Citation of documents in archival collections can be trickier than citations for publications, because you have to provide enough information about the document and the archival collection in which you found it and the repository where that collection can be found to allow someone reading your analysis to find that document if they wanted to. The following are some guidelines to assist you in citing your document:

For the document:

• Author(s) of the document.
• A title that identifies the document.
  • This might be on the document itself, such as a report or an essay.
  • If there is nothing resembling a title on the document, you will have to devise a title that is descriptive and meaningful (e.g., Letter to Alice Jones, Notes on a meeting to discuss the partition of Eastern Europe).
  • A date the document was created. This might be an actual day, a month, or a year, and you may have to supply an approximate date based on context if there is no actual date on the document itself.
• Box and folder (or other container information) where you found the document.

For each archival collection being used: 

• Title of the collection.
• Collection number or other identifier unique within the repository that identifies the collection. This information is frequently included in citations in parentheses following the collection title.

For the repository holding the archive you are using:

• Name of the repository.
• Name of the parent institution or geographic location of the repository if necessary to disambiguate the repository’s name from potentially similar institutional names.

Since your assignment is a document analysis and not a full-fledged research paper, you might just cite the document you analyzed at the beginning or end of your analysis. If this were a lengthier research paper, you would cite individual documents (with a shorthand reference to the collection) in footnotes and the collection in your bibliography. 

Yale Archives Citation Examples:

• Claude A. Barnett, letter to Grace Nail Johnson, 27 June 1942, Box 25, Folder 14, James Weldon Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson Papers (JWJ MSS 49), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
• Louise Bryant, Russian Revolution notebook, 1917, Box 15, Folder 98, Louise Bryant Papers (MS 1840), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.