Citing USGenWeb transcriptions

I present my attempt at citing a transcription of church records found at USGenWeb. The models that seem to apply are a website as a book with multiple chapters and transcribed bible pages online (EE p. 126-28). I chose to use the author as the lead element. Using the creator of the record seems problematic since we have no image of what the author used, its location, or if it's a bound volume, loose papers, or even the actual title of anything.

Karen Groce, “Drew Co, AR-Manuscript of the Minutes of the Old Florence Church,” (1997), record transcriptions; The USGenWeb Project (http://files.usgwarchives.net/ar/drew/churches/florence.txt : accessed 27 November 2022) > Arkansas > Drew County > Church Records > Minutes of the Old Florence Church; citing miscellaneous "Old Florence Church" minutes, 1847-1880; submitted to USGenWeb on 9 Aug 2001.

Layer 1: cites the author of the transcription, the title that appears at the top of the page, and 1997 is the year found at the bottom as her copyright. Layer 2: the website, the URL and access date, and the waypoints to find the record. Layer 3: source of the source can be inferred from the contents but we have to use the information that Karen provides since we cannot see if for ourselves. Layer 4: I added this because I feel like it's important but I don't know where it would go.

Thank you for your guidance.

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Submitted byEEon Mon, 11/28/2022 - 11:33

Patty, you’re doing a great job of reasoning through the issues and capturing all essential data. The citation could be simplified/clarified, however:

Karen Groce, “Drew Co, AR - Manuscript of the Minutes of the Old Florence Church,” record transcriptions, The USGenWeb Project (http://files.usgwarchives.net/ar/drew/churches/florence.txt : posted 9 August 2001; accessed 27 November 2022); citing …

Let’s take each highlighted spot, one by one.

Punctuation in title

The original punctuation, which I’ve used above, is space hyphen space. The creator of these notes committed an “infelicity” in using a hyphen instead of a dash, but minimized the confusion by putting a space before and after to give the sense of a dash. In copying the title, you dropped the spaces and just used the hyphen (Drew Co, AR-Manuscript). In doing so, you’ve created a new entity (AR-Manuscript) that was not intended. The punctuation principle to remember here is this:

  • A hyphen connects
  • A dash separates

While the original punctuation errs in multiple ways, the sense of what is intended should be preserved by typing it exactly. Removing the space before and after the hyphen created a connector (joining AR with Manuscript, instead of a separator between two separate thoughts (Drew Co., Arkansas, and Manuscript of the Minutes of the Old Florence Church)

Elimination of parenthetical date between title and descriptor:

Your citation states:

Karen Groce, “Drew Co, AR-Manuscript of the Minutes of the Old Florence Church,” (1997), record transcriptions; The USGenWeb Project (…

Here, the guiding principle is the basic structure of a citation.  When citing an article or database at a website (or a chapter in a book) the basic structure is this:

Author, “Title of Article/Database or Chapter, in Quote Marks,” descriptor if needed, Editor/Website Owner If Applicable, Title of Book or Database in Italics (Publication Place/URL : Date), specific item, if any.

There is no parenthetical date field that falls between titles. The only parenthetical field that contains a date is the set of parentheses that provides the publication data. 

Given your use of the semicolon I’ve highlighted in this part of the citation, it appears that you are trying to make two separate layers. But Groce’s abstracts are not a standalone manuscript that has been imaged at the website. It’s an article that appears at the website in HTML form. It is part and parcel of the website, not a separate entity that we could also access elsewhere.

Parenthetical publication data:

The standard format for publication data calls for citing the date published. Very often, when citing online material, we don’t have a publication date. In lieu of that, we cite the date accessed.  In this case, we do have a publication date to place in the parentheses that contain the publication data.

Adding the access date is also helpful because online data is often ephemeral; it comes and goes. It may be published today and gone tomorrow. Including the access date in the citation, along with the publication date, tells our readers (and us, as well, after our memory of the source has gone cold) that the material was still published on x-date.

Path after publication data:

At the end of your parenthetical publication data, your citation presented this:

… accessed 27 November 2022) > Arkansas > Drew County > Church Records > Minutes of the Old Florence Church;

In a recent discussion with History-Hunter (https://www.evidenceexplained.com/node/2102) we pointed out that redundancy can be useful. When the website provider has an exact URL, ARK, or PAL for a specific item, as well as a path, citing both provides “insurance” in the event that the URL or the path is later altered by the site.

In this case, that advice to History-Hunter does not hold for two reasons:

  1. The website does not identify a path for the citation.  The two images below, one from Ancestry and one from FamilySearch, provide examples of website paths. Your USGenWeb site does not provide this

  1. Using the details stated in the path you devised, it is possible to start at the base URL for USGenWeb (usgenweb.org) or the base URL for USGenWeb Archives (files.usgwarchives.net) and get to Karen Groce’s contribution by following their menus with a bit of “supposition and hope.” I use this phrase because the terms in which you identify the path are not the same terms that appear in the USGenWeb menus. The two actual paths, with the exact menu terms, are these:
  • usgenweb.org > Arkansas > ARGenWeb Counties > Drew > Church Records > Minutes of the Old Florence Church …
  • files.usgwarchives.net > FTP Directory: Arkansas > drew/ > churches/Florence.txt

The basic principle here is this: If we copy the breadcrumbs in a path, we should copy each term exactly. We don’t paraphrase.

“Citing …” layer:

After the website citation, you added a “citing …” layer:

; citing miscellaneous "Old Florence Church" minutes, 1847-1880

I don’t actually see this citation. When I search for keywords, “miscellaneous” and the date range, I get no hit within the article. Groce’s title, of course, contains the phrase “Old Florence Church.” Given that it is stated in the title, we don’t need to add a “citing …” layer to repeat just that. The purpose of that layer is to report any additional identifying or locational data that the author/contributor cites. The dates you’ve added are certainly helpful, but I don’t see where Groce is “citing ….” those dates. We can scrutinize what she offers and determine those dates for ourselves—but that’s not the same as saying that Groce is “citing 1847–1880.” 

Typically, an author’s citation will tell us where this information was obtained, where the original records now are, etc. We do not see this in Groce’s article. In a situation such as this, an Evidence Style citation would not include a “citing ..." layer.

After the title, under the standard USGENWEB NOTICE, we see an introduction of sorts to Groce’s article:

Has membership list & lots of good genealogy info!

FLORENCE CHURCH

[Also known as Pine Grove and Pine Flat]

The last line is also useful information. We might wish to add that to the citation in our last layer:

Karen Groce, “Drew Co, AR – Manuscript of the Minutes of the Old Florence Church,” record transcriptions, The USGenWeb Project (http://files.usgwarchives.net/ar/drew/churches/florence.txt : posted 9 August 2001; accessed 27 November 2022); Groce notes that the Florence Church is “also known as Pine Grove and Pine Flat.”