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Thursday, July 08, 2010

THE SOURCE OF MY DILEMMA IS THE SOURCE

I'm trying to correct errors from my early days of genealogy research
starting with citing sources on my Ancestry tree. Now I have the
usual Ancestry.com sources cited, but I'm adding a citation to my
Ellingwood line and I'm not entirely happy how it's coming out.

Much of my Ellingwood research comes from Florence Evelyn
O'Connor's book The Ancestors and Descendants of Asa Freeman
Ellingwood and Florilla (Dunham)Ellingwood.which was selfpublished
in West Paris, Me. The edition I have is from 1979. I'd hoped the
citation would come out looking like the examples in Evidence
Explained but they didn't. (I mean, I want them to pass footnote
Maven's high standards!)

And there's the problem of a repository. The book is out of print,
very hard to find, and I obtained this copy from one of my Ellingwood
cousins who had Florence's permission to print out a three ring binder
edition which Ellingwood family members can purchase. How do I
cite that? I don't want to post my cousin's personal information
(address, phone number) and endanger her privacy.

Do any of my readers have suggestions about this?

3 comments:

Family Curator said...

Hi Bill... I do love a challenge.

The self-published book is no problem, but the copy could be considered a reprint, image edition (see EE pg. 710 12.79). This is a reprint of the earlier publication, which was self-published, so it would need to combine the reprint format with self-pub works (see EE pg. 675 12.20). As such it could be cited thus:

O'Connor, Florence Evelyn. The Ancestors and Descendants of Asa Freeman Ellingwood and Florilla (Dunham) Ellingwood. Image reprint, West Paris, Maine: Privately printed, 1979, pg#.

I don't know how you can include private information without revealing name, address, etc. Maybe this is a start, at any rate.

Karen Packard Rhodes said...

Since you have a copy yourself, I would just say "copy in personal collection of the author," and leave it at that. That way, you are citing the repository for the copy you used, and keeping your cousin's privacy protected.

Greta Koehl said...

I am having the same problems as you are with non-Ancestry citations for Ancestry trees; no problem in Reunion or in an ordinary document, but the format for entering sources on Ancestry doesn't make much sense to me. I'll be interested to see the responses to this question.