Historical Sources in the Niche Market of Local History

Because the local historian usually begins research from the perspective of someone who is faced with a giant jigsaw puzzle, with lots of missing pieces and without a picture of the finished product to guide the way, the historian gets to create the road map that guides the research.

As we take the slow walk from the cradle to the grave, we create literally thousands of documents. Thousands more are created about us. Thousands more may result if we go more than twenty-five miles from the place we were born, cross a national border, or from driving a car, owning a house or rental property, owning a business, getting married, having children, having municipal services, or any of a dozen activities.

Historical sources on line are so numerous that it would take a five hundred-page book to list them. A few are to be found in Appendix 1. Most are state archives or historical societies; many are university collections. Many county offices likewise have masses of data on line. Including more than 5,000 archives available on line at the state, province, and national level for English-speaking historians. There are tens of thousands more, such as local libraries and local historical societies, all with information in some form. In any case, on line sources must be subjected to, and withstand the same scrutiny as any other source; while there are good sources available on the Internet, there are also those that are tainted like any other might be.

Many of the resources concerning both people and place that local historians and family historians will use are concerned with are local - county and municipal offices and documents. A surprising number are available on line and include:

· Apprenticeship records

· Baptism or christening records

· Birth certificates

· Cemetery records and tombstones

· Census records

· Coroner's reports

· Death records

· Diaries, personal letters, family Bibles, scrapbooks and ephemera

· Directories - trade directories, street directories, telephone directories

· Earlier family histories

· Marriage certificates

· Military records

· Newspapers - both news items and advertisements

· Property records and contemporary maps

· Public records - social security records, Poor Law records (in Britain), registers of electors

· Tax records

· Wills and probate records

Today many people are using these primary sources to recover their family history. But most of these records include only technical details of a person's life, such as their birth date, whom they married and so forth, but they contain very little about the person themselves such as their likes, dislikes, hobbies, hopes and dreams, occupation, memberships in guilds, societies or unions, and so forth. For modern researchers, family history websites and indexes are useful and they are often the main source of information. Some offer resources (e.g., census or civil registration records) that have previously only been available in microform or as hard copies; some are designed for individual researchers to share their information with others; some exist primarily to link people who share the same ancestors, or the same research interests. Indeed, many primary sources are available on line. For those that are not, keep in mind that primary source material may be very old. If you are permitted to handle the material, you will be instructed by the archivist in the way to handle the material and should follow those instructions to the letter. These documents and goods are survivors from another time and should be treated with the utmost respect.

Private sources, such as the dot-coms that offer ancestral information and family trees, or the family and genealogical databases of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints can be invaluable; however, the family or local historian must remain acutely aware of the lack of verification and oversight in the privately submitted records.

The historian must take documents, statements, oral histories, and traditional information into account, winnow it all down, and develop history from it. Determining which resources are appropriate to the project at hand uses the same agenda of questions, who, what, where, when, why, and how, to narrow down the choices. Having gathered and critically evaluated historical sources, the next step in preparing the history is determining which resources to use for the process, with a caveat:

· Selective use of sources in history may skew the investigation or prejudice it altogether. While we might be investigating the politics of a locale, it would be prejudicial to the investigation to selectively use only the sources from one political party that were damaging to the other political party. The result would not be history, but propaganda.

In this context, selective use means that historical sources are first chosen, and then information critical to their meaning and interpretation are omitted.

· Selection of sources, on the other hand, is necessary. For the local historian, the geographical limitation means a narrowing of scope that makes the selection of sources problematic only to the extent that the historian will need determine the applicability of the source's applicability to the specific research goals.

While selection of sources may mean not using sources that are outside the scope of an investigation or sources that duplicate each other, it also means going outside the bounds of the investigation as necessary, but only to the extent that it impacts the investigation or one of its elements.

Assessing each source in the proper historical context, the historian must harrow forgery, half-truth, deliberate distortion, the emotional high of patriotic propaganda, sly disinformation and, as previously noted, misinformation, to form and validate hypotheses by historical reasoning. Three methods are commonly used: Argument to the best explanation, argument from analogy, and statistical inference.

The argument to the best explanation uses seven steps and begins with the formulation of a hypothesis. This hypothesis is a statement which is held to be true and which, when taken together with other statements about the subject, person, place, or event, implies other statements describing "present, observable data." This present, observable data may be artifacts, information found in documents, or physical features (buildings, landmarks) of the place.

For example, if it is generally believed that there was a blacksmith shop somewhere in the general area being studied, but the exact location of the former smithy is unknown, and the existence of a blacksmith shop in the general area is acknowledged in several documents (by tax receipts, comments in a newspaper contemporary to the smithy), then there is (1) a statement which is held to be true and (2) there are other present, observable data (the tax receipts and newspaper comments). The hypothesis would be that the blacksmith shop did indeed exist in the area, implying the presence of blacksmithing equipment, equine trade in the area and that there may have been a smith living nearby.

The second step is to determine whether the hypothesis that a blacksmith shop was in the area implies a greater explanatory scope than any other incompatible hypothesis about the same subject. If it's known that a smith lived in the area (his obituary appears in one of the contemporary newspapers), that the neighborhood is on a street that was once a thoroughfare for horse drawn drayage (old city street information, trades information, railroad station lists) and that a large quantity of discarded horseshoes was once present (oral history from a person who remembers that a grandfather built a horseshoe pitch in the back yard of his home using old horseshoes found in the neighborhood), and if that offers a greater explanatory scope (a greater variety of observation statements) than the fact that the 1902 World Horseshoe Pitching Contest was held in town, then we move to the third step.

In the third step we determine if the hypothesis is a better explanation than another. The hypothesis of a smithy in the area implies a smith, equipment, trade were present. The tax receipts (an observational statement) imply trade; the presence of the old (abandoned) horseshoes imply equipment, and the presence of the smith (the obituary) living in the area makes the presence of a smithy more likely than a horseshoe pitching contest.

The fourth step is one of plausibility: is the hypothesis more plausible than any other hypothesis about the same subject? In terms of the accepted truths about the area, is it more likely than not? The final test for plausibility is negative: if there are people who believe that a blacksmith shop was not present, are they greater in number than those who do? If evidence implies that a blacksmith shop was not present, is it more or less believable than the evidence that one was present?

The fifth step has an element of negation and depends on how the hypothesis was arrived at: is the hypothesis("A") based less on speculation and supposition about the past thanother explanations implied by beliefs ("B") in the local area? If so, then the hypothesis is valid.

All hypotheses are based, to a greater or lesser extend, on speculation and supposition. The winner (the presence of a blacksmith shop in the neighborhood) is based less on speculation about the 1902 Horseshoe Pitching Contest than it is on speculation about a blacksmith shop in the area.

For a hypothesis to be true, it must imply fewer false observational statements than other explanations. If Grandma thought that Grandpa bought the horseshoes for his backyard pitch at the hardware store, but the uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters of the person who gave the oral history interview (see above) all said, when interviewed, that Grandma was wrong, then the process continues to the final step.

Finally, the hypothesis must "exceed other incompatible hypotheses about the same subject by so much, that there is little chance of an incompatible hypothesis, after further investigation, soon exceeding it in these respects."

In this case the existence by implication of the blacksmith shop is more widely recorded and reported than it would be if there were no blacksmith shop in the area (Test 2, above); and, although Grandma doesn't seem to believe that there was a blacksmith in the area, the uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters of the person interviewed were aware of by implication (Test 6, above). Therefore, since the scope and the strength of the explanation are so great that it explains the specific matter under investigation rather more thoroughly than any other explanation, it must be true.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck ....