Citing/Use of a specific Revolutionary War Pension record page as a birth source

dalecarmack:

You did not indicate which sections of EE itself you are trying to understand; but if you turn to EE4 §12.35, you will find models that show the essential information for citing a pension application, as well as the sequence in which pieces of information appear.  Specifically, 12.35's section "Online Database Entries & Images" uses a Civil War pension in an Ancestry database, but the pattern and the essential elements are all the same. And all fit Template 5: Complex Website.

Also, if you will study chapter 12’s discussion of the organization of the U.S. National Archives, it will help you to understand the pieces of information that fold3 provides in its source-info sidebar and how each piece of information relates to the other. Without understanding that, we'll create a garbled citation.

I’ll address each issue separately, as they appear in your draft citation:

 

ESSENTIAL DETAIL

The first layer of your citation provides this information:

"US, Revolutionary War Pensions, 1800-1900," database, Fold3 (https://www.fold3.com/file/27256604 : accessed 8 Apr 2025), image of bible page for pension R.6394 and widow Susannah Livingston, service of Henry Livingston

As shown in all of Chapter 12’s citations to NA pension files, citations to them typically include the soldier’s name, unit, state, and pension number. You’ve shown the number and name, but not the rank or unit.  The rank, unit, and state are included because there are frequently multiple individuals by the same name, and names have many variant spellings. Our inclusion of the pension number does help to identify which Henry Livingston we are discussing but it is all-too easy to make a typo in a number. That rank and unit identity also helps us cross-reference this pension to the correct military records for our solder. For these and other reasons, rank-unit-state are traditionally an essential part of a citation to a military file or a pension file.

However, in your case, the pension file does not identify a rank or unit because Henry did not do military service.  He served the cause as a packhorse driver. That, too, is important information to include in our citation so that others will not fruitlessly seek a military file.

EE’s suggestion for this part of the citation would be:

"US, Revolutionary War Pensions, 1800-1900," database, Fold3 (https://www.fold3.com/file/27256604 : accessed 8 April 2025), Henry Livingston (packhorse driver, Virginia) and widow Susannah Livingston, pension number R.6394 ….

 

LOCATION OF EXACT IMAGE

With regard to the database, the URL, and the specific image, your draft citation states: 

"US, Revolutionary War Pensions, 1800-1900," database, Fold3 (https://www.fold3.com/file/27256604 : accessed 8 Apr 2025), image of bible page for pension R.6394 and widow Susannah Livingston, service of Henry Livingston;

However, we do not know from this which image is the one you describe as “image of bible page.”  We will have to search all images to find it. The database architecture this site uses for this collection does not assign URLs to individual pages. 

In this case, when we study the file we discover that there are actually three Bible pages, which leaves us wondering which one has the specific piece of information for which you are providing the citation. (Or do you wish to cite all three pages?) For demonstration purposes, let’s say that you are citing the second of the three. When we view that image, the source-info sidebar identifies that image as “Page 3.”

Adding the image number to the previously suggested citation would give us this:

"US, Revolutionary War Pensions, 1800-1900," database, fold3 (https://www.fold3.com/file/27256604 : accessed 8 April 2025), Henry Livingston (packhorse driver, Virginia) and widow Susannah Livingston, pension number R.6394 > page 3 (being one of three Bible pages identifying children) …

 

SEQUENCE

The sequence in which we cite pieces of information does matter. Each piece of information needs to be attached to whatever it belongs with. Otherwise, the information is misidentified and will make it hard for others to use our citation—or for us, when we come back to it later after our recollection of the source has gone cold. As an example, your draft says

… citing "Case Files of Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Applications Based on Revolutionary War Service, compiled ca. 1800 - ca. 1912, documenting the period ca. 1775 - ca. 1900," National Archives Catalog ID: 300022, Record Group 15, Roll 1573, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Record Group 15 at NA is a vast collection of millions of original documents. RGs  have no “roll numbers.”  And "Record Group 15" is not the name of the roll numbered 1573.

A roll number is part of a microfilm publication (or an unpublished microfilm collection). When we cite a roll number, we have to identify the microfilm it is part of. There are thousands of microfilm publications/collections that have been made from NARA records and they all reuse the same basic set of numbers.

In the set of records you’re using, at the URL that you cite, fold3’s source-info sidebar identifies the microfilm publication as M804.  (See image above).

Therefore, your “roll 1573” must be attached to M804. Traditionally, the publication name/number is cited first, then the roll—just as we do with book titles and their volume numbers:    i.e., microfilm publication M804, roll 1573. 

 

CITING MICROFILM

Microfilm publications are cited in the same way that we cite published books (and websites):

Author/creator if applicable, Title in Italics, series ID if applicable (publication place: publisher, date), specific roll/page number.

EE4, 12.35, shows how this appears in the citing layer when we use online images:

… citing General Index to Pension Files, 1861–1934, T288 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives [n.d.]), no roll number cited.

Substituting the pieces of information that apply to your item of interest would give us this:

… citing Case Files of Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Applications Based on Revolutionary War Service, Compiled ca. 1800 - ca. 1912, Documenting the Period ca. 1775 - ca. 1900, microfilm publication M804 (Washington, DC: National Archives), roll 1573.

You’ll notice that the title of the National Archives publication (the film) appears in italics. It does not have quotation marks around it.  The longstanding rule for citing publication titles (not just an EE rule but a standard throughout most style manuals), is this:

• Italics are used for the titles of standalone publications (books, film, journals, magazines, newspapers, etc.).
• Quotation marks are used for titles of parts of those publications (chapter titles within a book, articles within a journal/magazine/newspaper, etc.).

All of this is covered in EE’s Chapter 2 Fundamentals of Citation.

 

CATALOGING DATA & ORGANIZATION OF ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS

Fold3 also gives us two other pieces of source information that you have included in your draft citation:

… citing "Case Files of Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Applications Based on Revolutionary War Service, compiled ca. 1800 - ca. 1912, documenting the period ca. 1775 - ca. 1900," National Archives Catalog ID: 300022, Record Group 15, Roll 1573, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

NA is implementing a new cataloging system for all its billions of records.  It is now assigning an individual catalog number to each document collection—or, as in this case, a document series with many collections.  However, a catalog number is not part of a citation to NARA microfilm.  As a corollary you'll be familiar with, a library catalog number is not part of a citation to a published book.  

A publication's identity and how this-or-that library catalogs it are two separate things. We may include the catalog data in our citation if we wish, because it can be helpful in our research. Within our working files, we can add anything to our citation that is helpful; extraneous material is then eliminated at publication time.

In this case, a Google search for the phrase “National Archives Catalog ID: 300022” leads to the NA page on which a whole series is described—not just that film publication but numerous others.  If you wish to include the catalog number, it might be handled this way:

… citing (1) Case Files of Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Applications Based on Revolutionary War Service, compiled ca. 1800 - ca. 1912, Documenting the Period ca. 1775 - ca. 1900, microfilm publication M804 (Washington, DC: National Archives), roll 1573; and (2) NA Catalog ID 300022.

The Record Group number (15) is also not a standard part of a citation to a microfilm publication. We are not at NARA using the original documents which are organized there into record groups.

We may, if we wish, include this in our citation as a point of information for further research. However, for “Record Group 15” to be mentally useful, we would also need to say what "Record Group 15" represents.  Each of the hundreds of record groups at NA have an identifying name as well as a number. The result would be  Record Group 15: Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

If you decide to include it, your “citing …” layer of the citation would grow to this:

… citing (1) Case Files of Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Applications Based on Revolutionary War Service, Compiled ca. 1800 - ca. 1912, Documenting the Period ca. 1775 - ca. 1900, micropublication M804 (Washington, DC: National Archives), roll 1573;  (2) NA Catalog ID 300022; and (3) Record Group 15: Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

In sum:

Eliminating the detail that we would not use at publication time and assembling both layers of the citation would give us this (with boldface and standard face separating the two layers):

"US, Revolutionary War Pensions, 1800-1900," database, fold3 (https://www.fold3.com/file/27256604 : accessed 8 Apr 2025), Henry Livingston (packhorse driver, Virginia) and widow Susannah Livingston, pension number R.6394 > page 3 (second of three Bible pages identifying children);  citing Case Files of Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Applications Based on Revolutionary War Service, compiled ca. 1800 - ca. 1912, Documenting the Period ca. 1775 - ca. 1900, microfilm publication M804 (Washington, DC: National Archives), roll 1573.

 

 

dalecarmack, with website waypoints and paths, we use the greater than ( > ) symbol to separate waypoints in the path. At many sites, a waypoint will have an internal comma. Thus using commas between waypoints can create ambiguity.

Your final version works well.