19 May 2014
WWW-land is truly a wonderfully wacky world. We find gorgeous sites filled with garbage. We find tacky pages filled with Gospel Truth—or as close to it as any historical researcher can get. How do we ensure that our online efforts are healthy ones?
18 May 2014
"When you catch an adjective," Mark Twain supposedly wrote to a twelve-year-old boy, "kill it. No. I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable." Constance ...
17 May 2014
A YouTube video for history researchers suggests that church records be considered vital records. EE gasped: Hunh? Aside from the fact that churches rarely maintain records of births and deaths ...
15 May 2014
"Historians look for anachronisms, whether of language, form, or content. ... Sometimes, for example, it is possible to show that a particular 'hand' did not exist when ...
14 May 2014
Laws of heirship, across time and place, have generally dictated estate divisions by either "per capita" or "per stirpes." The jurist Henry Campbell Black has defined the differences this way:*
13 May 2014
Last Tuesday, we thought about the less-fortunate Americans of yesteryear, urban dwellers who left few records, and we brainstormed the kind of resources we might be able to find on them in local courthouses and town halls. Today's test takes a different tack ...
11 May 2014
Most writers love quotations. They capture the "feel" of a document. They express the thoughts of those we're studying. They can provide important perspective, as provided by other writers. They also introduce a host of questions and even more opportunities for ethical and legal transgressions—starting with these five ...
10 May 2014
Citations that involve living people must respect privacy. In our working notes, we record the name and contact information for each person we interview and each person who ...
