Citation Issues

      I write to ask whether other users of EE think that section 2.56 should have a sentence to the effect that, if the listing in 2.56 does not include an abbreviation for a desired word, users should turn to Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary.  (I got this suggestion from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed., sect. 15.1.)  Abbreviations from many fields are given alphabetically throughout WNCD.

I have had to sub-contract to a few researchers out of the country to obtain documents for me.  They have also provided citations for those documents the way they do it in their country.  My question is should I use their citations or try to convert those citations into EE format for my client reports?

Kelly

    I would like to see a hyphen separating section letter from page number in a newspaper citation which uses the shorter form.  Is this a unique quirk of mine or are there others who think that it may add clarity?  To use the example from EE’s sect. 14.22, I would recommend the following:

    longer form: Ken Ringle, “Up through Slavery,” The Washington Post, 12 May 2002, sect. F, pp. 1, 3.

    shorter form: Ken Ringle, “Up through Slavery,” The Washington Post, 12 May 2002, p. F-1, F-3.

When citing a microfilm held by a historical society what is the order of the elements?

For example:

Carver County Historical Society, microfilm roll 61, Waconia, Minnesota

or

CCHS microfilm roll 61, Carver County Historical Society, Waconia, Minnesota

or

Carver County Historical Society, Waconia, Minnesota, microfilm roll 61

Ann Gilchrest

I have several death records from Minnesota that are derivatives of a derivative. Apparently an "index/register" was created from the original town and township records of Hennepin County. This "index" appears to be a complete transcription of the original record with a reference to the original register this is an assumption because no one has been able to verify that is in fact what it is. Sometime after July 1974 the "index" was transcribed to a form. The form number is HC 582 (7-74) Certificate of Death Record.

Some years ago I received a large number of photocopied news clippings (maybe 4 0r 5 on a page for instance) from a private Newspaper Museum in Oklahoma. They have the newspaper name stamped on the sheet but not on each clipping. In addition there are no pages or column numbers indicated for each. That is the way they appear in their files.  I wrote to the church there at the time and found that they also had files full of clippings about the person I was searching for. Still no page or column numbers on those as well.

While I completely agree with excluding postal and e-mail addresses from published citations for privacy purposes, I have a hard time understanding the need to include a specific phrase, for example,

    [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE].

And I don't understand why we would want that phrase to be in small caps which tend to distract the reader. Maybe it is a holdover from my software design days where we often used all caps and square brackets to indicate a variable where the user should substitute real information for a placeholder name.

I have received copies of WWI Military Personnel Records for a soldier who was wounded in France in 1918. The records came from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Many of the records were damaged by fire.

I have a copies of pages from a Catholic parish book the title of the book is "St. John's Parish Census Book (Old) with an index," the entries are in Latin and arranged in family groups similar to family books in Germany.

When I called the parish office to see if the books were still in their office, some confusion occurred over the "title" apparently the office refers to these books as family books. So far my citation looks like this:

I have always been curious as to why census citations don't include jurisdictions from smaller to larger, ie. - Houston, Harris County, Texas rather than

Harris County, Texas, Houston.