Citing The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society website

By RobynR on Fri, 05/01/2020 - 22:45

Forums

I am wanting to cite a quote from this website that states "New York State did not require local governments to report births, marriages, and deaths until 1880."

This is what I have come up with, but was after US based folk opinions. I am in Australia.

The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, NYG&B New York Genealogical and Biographical Society  (https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org/ : accessed 2 May 2020), Finding New York Birth, Marriage, and Death Records > What all researchers need to know about New York birth, marriage, and death records > "New York State did not require local governments to report births, marriages, and deaths until 1880."

Thanks in advance.

 

 

 

Submitted byEEon Sat, 05/02/2020 - 09:43

Robin, EE would not use a path-style citation with this. When I used your URL, it took me to the society’s landing page, which offers a dozen and a half options on which we can click. But I saw no option labeled "Finding New York Birth, Marriage, and Death Records," which was the first item in your path. I found that item by querying for the title in the search box. There’s a simpler approach.

What we have here is a simple article at a website. It’s an anonymously authored article—one of many such instructional articles at that site.

Turn to EE’s QuickStart Guide, to the page “The Basics: Publications: Print & Online.”  There, four basic models are given:

  • Print Book (the simplest of all types to cite)
  • Website (which follows the same pattern used for a print book)
  • Book with Chapter Authors (basic book cite, plus initial identification of author and chapter)
  • Website with Multiple Offerings (same pattern as Book with Chapter Authors)

Adapting the latter to your source would give us this:

         1. "Finding New York Birth, Marriage, and Death Records,” NYG&B: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society  (https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org/new-york-birth-marriage-death-vital-records : accessed 2 May 2020), "New York State did not require local governments to report births, marriages, and deaths until 1880."

You will notice several points here:

  • Because there is no author for the article, the author field is left blank and the citation begins with the name of the article.
  • Because the website is eponymously named, we do not have to repeat the name of the society in both the creator field and the title field.  Doing so would, in fact, give three repetitions of the same name in three consecutive fields: Creator, Title (URL ...).  This is a situation we often encounter in our research from Ancestry, to FamilySearch, to the National Archives of most nations.
  • EE would add a colon between the website’s title and subtitle, so the two are not run together.
  • The URL is the exact one that takes us to the article.
  • In your path field, you placed the following (which I will color here to make distinction between parts): Finding New York Birth, Marriage, and Death Records > What all researchers need to know about New York birth, marriage, and death records > "New York State did not require local governments to report births, marriages, and deaths until 1880." 
  • The first element in your path was the title of the article, which has been moved to the start of the citation.
  • The second element is the section of the article, which EE would not include. The article is very short, roughly the equivalent of one page in a book. When we cite a book page that has a subhead in the middle, we would just cite the page, not the page > subhead > sentence. Readers would have no problem finding the specific sentence.
  • The third element, the actual sentence, might or might not need to be cited. Typically, our narrative discussion makes an assertion, then we cite the source on which that assertion is based. Quoting the source in the citation would be necessary only if our discussion in the narrative was so oblique that users of our work would have difficulty associating our discussion with the specific sentence in the original.