Descriptors in a citation and a question about Church Census'

By Anonymous on Fri, 05/04/2012 - 09:37

Forums

I have a copies of pages from a Catholic parish book the title of the book is "St. John's Parish Census Book (Old) with an index," the entries are in Latin and arranged in family groups similar to family books in Germany.

When I called the parish office to see if the books were still in their office, some confusion occurred over the "title" apparently the office refers to these books as family books. So far my citation looks like this:

Saint John the Baptist Catholic Church (Jordan, Minnesota), "St. John's Parish Census Book (Old) with an index," (entries are in Latin and arranged in family groups), p. 34, entry for Lux, Florianus (family group); Parish Office, Jordan, Minnesota

My question should I add (family books) to the title as the parish office refers to them as such?

My second question has to do with the origin of these records.

From what I have been able to determine these books where created to meet a request from the US Census Bureau to develop statistics of churches in the US. I have located one Census Bulletin < http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1890d4-01.pdf > dated 23 July 1891 which states, "This bulletin. which is the third devoted to statistics of churches,..."  Does anyone know when the other 2 bulletins where complied and where I might find them?

 

Ann Gilchrest

Submitted byEEon Fri, 05/04/2012 - 19:58

Ann,  if a book or series is known in-house by a certain term, you are indeed wise to include that informal name in your working citation. Beyond this, we should clarify one point regarding the words you place in quotation marks as the title of the volume: "St. John's Parish Census Book (Old) with an Index."  These are the words that actually appear on the volume? If so, then in a full reference citation, EE would probably cite the volume this way: 

     1.  Saint John the Baptist Catholic Church (Jordan, Minnesota), "St. John's Parish Census Book (Old) with an Index," p. 34, entry for Lux, Florianus (Latin entries, arranged in family groups); the series to which this belongs is informally called "family books" by the Parish Office, which holds custody.

Essentially, your approach and ours offers the same information. The difference is that our approach would be to group together all the formal data for the book (Creator, title, page, entry), followed by the additional details that help readers better understand the record set. Also, if you cite the church's location as part of the creator data, then you don't need to repeat it at the end of the citation.

With regard to your question about Census Bureau's statistical bulletins: since it does not deal with citations, we'll explore your problem of locating the "missing" bulletins under  in the "Record Usage" forum.