"They [James and Elizabeth Rampley] are the only Rampley family in the
1850 census for Illinois, Missouri, or Iowa."
How do I cite such a statement? Do I indicate the database I searched, when I searched it, and how my search was conducted?
I have some ideas, but I'm curious to see if any readers have any thoughts?
Obviously, the purpose of a citation is to answer the question "how do you know that?" So I suppose you wouldn't necessarily have to cite a specific source, but more of an explanation: "I performed a page-by-page search of the 1850 census for all enumeration districts for all three states." And you would probably want to tell which images you used, whether all the pages were available, etc. One missing page could make that statement completely untrue.
ReplyDeleteI'm in agreement that a specific citation isn't detailed enough to really explain the statement.
ReplyDeleteOther ideas included making a blog post regarding my negative search and citing that. Personally I think that including the search details directly in any text is the best and most direct way to go. The discussion should include (at least):
website used
date
search parameters