Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Citing Quoted Sources

The Insider's Guide to Citations

Citations have two purposes: locate the source and indicate its strength. This series of articles explains what we must do to accomplish these purposes for genealogical sources.

 

Citing Quoted Sources

Remember the big no-no in writing school papers? You’re reading a book and it quotes another. You like the quote and use it in your paper. You’re supposed to go find the original and cite it. If you can’t, you must cite the first book and its citation of the original. The Chicago Manual of Style says such a citation should look like this:1

     2.  Donald Lines Jacobus, “Tradition and Family History,” The American Genealogist, 9:1 (July 1932); quoted in Milton Rubincam, Pitfalls in Genealogical Research (Salt Lake City: Ancestry, 1987), 11.

Do you see how this is two citations in one? Remember the form; we will use it for derivative sources.

Citation of the source of the source ; quoted in Citation of the source seen by the researcher

 

I use a semicolon to separate the two, since that is the English language standard for separating list items that contain internal commas.2


Sources

     1.  The Chicago Manual of Style 15th ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003; CD-ROM version 1.2.3), 727.

     2.  Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace, PDF images (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2007), 88.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for showing the overall form of the citation in those boxes. I can't stand people who just give examples, without the overall form, and expect us to somehow come up with a sensible variation of the form on our own when circumstances change.

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