Voter Registers

leflake, let's think through this together.  … Citation has two purposes:

1. To give us enough data about the source that we can make an informed judgment about its credibility.
2. To enable someone else (or ourselves at a later date) to find the record.

Your citation well serves the first purpose. It presents some problems in filling the second need. I’ll describe the process I just went through to refind the record. Then let’s think about how to alter the citation to make that workaround unnecessary.

What I did:

1. Use the URL.  The citation, of course, just goes to Ancestry’s landing page, not to a specific image. That’s fine. It’s even best, most of the time, at this website. However, using only the home-page URL means we have to provide a path through which to navigate through the site to find what we need.
2. Look for a database title in the citation to Ancestry.There isn’t one.
3. Look in the citation to the “original” to see if, maybe, the database title is there. Normally a database title is in quotation marks. You show “City of Savannah Voter Registers, 1871” in quotation marks. Given that quotation marks mean I’m copying this exactly, I used that for a title search in Ancestry’s card catalog.  The search engine gave me no results.
4. Try key words in the card catalog.  “Savannah” and “Voting” gave me a link to an Ancestry database titled “Savannah, Georgia, Voter Records, 1856-1896, 1901-1917.”  Great! 
5. Enter the voter of interest into the search box for that database. Entering “William Dunn” gave me 19 entries, each of which carried 2 dates (“Birthdate” and “Residence Date”).  Logically, “Residence Date” would be the one we need, but there were no 1871 entries.
6. Check for the possibility of a typo in the date.  The database search had turned up entries for 1861 and 1872. Searching each of those did not take me to anything I could identify as “Vol. A to E (1871), William Dunn, p. D, Number 98.”
7. Backtrack to the landing page for the database and look for a “browse” option.  Here, I found two options—one of which was worded exactly like the words you put in quotation marks. (However, those words are place in your description of the original document, rather than your description of Ancestry’s organizational path.)
8. Choose “City of Savannah Voter Registers, 1871” option. This took me to an image of an old register labeled “Vol. A to E” just as your citation promised. Great!
9. Flip to “p. D, Number 98.”   Oops. There is no pagination—not numbers or letters. There are, instead, whole sections (many pages) for each letter of the alphabet. There is no key to tell us how to find a “D” section—or where, among 376 images whose organization is unexplained, we might find a “D” page that carried entry number 98.
10. Flip each page, image by image, until the right one is found. With this approach, I finally found it on Ancestry’s image 74.

So:  How might you tweak the citation to enable someone to find the record in 2 minutes instead of 20?  In addition to the thoughts above, two other basic principles apply:

A. Website citations to databases and images involve “layers.” For imaged records, we have three layers. If we choose to lead with the original document, then the three layers would be these:

• Layer 1 is the identification of the original document—as best as we can identify it from what is visible.
• Layer 2 is the identification of the website that delivered it—a citation that should enable us to go straight to the image (also bear in mind that website citations are cited like books; and databases at websites are cited like chapters in a book).
• Layer 3 is the “source of the source information”—whatever the website tells us about the identity and location of the material.

B. Details from one layer should not be mixed into our details for a different layer. 

With these thoughts in mind, how could the citation be improved?