While we may certainly do so in our personal research notes, it would not be part of a citation at publication stage unless the article we are citing was extraordinarily long.

With regard to your three questions:

1. Is your specific item field over-detailed? Aside from the identification of the paragraph issue already discussed: whether you need the full identification of the bride, groom, and officiant in the reference note depends upon whether that information is already reported in the narrative statement to which you append this reference note. Almost always, it would be stated in the narrative.
2. Is the second-layer wording proper? The second layer in your original draft (i.e. “microfilm data not provided”) is unnecessary and confusing, given that nothing has been said about microfilm. Ditto for your second draft at 14:23. In your last draft at 15:59, it became the third layer but, there, the addition of the Newspapers.com mention adds to the confusion without some explanation, especially since that website name is coupled with the microfilm reference.
3. Is URL in source list entry improper due to pointing to a search page? Given that your entry cites the database collection by name, it would not be inappropriate to cite the exact URL for the database collection (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/8332/).

EE would not use either your draft 1 or draft 2, in which you cite the Ancestry database as your first layer. Your draft 3 comes closest to what you need.

To go back to the basic newspaper pattern at 14.22—with the inclusion of the website, as per the Forum discussion you flagged—a typical citation to your particular source would be this:

Your draft 3:

“Announce Engagement,” The Wellsboro (Pennsylvania) Gazette, Vol. LXV – No. 4, (Thursday, September 21, 1939), p.7, col.6, paragraph 7, Miss Gladys M. Quimby to Wayne R. Knowlton by A.W. Quimby; imaged in “The Wellsboro Gazette (Wellsboro, Pennsylvania),” database, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/492622855:8332) : accessed 19 Jan 2023) ; Newspapers.com, microfilm data not provided.

Clean copy:

“Announce Engagement,” The Wellsboro (Pennsylvania) Gazette,  September 21, 1939, p.7, col.6, Gladys M. Quimby to Wayne R. Knowlton; imaged in “The Wellsboro Gazette (Wellsboro, Pennsylvania),” database, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/492622855:8332) : accessed 19 Jan. 2023).