Referencing historical legislative documents

By sboerner on Tue, 11/21/2023 - 14:05

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I am working on a history blog post that is based partly on information drawn from the Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York. These were compilations published after each legislative session during the 19th century. They contain reports, transcripts of testimony, etc.

In each volume, each "issue," or document, is numbered, and each has its own set of page numbers. Sometimes the documents for a single session are published across two or more volumes. Here is an example: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Documents_of_the_Assembly_of_the_State_o/6-Y1AQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1.

Here is the pattern I've been using for footnotes:

1. “Communication from the Canal Appraisers in Relation to the Claims of Jacob Graves and Others, Mill Owners, at Rochester,” No. 63, 21 February 1854, p. 59, in Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York, Seventy-Seventh Session, Vol. 2 (Albany, 1854).

That is: Issue title, issue number, issue date, issue page number of citation + in + title of volume including volume number + (Albany, year of publication).

I figured that the page number belongs to the issue information, not the volume title, because there are many page 59s in the volume. I've included the "p." before the page number for clarity and treated the volume number as part of the title. The publisher is probably the State of New York, but because it is not given on the main title page, I've omitted it.

Now, in some situations I'd like to label the citation, for example:

1. Statement by Hervey Ely, 13 December 1853, “Communication from the Canal Appraisers in Relation to the Claims of Jacob Graves and Others, Mill Owners, at Rochester,” No. 63, 21 February 1854, p. 59, in Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York, Seventy-Seventh Session, Vol. 2 (Albany, 1854).

I can find no model for this (or anything similar) in EE or in Chicago. Have I overlooked it?


 

Submitted byEEon Thu, 11/23/2023 - 09:23

sboerner, EE does indeed have models for that.

  • Chapter 8: Colony & State Records, Legislative Acts 8.41
  • Chapter 8: Colony & State Records, Legislative Petitions & Files 8.42
  • Chapter 13: Legal Reference Works, particularly 13.35 and 13.38, House & Senate Documents or 13.52 Other Governmental Publications: State-Level

The issue here is that you are trying to cite something you have not used, instead of what you did use. You are not using the actual documents in an archive. You are using a book that has typescripts of handwritten documents, perhaps accurate and perhaps not.

Your citation is a basic book citation in which you cite Author, Title (Publication Place: Publisher, Year), page number, then an identification of what appears on that page: i.e., a transcription of XYZ.

Submitted bysboerneron Wed, 11/29/2023 - 11:06

Thank you. I see the distinction and why it's important to make that clear. I think I've been focused on the problem of identifying the page numbers when those are repeated throughout the volume. What about something like this?

1. Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York, Seventy-Seventh Session (Albany: C. Van Benthuysen, 1854), vol. 2, no. 63, p. 59, a transcription of “Communication from the Canal Appraisers in Relation to the Claims of Jacob Graves and Others, Mill Owners, at Rochester.”

Some notes: There is no single author of the book, so that is omitted; and I notice that some of the examples in EE 13.35 list government printers as publishers, so I have done that here. To address the page number problem, I have added the issue number between the volume and page numbers and used abbreviations for clarity. (I'm not sure this is correct, obviously.)

For the second example, where I'd like to mention the specific testimony:

1. ​​​​​​​Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York, Seventy-Seventh Session (Albany: C. Van Benthuysen, 1854), vol. 2, no. 63, p. 59, a transcription of a statement by Hervey Ely in “Communication from the Canal Appraisers in Relation to the Claims of Jacob Graves and Others, Mill Owners, at Rochester.”

The specific dates of Ely's statement and the "Communication" have both been left out. In the context of the narrative they might convey important information, but I have no idea where to put them.

Please bear with me here. Trying hard to sort this, thanks.

Submitted byEEon Thu, 11/30/2023 - 09:21

Hello, sboerner. You’ve done well.  The publisher is indeed the state's printer, as identified on the title page. The author is the New York State Assembly; however, given that its identity is in the title of the document, to repeat it in the author field would be redundant.

To help our readers see the issues we're discussing, I’m posting in a copy of the title page below.​

​

The structure of the volume itself is confusing given that each document is individually paginated, with no overall pagination for the book. You have appropriately placed the document number before the page number to indicate that.  EE would make three tweaks organization-wise:

  1. (EE's Velcro Principle: What's meant to stick together should stay stuck together <g>.)  Because the phrase "Communication from the Canal Appraisers in Relation to the Claims of Jacob Graves and Others, Mill Owners, at Rochester" is the title of the document, it should be attached to the document number that it further identifies, not the page number.
  2. Because a page often has several or numerous numbered items on that page, it's best to specify what you mean when you say "no. 63"—in this case: "Document No. 63" or "doc. no. 63."
  3. The volume number (under the rules of most citation guides, including EE), typically goes after the title of the book. We have two options for what to put in that field: (a) the specific volume number; or (b) the total number of volumes, in which case, the specific volume is specified in the Specific Item Field where we cite page number, etc. (EE12.69, 3d ed. rev.) With the records you are using, unless we access the publication at a law library where all the volumes are shelved next to each other, it is quite difficult to determine the total number of volumes published for this year; thus, your choice not to cite the total number is a logical one.

In sum:

      1. ​​​​​​​Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York, Seventy-Seventh Session, vol. 2 (Albany: C. Van Benthuysen, 1854), doc. no. 63: “Communication from the Canal Appraisers in Relation to the Claims of Jacob Graves and Others, Mill Owners, at Rochester," p. 59, transcription of statement by Hervey Ely.

If you were to cite an online digitization of the book, so that readers of your work can easily locate a copy, an appropriate citation would be this (using colorization here to demonstrate the separate layers of the citation).

     1. ​​​​​​​Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York, Seventy-Seventh Session, vol. 2 (Albany: C. Van Benthuysen, 1854), doc. no. 63: “Communication from the Canal Appraisers in Relation to the Claims of Jacob Graves and Others, Mill Owners, at Rochester," p. 59, transcription of statement by Hervey Ely; imaged at HathiTrust (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b2997757&seq=9 : accessed 30 November 2023) > image 551.

Thanks for introducing many of our readers to a source that’s not used often enough, especially for New York where many counties have a dearth of surviving legal records. HathiTrust has digitized literally hundreds of these volumes for New York alone and thousands for other states nationwide.