I attended a RootsMagic SIG yesterday and a subject came up about a census source/citation. One of the discussions was about putting the exact location of the census in the URL section. Not just saying it’s on Ancestry dot com or FamilySearch but to mention the exact page where the census is located. I know there is no right or wrong way of doing this, just want to see which way is more popular. Here are a few examples.
1910 U.S. Census for Arthur McCullough: exact page first, then the way I do it.
How many of you do that? I only put that I found it on Ancestry or Family Search. In due time, I feel the exact location will change in the future. Correct me if I’m wrong. What are your thoughts on this.
You will probably get a lot of different answers BUT as you said there is no right or wrong way to do this–you are also very right that the location of the image could at some point change…
I did copy the info you listed and it took me to a screen that said this was a private file-- As for the URL, I usually record the page before the image-- so 1900 census for Kate would be
Reason I record the page before is that a lot of times, I want to look at another record for the person ( say Kate’s marriage info) but all I have is the census info-- this lets me access all her info instead of just the one census page..
When you said page, I thought you actually meant the number for the page in the census, so that if you actually had to go somewhere and view the census on microfilm, you could find it-- for that you need to record the city, county, state, and i think both supervisor’s district # and enumeration district #
so for Kate it would be
Kansas City, Wyandotte Co., KS
Sup # 2 EDU # 154
page 67 B/ sheet 17/ 177 written on it --scan p 34
I do the same as Nancy. However, in my custom source templates I’m also recording the exact record details in a way that it can be found even if / when the URL breaks.
For example, for my US Federal Census template, I have fields that specifically record NARA Record Group, Catalog Series and Publication info, as well as things like State, SD, ED, Page#, Household, Line/Row etc. Using that info I could readily re-find the same record in any online database.
Certainly. I’d be happy to. You should be able to recreate it from this screen capture of the definitions. Below that is a sample of what it looks like, using one of my 3rd ggf.
I have to admit that I have a huge focus on the printed page. In addition to my notion that a URL is not likely to be of much value in 100 years (or 50 or 25), the complicated URL’s that will take you to a particular record at Ancestry or FamilySearch seem totally inappropriate to me for the printed page.
Instead, I include enough information that a particular census record can be found on any site, be it Ancestry or FamilySearch or any other site that hosts census records. Or for that matter, there is enough information so that it works to find a record even if you return to microfilm.
I admit that it makes more sense to include detailed URL’s when presenting your data online, but that simply isn’t my focus. And when I do present my data online, I include the images I have downloaded on my site, not a link to the location from which I downloaded the image.
Lol, well I did post it in a public forum. I don’t mind if it travels around a bit. Besides, I like the people here so if I can help more folks with it then all the better.
Like Jerry I focus on what the printed reports look like. Early on I started out using Census as the source for a person’s or family’s residence. Someone looking at my family group sheet for example, will see that in 1850 they lived in say Coventry, Chenango, New York. Ten or twenty years from now the reader can go to Ancestry or alternate provider and search for the census in that year and place. I have found over the years that the urls I used long ago are no longer valid, but census years and locations remain stable.
I agree with others the URL may have little meaning in 10 or so years, however if I had a choice between Family Search & Ancestry (and they are on both) I would use Family Search because its free to access vs Ancestry requires Subscriptions for most things.
A source citation for a census record would be formatted as follows in keeping with Elizabeth Shown Mills in Evidence Explained:
1910 U. S. Census, Portage County, Ohio, population schedule, Randolph Township, enumeration district (ED) 107, SD 18, sheet 5A, dwelling 113, family 116, William Weihner household; digital images, Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com : accessed 22 February 2026); citing NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 1224.
This gives all the information needed to find it again anyplace - Ancestry, FS, whatever. However, I also then use the Citation WebTags field in RM11 in the source citation to record the URL. Yes, it may not be valid down the road but using that link is a faster way to get back to the record if I need to later.
That is, of course, perfectly correct. However, I shorten it a bit as follows, and it’s an important shortening.
1910 U. S. Census, Portage County, Ohio, population schedule, Randolph Township, enumeration district (ED) 107, SD 18, sheet 5A, viewed 22 Feb 2026 at ancestry.com.
Essentially, I equate a census citation with an entire census image, not just with the entry for one family. I understand that this is not EE compliant, but it is what has always made sense to me - that the citation is to the image as a whole so that there is a one-to-one correspondence between images and citations.
Sometimes I have exceptions in the other direction, as when a single courthouse marriage record has three images - an application, a license, and a return. So in this case, my single citation maps to three images, but the three images are a part of a coherent whole. In fact, I used to make the three images into a single pdf file so that there is only one “image file” linked to RM. But ultimately, I didn’t like the way PDF’s behaved when published to the Web.
I adopted this overall concept by analogy to citations to compiled family histories that are published in bound books. I’m not at home to check my copy of EE, but I think in this case that even EE only references down to the level of one page, rather than to something like page 97, line 12 to get the reference to some particular John Doe on the page.
I also do not see much value in using heavily layered citations, as in the EE reference to the NARA information. This doesn’t really help you find the record again, and it certainly clutters things up for printed reports. In the case of census records, the fact that NARA is the real repository is clear implicitly. In cases where the real repository may not be so implicitly clear, I will sometimes include the repository layer. For some reason, I do feel obliged to mention where I found an image, like ancestry.com vs. familysearch.org for census images. It doesn’t seem totally logical if I’m trying to avoid heavily layered citations in the first place. But logical or not, I do include the name of my sites, even though they may not exist in 100 years or in 50 years or in 10 years.
In the case of citations that you can copy whole from a Web site and paste into a genealogy app, my experience is that they can become even more layered and tedious than the census example from EE. Plus, there is no good place to paste them into RM or other genealogy apps because RM and other genealogy apps expect citations to have a “source part” and a “citation part”. So I never just copy and paste those kinds of citations. I always create my own instead.
I have used Ancestry for decades and my experience, once eons ago I did post the links to Family Tree Maker program when I used that, is that Ancestry moves the files around so that the links break. I prefer citing the sources the old-fashioned before digital way.
I like ngwehner’s response. A good and proper traditional citation based on an established system like Evidence Explained. HOWEVER, what is the downside to including the current URL? Copy Paste. Done. And it is SO nice to be able to pop back to a past record with a single click.
I try and do a good citation but usually include the URL at the end knowing that link may be broken at any time but then I’m just back to where I’d be if I hadn’t included it in the first place
For me the downside is the visual clutter and the extra paper for printed reports. That probably isn’t an issue for most RM users, but I use RM to create a lot of printed reports for family reunions.
