7 May 2014 For biographers and personal historians, donations are the crown jewels in every trove of legal documents, because people donate to others and causes that are dear to them. As researchers, it is important for us

6 May 2014 We all know the problem. At least we've heard about it, even if we haven't experienced it firsthand: The urban poor—newly arrived immigrants, uneducated laborers, tenement dwellers or at least renters ...

5 May 2014 The statutes published for each session of Congress—and for the corresponding state legislatures—contain laws that did not eventually make their way into the compiled "codes ...

3 May 2014 If you add words to a publication's title, to clarify it, you should place the addition or correction in square editorial brackets. In the first example below, a place was added because

2 May 2014 On the eve of America's Civil War, roughly one out of every eight African-Americans was considered free—either freeborn or emancipated from slavery. The census of 1860 identified 488,079 Americans as ...

1 May 2014 When citing unpublished vital records, we have four key issues to consider: :

30 April 2014 Such quaint terms! We seldom see them, when doing American research in relatively modern times; but when our research pushes back into Europe or the British Isles ...

29 April 2014 A historical monograph published by a university press invokes the agricultural schedule of the 1850 U.S. census and asserts: "Considering [this individual's wealth], the census statistics ...

28 April 2014 Historic records are frequently filed or bound in chronological sequence. Across the years, many have been misfiled or bound amid records of a different time frame ...

27 April 2014 In historical writing and citing, italics have one purpose: emphasis. We most commonly see them used in five ways: ...