Sourcing digital archival images of Church Birth, Death and Marriage Records

Fr. Ivan Delic:

Will you clarify a couple of points for us?

1. Which QuickCheck Model are you trying to use? (Which sample page on our site?)
2. What does "S. Petronijevic" represent? The name of the church that created the  register? The name of one of the parties on the marriage certificate?  Or ... ?
3. What does the date in parentheses represent? Date of marriage?  Date of visit to archive? Or ... ?

Fr. Ivan,

The sample you found online does not fit your need. I assume you do not have a copy of Evidence Explained to study. Because you say you are new to citing old records, it would help you to have the guide.

EE provides a whole chapter on church records (Chapter 7, pages 307-370).  It covers many types and many quirks, both American and international. No church example treats Serbia. However,  7.37 (Canada), 7.38 (England), 7.39 (France), 7.40 (Germany), 7.41 (Mexico), 7.43 (Scotland), and 7.45 (Sweden) all treat different situations with microfilmed church records, including those whose records have been taken from the church and deposited in an archive elsewhere—as in your case.

It would also help you immensely to read the first two chapters: Fundamentals of Evidence Analysis, and Fundamentals of Citation. To help you get started, I will review six basic principles that apply to all types of records.

1. When we use microfilmed records, we have two things to identify: (a) the original record; and (b) the microfilm version.
2. Microfilmed records exist in two basic types: (a) those that are published and widely available; and (b) those that are made for preservation purposes and must be used at the local archive or library that made the film. This 2(b) fits your case.
3. When citing the exact title of a manuscript register, we place that title in quotation marks. Those quotation marks tells the world that the register is not published and we must go to a specific archive to find it.
4. When citing the title of published books, we use italics. Those italics convey the message, “Hey, I’ve been published and you can find me at many libraries.”  (I point this out because your draft of the citation uses both quotation marks and italics for the title. That mixed message will confuse anyone who attempts to use your citation. It can also confuse you, later, after your memory of a record has gone cold.)
5. If we are using manuscript church registers that have no individual title, but are part of a series (as in the example below), then we do not put the series name in quotation marks or italics. We simply give the series name and volume number.
6. Specific pieces of information are placed in a specific place in the citation, so that all readers will understand what each piece of information represents.

At EE 7.39, you will find an example for French church records that have been deposited at a local archive:

      1. Saint-Projet Parish (Bordeaux, France), Marriages and Burials, register GG639, act, Durel-LeBrun marriage (1752); Archives Municipales, Bordeaux.

The elements of the citation are these:

• Name of church: Saint-Projet Parish
• Location of church: (Bordeaux, France),
• Name of series & volume number: Marriages and Burials, no. GG639,
• Item of interest & year: Durel-LeBrun marriage (1752);
• Archives & its location: Archives Municipales, Bordeaux

We can now substitute your exact information in place of the French data. There will be three differences.

1. In the French system, each register is identified by series and by number. In your Jezevika example, you do not cite series & number. Instead, you give what appears to be an exact title.
2.  In the French example, the register does not have page numbers or act numbers. In your case, you do have them and that is good.
3. Because you used unpublished preservation film there at the local archives, you will need to insert the microfilm number and the image number.

The elements of your citation are now these:

• Name of church:  ??
• Location of church: (Jezevika, Serbia),
• Name of series register: “Marriage Record Book, 1863-1880,” 
• Item of interest: p. 10, no. 42 Now add  names, type of sacrament and (year or date);
• Identification of microfilm number and frame/image number: microfilm 10, image 00387
• Archives & its location: Historical Local Archives, Cacak.

Once you fill in the missing information that is flagged in red above, then you can assemble the pieces of information into a “citation sentence” like the Saint-Projet example—using the same punctuation that divides each element.

Fr. Delic,

The image you offer (thank you) well demonstrates another variant type of church record: a preprinted register. These became popular in many places, for both church and civil records, in the mid-to-late 1800s. (In some places, we find them for even earlier records, although they may not represent the original records). For offices or churches that could afford them—and for officials and priests who hated clerical work—preprinted registers provided a quick way of creating records. The boilerplate language was already printed, all they had to do was fill in the blanks.

In EE, you'll find discussions and varying examples at 1.37, 7.30, 7.42, 9.31, and 9.54.  We also have, underway, a forthcoming QuickLesson that will explore some of the ramifications of using these.

One of the basic problems, as you'll see from a couple of the EE passages, is that many such registers are not the original registers. Instead, they were created late in the 1800s, at which time pastors and civil clerks went back to older registers and isolated bits and pieces of data from the originals to fill in the blanks of the form-type register.

Your particular register is relatively unusual in that it combines both free-form pages and preprinted pages. What often happened in such a case is that multiple registers had begun to deteriorate and were rebound together.  That's a point you would have to decide for yourself through examination of the current register.

Identifying rebinding situations can be a valuable flag for researchers because the deterioration that caused the rebinding was often one in which the original covers were lost together with some of the beginning and ending pages. The rebinding lulls us into a false sense that all the records have been preserved, when many could be missing. In such cases, we can often discover that problem by studying the registers page by page and looking for gaps that do not correspond to the absence of a priest in residence.