Citing Material on this Web Site

How to Cite Material on this Web Site

What is a citation and do I need one?

A citation is simply an indication of the source of material that is not your own and from which you have derived information, analyses, or opinions for use in your own work. You need to use citations even in your unpublished work, such as a family database, for three essential reasons:

To give due credit to the person or persons from whom you got your information;

To enable someone else to go to the original source of your work to double-check your writing or find more information;

To distance yourself somewhat from possible charges that you have misread documents or invented information. If your work contains a typographical or other error that was present in your source, the fault is not yours but is that of the source. For example, you may certainly use a book of will abstracts as a source, but do not simply cite the will itself as the source, as any errors that crop up in your work will be blamed on you; instead, cite the will abstract and the book from which you got it. This lets the reader know that you are relying on someone else's work rather than reading the will itself.

There are numerous resources on the web and in print that provide detailed explanations of citation styles, many of which are inconsistent with each other. A well-written citation must give full credit to the source and provide a clear path for the reader to find the original information. Citing web pages is a bit more problematic. For one thing, the web site may change or the information on a specific web page may change. Citing a web page is a bit like trying to pin the tail on a donkey that is running away from you.

For citing material from the web you should always give at a minimum the link to the web site and the date on which you accessed it. Any changes made to the web page after you accessed it are not your fault or responsibility.

Citing material on this web site (http://easternshoreheritage.com) should adhere to the following guidelines.

To cite a will, an inventory, or other document on this site, give the title of the document as it is found on the web page, the source from which the document was drawn (this information will be somewhere on the page) plus access and web info, for example:

Deed from George Parker to William Thornman - 7 October 1805. Accomack County Virginia District Court Wills & Deeds 1800-1806, pp. 383, 384. 5 May 2009. <http://easternshoreheritage.com>.
This citation lists the title of the document as it is found on this site, gives the date on which it was accessed, and lists the web address. If you are wondering whether to give a more detailed web address, in this case http://easternshoreheritage.com/deeds/Parker_Thornman_deed.htm, you should be aware that addresses change all the time. The best policy is simply to give the main web site address. Anyone who needs to find that web page can easily look in the index. The citation also tells the reader exactly which book at the courthouse was used.
If you check the above web page for the Parker-Thornman deed, you will discover that there is a link to another web site that has an image of the actual deed. Which one should you cite? The answer lies in where you got your information. If you got it only from the image, then cite that; if you got it from the web page here, cite that.
To cite a person you found in the Navi-Bauble use the following format as an example:

Abbott, Lilly (ca 1790 - ). Genealogical Navi-Bauble Database. Eastern Shore Heritage. 1 January 2009. <http://easternshoreheritage.com>.
First, the name of the person is given as it appears in the alphabetical index, including the birth and death information; then the database itself is indicated. Since this is a localized database, the name of the web site (Eastern Shore Heritage) comes next, then the access date and the web site address.

If you find that you need to be more specific, you can always add an explanatory comment to your citation. For example, you might want to point out that the information about Lilly Abbott's children is really what you were after, so you could change the above citation to this:

Abbott, Lilly (ca 1790 - ). Genealogical Navi-Bauble Database. Eastern Shore Heritage. 1 January 2009. <http://easternshoreheritage.com>. See especially the information given for her children in the source notes.

If you need to indicate that the source you were using was itself cited in the Navi-Bauble, for example, Turman's Marriage Records (and you didn't actually go look up the information in Turman's book yourself), you could do it this way:

Turman, Nora Miller. Marriage Records of Accomack County, Virginia 1776-1854, Recorded in Bonds, Licenses and Ministers' Returns. Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, Inc., 1994; p. 72. Cited in the entry "Abbott, Lilly (ca 1790 - )" in the Genealogical Navi-Bauble Database. Eastern Shore Heritage. 1 January 2009. <http://easternshoreheritage.com>.

It is important to cite both Turman and the Navi-Bauble. If you cite only the latter, Turman gets no credit; if you cite only Turman, the Navi-Bauble gets no credit for its use of Turman. Further, if you mention only Turman, and the information from her book was miscopied in the Navi-Bauble, Turman would be blamed for errors she did not commit.

As a general rule, when in doubt, be very specific and inclusive in your citations.