After reading the latest Q & A from Chicago Manual,1 our friend Bonnie posed her own question that gets to the heart of Evidence Style and why it follows certain practices ...

Our questioner had just stumbled upon the Industrial Schedule of the 1860 U.S. census. An oddball? Well, as you can see from the image here, it certainly doesn’t look like the census we typically consult when we set out to identify Americans of the past ...

An email forum for researchers currently carries a thread on citing long URLs vs. digital paths (aka “waypoints”). One commenter saw an advantage: If we cite the path, then we can eliminate layered citations. Can we really?

“Help!” said the email. "I’m stuck on this one line of research. I’m not a newbie. I’ve done research for years. I spend hours every day online, doing research. I’d appreciate a suggestion from an expert." O.K. This is it ...

A newly found source gives us information about a person or a problem. Is that evidence? Or “just a clue”? We might even ask a more basic question: What’s the difference? ...

Our last posting about negative evidence and EE’s QuickLesson 17 drew quite a few shares. That led to an interesting discussion on the page of one of those who shared the posting. At the root of that discussion lay another common confusion: Negative evidence is not a “finding” that NEGATES something else we found.

A teaching tool for researchers just came across EE's desk. To paraphrase: The tool asks whether a needed record exists. Then it instructs: If it does not exist, you now have negative evidence.

No. Nope. Non and nyet!

Researcher Michael W. McCormick, in another forum, raised a question about Evidence Explained. The answer was too long to post there. With his permission—and my thanks for raising a helpfully analytical question—I’m using the Q and A here.

We've all been told: When you use a reference work, use the latest edition. Fine and good. We understand the principle. The latest version is more likely to

Two postings ago, we posed this thought: “Past first-degree relationships, DNA testing does not supply quick and easy answers to ‘prove’ a relationship.” Yesterday, we posed a problem ...