Friday, September 19, 2014

Crafting a Source Citation for a Published Book and a Google Book Version of the Book

When I was writing my 52 Ancestors post this morning, I noticed that I needed to "improve" my source citation for the birth of Miranda (Wade) White.  The only birth record I had was from the book:

William R. Cutter, et al (editors), Genealogies and Family History of the State of Connecticut: A Record of the Achievements of Her People in the Making of a Commonwealth and the Founding of a Nation, Volume IV (New York, N.Y. : Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1911).

I found this book on the shelf at a local library (and I don't recall which one!) back in the 1990 time frame and I made a photocopy of the Wade sketch that had her name.  However, I had not transcribed the information - I had only entered it into my genealogy database directly from the photocopy of the pages.

In my RootsMagic file, I had made a free-form source citation for this on-the-shelf item, with the template looking like this:


The source citation for the birth information in the published book is:

Footnote: William R. Cutter, et al (editors) Genealogies and Family History of the State of Connecticut: A Record of the Achievements of Her People in the Making of a Commonwealth and the Founding of a Nation, Volume IV (New York, N.Y. : Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1911), in "Wade" sketch, page 2125, Miranda Wade birth.

Short Footnote: Cutter, Genealogies and Family History of the State of Connecticut, in "Wade" sketch, page 2125, Miranda Wade birth.

Bibliography: Cutter, William R. Genealogies and Family History of the State of Connecticut. New York, N.Y. : Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1911.

Since this book was published in 1911, I figured that it was online at Google Books, so I did a search for [ cutter genealogies connecticut miranda wade ] to see if I could find it without digging through my bookcases and then scanning the pages.

It was one of the first matches, and I clicked on it and page 2125 with Miranda's name opened:




To cite this book found on Google Books, I needed to add the book publication information plus the Google information.  To get the book publication information, I clicked on the link for "About this book" in the left-hand column.  Here is the publication information about the book:


I copied and pasted most of the information into the source template for "Book, image copy (online)" in RootsMagic 6, and then added the Google information and the source detail information:


Note that I didn't put all of the authors names, I substituted "et al" for them.  

The resulting source citation for the Google Book copy of the published book is:

Footnote: William R. Cutter et al, editors, Genealogies and Family History of the State of Connecticut: A Record of the Achievements of Her People in the Making of a Commonwealth and the Founding of a Nation, Volume IV (New York, N.Y.: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1911), in "Wade" sketch, page 2125, Miranda Wade birth; digital images, Google, Google Books (http://books.google.com : accessed 19 September 2014).

Short Footnote: Cutter, Genealogies and Family History of the State of Connecticut, in "Wade" sketch, page 2125, Miranda Wade birth.

Bibliography: Cutter, William R. et al, editors. Genealogies and Family History of the State of Connecticut: A Record of the Achievements of Her People in the Making of a Commonwealth and the Founding of a Nation. Volume IV. New York, N.Y.: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1911. Digital images. Google. Google Books. http://books.google.com : 2014.

As you can see, the only significant difference is the added "layer" of the Google information.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/09/crafting-source-citation-for-published.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver


1 comment:

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