Hi,
I'm doing homework for my master's and I'm running into problems with my footnotes, how do I include multiple sources such as a letter quoted in an encyclopedia, or government documents included in a collection of government documents, or an essay quoting a letter inside an encyclopedia? I've never had to do more than one level of citation before and traditionally I would rip the primary source out of the collections, but I do not think that is what my professor is looking for.
Yikes, those are the tricky ones.
Okay gov't documents, you sort of cite it like any other books, but you usually include the volumes. Let's look at the gov't docs I used for my own research from the Pennsylvania Archives
Pennsylvanian, Commonwealth of. Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, from the Organization to the Termination of the Proprietary Government. Colonial Records of Pennsylvania. 10 vols. Philadelphia and Harrisburg: Theophilius Fenn & Co., 1852.
The author here is the state (since there isn't a given author), according the latest edition of Chicago. Include the title and series name. Volume number. Publisher, etc.
Now, the other ones. If I understand you correctly, if you're using a quoted source within another source, then you need to state that you're using an indirect quote.
Name, of Author, "Their Letter," in Encyclopedia and then give the rest of the citation for the encyclopedia. Repeat as needed. I think this page might be of some service to you.
I think you can do that for the last one too, but I'm wary of suggesting that as I'm pretty sure it's kind of frowned upon to quote three different sources. Is this for an exercise?