Citing a Graves Registration Card from Fold3.com

Stepmom 43, let’s begin by dissecting the draft citations that you offer. Taking this approach may help since one basic problem here is one that appeared in your “.com” query earlier today.

If you’ll turn to the QuickStart Guide at the front of EE (3d ed. or 3d ed. rev.), you’ll find there the basic pattern for citing published materials, whether published in print or online. You’ll notice that

• a citation to a website follows the same format as a citation to a book.
• a citation to a database at a website follows the same format as a citing a chapter in a book whose chapters are by different authors.
• citations to published materials typically start with the name of the author who created that work we are citing.

(If you are using EE’s QuickSheet Citing Ancestry.com Databases & Images, look at “Basic Templates” at the top of side 1. There, you’ll see that each field of the citation has a label attached to it, explaining the same principles in a different way.)

This is the same basic format that we learned for citing books and chapters way back when we were in middle school and struggled to write our first research papers. You’ll also recall from those days that

• when a book (or article, or painting, or whatever) has no author/creator identified, then we skip that field of the citation and we begin with Book Title in Italics—or, when citing a chapter, “Title of Chapter in Quotation Marks,” followed by Book Title in Italics.  (If you’ll check EE’s index for authors, creators, etc. < anonymous authors, you’ll find much more on this subject.)  That same pattern holds for citing websites and their databases.

Following these long-standing practices, when you begin your citation with

James Schaffer, "Indiana, Marriages, 1810-2001,” … Ancestry … 

you are telling your readers that James Schaffer is the author of a database called “Indiana, Marriages, 1810-2001,” which we can find at Ancestry. But, of course, he isn’t.

When, as in the query we’re working through now, you begin your citation with

“James Shafer [Shaffer,]" … Fold3 …

you are telling your readers that “James Shafer [Shaffer,]” is the name of the database that is offered by Fold 3.  However, James Shafer represents just one card that was imaged in some database that goes unidentified, as your citation is currently constructed.  That card is the equivalent of a page in a book. When we cite a book, we would not start off our citation with the page number, would we?

One other essential is also missing from your drafts. It’s very definitely an issue we need to think about while we are trying to determine who actually is the creator of our material.  Where did Fold3 get this card? Did Fold3 create it? If so, where did Fold3 get its information?  If Fold3 is not the creator, then who is?

Without knowing where the information came from, we can’t evaluate its reliability—which is the other reason that citations exist: to provide enough information about the source that we and others can evaluate the reliability of the information we’ve taken from that source.

Every Fold3 database is accompanied by some type of source description. Some are very complete. Some are skimpy. This particular database is one of those for whom we’re told little but, as little as it is, we need to report those details in our citation. We put this information in a source-of-the-source field, or a separate layer, at the end of our citation.

When you go to that particular image and click on the “information” icon—or when you click on the title of the database itself—you’ll bring up whatever source-of-the-source information Fold 3 provides.  Here’s what Fold3 gives us below (or beside) the image, depending upon how we set up our screen:

This tells us that Fold3’s “publication title” (i.e., the title of its database) is “Ohio, Soldiers Grave Registration Cards, 1804-1958.” It also identifies its source as “Ohio History Connection” with a link.

Using this data, a citation to this card could be constructed in multiple ways, depending upon your preference. As a basic example:

“Ohio, Soldiers Grave Registration Cards, 1804-1958,” database with images, Fold3 (https://www.fold3.com/image/616030283?xid=1945 : accessed 28 June 2018), imaged card for Shafer, James, buried 1902, Beach City, Ohio; citing “Ohio History Connection” [https://www.ohiohistory.org/].

Your question about whether the exact URL for the image should be cited or whether you should cite the path is one researchers decide for themselves. The options are these:

1. If you cite the exact URL in each citation, then you create a unique citation that cannot be reused for anyone else. If you are organizing your research within a commercial database, you’d end up with a “Master Source” or Source List Entry for every individual card.
2. If you use just Fold3’s home-page URL, followed by a path after the parentheses, then you can use that one Master Source for many different cards and you will have just one Source List Entry in your Bibliography or Source List.
3. If you are writing a research report, then either of the above options is fine.
4. If you are submitting an article or book for possible publication, then you follow the style of the journal or press to whom you are submitting.

With regard to your P.S.: Saying “Page 1” is not necessary if a cited item has just one page. By the same token, we would not say “page” unless we’re using bound materials or folios that have actual pages with each side of a leaf numbered. We also need to be careful to distinguish between citing a "page" of a book and an "image number" within a database or a "frame number" on a roll of film.

Overall, the most important point to remember is that a citation is not created from formulaic words. Every term has both a meaning and a purpose. Every field has a purpose. Every arrangement or sequence has a purpose. If we take the time to learn the basic terms and patterns, citations become much, much, much, much easier. (Redundancy intended!)