My first reason to “shred” documents (that is to look closely at each statement a source makes) was that it forces you to be aware of the details. The second reason to shred your documents is that each bit of information in them has a different chance of being correct. If you lump each individual […]
Shredding Documents, Part 2 Read More »
Awhile back, in Do Your Documents Have a Shady Past, I mentioned that documents exist both as a collection of individual pieces of information and as a unified whole. That whole has a history of its own. After considering a document, or in fact, any source as a whole, all those separate items of information
Shredding Documents, Part 1 Read More »
I love words. Like people they have origins and even genealogies. They even have family groups and cousins both close and distant. They have ancestors and many will leave descendants. Words have their own personalities—definitions, shades of meaning and special ways of behaving. They change as they grow older. When reading an old document it
Dour about Dowers? Read More »
When most family historians think of gathering information, they think of looking for written documents. There are other places to look, other things that are not documents but that are fine places to find information. Your source for much of what you learn as you first start out in family history should be relatives. Talking
Going to the Source Read More »
When questioning your documents, there are more questions to ask than just if your Aunt Maude might have “corrected” a few things in the family Bible. Who created it? Did the author have any first hand knowledge? Did the author have any reason for bias? When was it created? Calendar changes and different ways of
Give Your Documents the Third Degree Read More »
Historical documents are complex things. Far more complex than we might first expect. Each document exists as at least two separate things—first as a physical object, and second as a collection of information, independent of any physical form. In two earlier posts (Don’t Believe It! and Genealogy Without Documentation Is…), I’ve discussed a few things
Do Your Documents Have a Shady Past? Read More »
To try to understand the people that I’m researching, I like to try to think like them and to look at my surroundings like a pioneer. Often that means thinking like a pioneer in the forests of eastern North America. The next time you are walking in the woods, try this experiment. Do your best
Seeing Like a Pioneer Read More »
One of the most exciting things in researching any topic occurs when one stumbles across an unexpected bit of information, information that seems beyond the topic but that is interesting nonetheless. In a perfect world we would live happily ever after with our new found fact firmly in hand—but the world isn’t perfect. Authors are
Authors, Authorities and Reading in Focus Read More »
I just finished reading one of those books that can open the eyes to a bit of history that is not so well known. The title of the book, The American Plague, refers to the disease yellow fever. Like many diseases that no longer torment us, we don’t realize the justifiable horror that our ancestors
William of Ockham was a Franciscan friar who lived at the turn of the 14th century. A celibate who lived that long ago is not the most likely of topics for a genealogy article. He is my subject for today not because of who he begat but because of what he wrote. Perhaps his most
Sharpen Your Genealogy with Ockham’s Razor Read More »