Birth records

Hello, mbcross. I found the record easily from your citation. That's the first test of how good a citation is when citing an online source. Past that, we can make three tweaks:

1. The record you're citing is actually that of Richard Michael McHale Jr. That's the way the name appears on the record itself. That's the way it appears in Ancestry's database. Best practice is to cite it exactly as is.

2. In your citation, after the parenthetical publication data (place: date), you have a semicolon. In a complex citation that requires layers, semicolons separate those layers. The phrase "Richard M. McHale birth, 11 January 1922," is an essential part of the first layer. It's not a standalone item. It's the specific item that we look for in that website's database.   (It's the equivalent of a page in a book. You would not put a semicolon between a book's publication data and the page number, right?)

3. The "citing ..." layer (i.e., location layer) also has an extra semicolon:  citing "Orleans Births 1921 Vol. 177, pg. 901-1200;" Louisiana State Archives, Baton Rouge.  All of that is part of the same location layer.

To put it another way, your draft citation has four layers:

• "Louisiana, U.S., State Birth Records, 1832-1924," database and images, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/63106 : accessed 9 Jul 2026);
• Richard M. McHale birth, 11 January 1922;
• citing "Orleans Births 1921 Vol. 177, pg. 901-1200";
• Louisiana State Archives, Baton Rouge.

But you have only two things going on in that citation:

• You're citing a database at a website and the specific item to look for in that database.
• You're reporting what that database cites as it's own source and where it found it. 

Two things to cite means two layers.