Need help with NEHGS citation

Question

The current info on Mainwaring Beal is scant and this NEHGS record for Mainwaring Beal comes from my tree on Ancestry. I have been learning all I can about other ways to create citations that are not linked to Ancestry so they are free and accessible to everyone. Unfortunately, I cannot find an alternative for this particular later Vol 110 of 1956 and I do not have a subscription to American Ancestors. Would an additional citation from American Ancestors be better and could someone perhaps provide one? 

In the meantime, how could this Ancestry one below be improved? Does the URL actually go to the record or just to my tree (which is still a work in progress)? I welcome any and all alternative NEHGS source citations and recommendations for changes as I am not quite satisfied and would like to complete this one little piece of the puzzle before I propose a needed merge for him. Thank you for looking and providing assistance.

Ancestry.com. The New England Historical & Genealogical Register, 1847-2011 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011. The New England Historic Genealogical Society. The New England Historical and Genealogical Register. Boston, MA: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1957. Vol 110, p 57. (https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=2129&h=436743&tid=158774432&pid=182122421675&hid=1033)

Answer 1

Errk! That Ancestry citation is a bit like getting the smell of delicious food being cooked, but not being able to get at the food.

The journal page cited is on American Ancestors at https://www.americanancestors.org/DB522/i/14257/57/264709687

The article is "Vital Records of York, Maine."

This specific entry is part of a list of the births of the children of "Edward Bales (the Son of Arthur Bale) ... borne in York off ye body of his wife Elizabeth the dafter of Captt John Littlefield." Nine children are listed. The first of these is:

Mannerin Bale     born:  January ye 1:  1697/8

Comments

Further to the above:

• The URL you provided goes to the index record on Ancestry, not to a family tree page. The record is, however, best understood as an "index" to the record; it's better than nothing, but it is not the actual record.
• And those York vital records are among the many excellent resources that aren't available on the free public Internet.

Answer 2

The NEHGR is a journal, and as such each issue has a number of articles (some frequently being serialized due to length) by different authors. A proper citation needs to include the author, title, and the volume information (name of journal, volume. Number, date, page(s), and so on). The Ancestry citation does not conform to the standard format for journal articles.

 Collections of this journal, some complete and some not, exist in a number of genealogical libraries in the US and elsewhere. Electronic versions exist as well, also some complete and some not, such as Ancestry or American Ancestors. All of these are simply respositories and are not necessary for the citation. However, they may be included as a convenience for the reader. Personally, I have used the physical bound volumes, the older ones bring fragile, in places such as the Sutro Library in San Francisco, as well as electronic versions (online data bases, CDs, and digitized volumes).

Thus, if I were to cite an article from NEHGR, I would cite the actual article, and may or may not cite where I actually found it. If I thought it was rare and difficult to find, and NEHGR is not, I would identify a respository.

Comments

Here is a link for citing a journal article from an on-line database:

https://www.easybib.com/guides/citation-guides/mla-8/cite-journal-article-online-database-mla-8/

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FYI: The NEHGS website (AmericanAncestors.org) provides complete full-text access to the entire publication history of the NEHGR (with the exception of a small number of articles that aren't online, but are supplied to NEHGS members on request). The URL I posted is a link to a specific page, but the entire article (actually, in this case it's the entire installment of an article that spanned a number of issues) can be accessed by paging backwards and forwards from that page.