Abstracts

We love those published abstracts, don’t we? Those databases. Those quick, cheap, and easy sources that save us the time spent combing old records or the costs of ordering them. But, as with all love affairs, verify before you trust is a wise idea.

The email began as many do, with a generous supply of kind words about the research published at my personal website. Then came the paragraph that laid out the actual reason for writing ...

Reader pbaum has raised an issue often faced by those who comb history's nooks and crannies: Say I have 10 or more land entries mentioned in the main text, but ....

What is your success rate as a researcher? Does every effort advance your goals or bring you closer to resolving a specific research problem? Do you invest hours that generate no relevant information at all? Do record sets and databases never seem to yield the needed answers to your key questions about events and identities, associations, and relations? Or have you amassed great quantities of data that remind you of the Shakespearean line about “much sound and fury, signifying nothing”? ...

13 February 2014 Reseachers use the term "church records" quite loosely to refer to a wide variety of different materials. Yet minute books, vestry books, actes de fabrique, sacramental registers, family books, and certificates of all types—baptism, marriage, and death—offer significantly different materials. Each . . .

12 February 2014 Historical researchers create various types of "research notes." When we read monographs and articles that present interpretations of the past, our notes typically summarize the author's thoughts. Occasionally, we may copy, exactly, a critical passage or a pithy quotation—with . . .