Correct document information for Canadian Censuses

LegacyUser

James Cobban said: Typical document information for a Canadian Census record is the following:

District North Grey
Household ID 253
Line Number 16
Affiliate Film Number C-9953
GS Film Number 4396616
Digital Folder Number 4396616
Image Number 00571
Citing this Record

"Canada Census, 1871," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1... : 24 October 2018), Elizabeth Idle in household of Thomas Idle, Grey, Ontario, Canada; citing 1871; citing National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.

A citation must identify the page of the source document containing the information. This does not. It gives the district name, which because of Canadian politics is actually the name of the federal election district containing the record. In this particular census there were 205 districts because there were 205 seats in the House of Commons in 1871, with an average population of 12,846 each, so about 500 pages each. So informing the user that the records in question is on line 16 of one of those 500-odd pages is not helpful.

The missing essential citation information cannot be obtained from the above notice and must therefore be obtained from the images. But because FamilySearch seems to have a policy of not asking for permission to make images available even during a world emergency, these links are currently unhelpful. The images for all Canadian censuses, by the way, are available for free on the Library and Archives Canada web-site. If FamilySearch is so inconsiderate as to not publish full citation information and to also not provide access to the images then that could be mitigated if FamilySearch pointed at the Library and Archives Canada site. Library and Archives Canada cannot be seen as a competitor for FamilySearch any more than NARA.

I am further puzzled because it is obvious, for example from shared transcription errors, that FamilySearch is using the same nominal index database as both Ancestry and Library and Archives Canada. Since that database as presented by both Ancestry and Library and Archives Canada does include complete citation information, in particular including the enumeration district and page information, why has FamilySearch chosen to exclude this information which is in the shared database?

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: This citation problem impacts more than just Canadian census enumerations. A number of U.S. Federal Census Enumerations also lack the critical information that identifies the actual enumeration page.

The problem has been in existence from the beginning and has been previously raised. At this time, I believe that only one U.S. enumeration finally has the critical identifying information in the citation.

LegacyUser

David Newton said: The citations of the English and Welsh censuses also share exactly this sort of problem.

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: It seems very odd that FS would have copied this database, but excluded some of the citation data. That will inevitably lead to issues with sourcing, resulting in sloppy genealogies.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Presumably the thinking was that if we had line number, image number, film number, then that was all one needed. However, since I can't access the film (as James says), then the image number is fairly useless and I can't use the FS citation to look at (say) Ancestry.

Maybe LDS members have access to the film? Who knows? - that appears to be confidential. But it would be another reason why FS didn't realise the uselessness of the citation for non-members not at an FHC etc.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: The biggest problem is that the citations are person-oriented and not source-oriented, which would mean they would refer to the page of the census, rather than the individual on some page and if they were looking at a different site for the images, they then should be able to go directly to the page they wanted.

The whole idea behind any citation is to lead future researchers to the original source that is cited. FamilySearch's people who set up the citations evidently were not taught that basic principle (and this applies to any citation, not just those used by FamilySearch or other genealogical sites) or forget the idea behind a citation.

They've gotten better, but have a lot of work still to do. Getting rid of the person-centric citations would help -- it's okay for a source title on the source page of a profile to be person centric, but not the citation itself.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: "The whole idea behind any citation is to lead future researchers to the original source that is cited"
Yes - I like David Newton's test - "Using this 'citation' can I go to the archives, order the right document [which could be a box], and find the right line on the right sheet of paper?"
That's probably twice the length of the original test, but that's 'cos I just wrote it...