Citing an Index Entry for a Philadelphia Bank Immigrant Passage Record

By c0r8g30 on Fri, 07/19/2019 - 18:40

Forums

Dear EE,

I am struggling with the citation for an indexed item at Ancestry, that was indexed together with JewishGen, I think I should have three layers:

  1. Cite what you see
  2. Cite the source of what you see
  3. Cite where your source may have found the information

I came up with this:

“Philadelphia Bank Immigrant Passage Records, 1890-1949,” Blitzstein Bank, book 3, p125, Peirel Fainkuchen; indexed in Ancestry (https://search.ancestry.com : accessed 31 Mar 2019”); citing “Ticket purchase books and index, 1899-1930,” Blitzstein Steamship Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; data provided in partnership with JewishGen, who in turn lists the digital images as housed at Temple University.

I would prefer not to have discursive notes and I also don't want to cite the original image to be found at Temple U. I just want to have a clean citation for the index, for what I found at Ancestry.

For your reference, the Ancestry link is:

https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=1366&h=113766&tid=&pid=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=Vyd3656&_phstart=successSource

Your feedback would be welcome.

Submitted byEEon Fri, 07/19/2019 - 19:23

c0r8g30, your "cite what you see" approach to Layer 1 would be appropriate for citing an image copy. However,  the link you give is not to an image. It's to Ancestry's database entry, data extracted and reassembled by Ancestry. Therefore, the first layer of your citation above isn't to what you see, it's details that are said to appear in a register you don't see—in which case you can't verify that it's accurate.

For database entries at Ancestry, you follow the basic model for citing an online database. Your first layer will be:

"Title of Database," Creator of Website (unless it's self-titled), Title of Website  (URL : date), entry for [specific item of interest, with whatever record details the very brief database entry gives you];

After the semi-colon, your second layer will begin with citing and then add whatever citation the website gives you.

Submitted byc0r8g30on Sat, 07/20/2019 - 20:51

Dear EE,

Thank you for correcting my mis-application of "cite what you see". I still struggle with the source-of-the-source. Would this be OK:

“Philadelphia Bank Immigrant Passage Records, 1890-1949,” database, Ancestry (https://search.ancestry.com : accessed 31 Mar 2019) entry for Peirel Fainkuchen, Blitzstein Bank, Book 3, p125; citing “Ticket purchase books and index, 1899-1930,” Blitzstein Steamship Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; data provided in partnership with JewishGen, who in turn lists the digital images as housed at Temple University.

Submitted byAnnon Sat, 08/03/2019 - 11:12

And the image can be requested from JewishGen. I did that for a family record I found through the extract on Ancestry.