30 October 2014 When is a marriage not a marriage? Most researchers are well familiar with the term common-law marriage (which did become a marriage, with longevity, in most societies), but historical records yield other delightful terms that can undermine our conclusions if we are not familiar with the practices involved. Today, we examine three of those. ...

27 October 2014 Newer researchers think of “source identification” in terms of How do I cite this? The underlying issue, however, is not how to cite. It is, instead, how to ...

21 October 2014 Researchers and writers typically handle reference notes in one of four ways: as endnotes, footnotes, parenthetical citations, or hypertext. All four of these options are not of equal merit for history researchers ...

18 October 2014 Hundreds of the record groups at NARA have inventories to help us identify various series of original material within that record group. Copies of these guides have been distributed to libraries and individuals upon demand. Many have been digitized by Google Books or Archives.org. ...

15 September 2014 When you use a tax roll from yesteryear, how do you use it? Do you simply search for the individuals of interest and copy their data? Or do you ...

12 October 2014 Every historical speaker knows the problem, we ask for a lectern and we're given a stage. What are we do to? What happened? Etymological confusion, obviously. Understanding the roots of words can help to avoid such problems, so let's look at two that are critical to our oral delivery of research findings.

9 October 2014 Everything has a creator. But what do we do when we have three creators creating three different but connected things and we have to pack them all into one citation?

6 October 2014 Most evidence we use to reconstruct human lives will not clearly identify the individual involved. Our sources may not even carry the name of the person we seek. Each time we do a bit of research, we all hope that diligent clerks will have ...

3 October 2014 Filmed and fiched materials at a library or archive can carry two identification systems: 1) the identification created by the producer; and 2) the cataloging data created by the library. If the ...

30 September 2014 American English and British English differ in many niggling ways—some of which we addressed in our posting "International Quotation Differences," last 23 March. Those differences are even more pronounced when we consider ...