How we research. Every clue is true^™.

• County histories

  The histories of 1875, 1882 and 1906, and their like across the valley, read for what they say and who told them.

• Newspapers

  Weeklies, dailies and the state-news columns, read on the page image, with the date of the issue and the page.

• Journals and laws

  Legislative journals, session laws, government registers and gazetteers: what was voted, printed and listed, and when.

• Land, court and maps

  Plats, deeds, land entries, court records, atlases and fire-insurance maps, read against each other.

• Letters and diaries

  The people of the time in their own words: letters, diaries, travellers’ accounts and family papers.

• Pictures

  Postcards, photographs and engravings, credited to the library or archive that holds them, with their rights.

• Documented

  A source says it, and the source is cited.

  For example The village plat was recorded on 16 February 1848.

• Reading

  Our interpretation of the sources, kept apart from the facts.

  For example The creek already had the name, so it was the obvious one.

• Open

  A question the records do not yet answer.

  For example Who named the village Dowagiac?

• New finding

  Something we found in the record that no earlier publication we could find has.

  For example The name is in print in 1833, five years before the first gazetteer.

The examples come from How Dowagiac got its name. Our research reports and notes use the full set of nine Scrollsigns, from Document, the strongest, down to Hypothesis, which fold into these four in a news story; all nine are set out on the Scrollsigns^™ page.

1. We have seen the record.The words are read on the page image, not only in machine-read text.
2. It is fully cited.Title, date, printed page, who holds the original, and a link.
3. Each witness counts once.A later history that reprints an earlier one is not a second source.
4. We searched for it in print first.Google Books and Scholar, the Internet Archive and HathiTrust, the Library of Congress’s newspapers and the state newspaper collections, the standard histories, the societies that keep the subject, Wikipedia and its references, and the journals of the field. What we searched is listed with every finding.
5. Conflicting sources are shown.Where the records disagree, we say so and cite them all.
6. Dates and context are read correctly.The date of the record, the date of the event and the date of any reprint are kept apart, and a joke is read as a joke.
7. The claim is no larger than the evidence.We write “the earliest we have found,” never “the first ever.”
8. A second reader checks it.Every quotation, page and date is checked against the original before it is published.

Three kinds of finding

• New findingNot in any earlier publication a careful search could find.New to print as far as we can tell, not a claim that nobody ever knew.
• New documentationSomeone said it before us, but without a source.We supply the record, and credit them by name.
• RecoveredAlready in an old printed book, but missing from every modern account.We bring it back into the story, and say where it was.

There are 183 findings in the discoveries register, each with the record it came from and what we searched.

1. Find the recordIn a library, an archive or a scan: the oldest witness we can reach.
2. Read it on the pageEvery quotation is taken from the page image, not from machine-read text.
3. Search print for itBefore anything is called new, we look for it in the books, papers and journals listed with the finding.
4. Cite it and mark itFull citation in the numbered sources; every paragraph labelled for what it is.
5. A second reader checksQuotations, pages and dates against the originals, then it goes up.

• Corrections

  When we get something wrong, we correct it on the page the same day, and the correction is noted on the page itself. If someone shows an earlier publication of one of our findings, we credit them by name and change the finding’s standing.

• Versions

  A research note is never rewritten in place. It gets a new version, and the old one stays on record.

• Contributed articles and collaborations

  We publish articles by readers, families and fellow researchers under their own names, and work with historical societies, museums and libraries on joint research. It is all held to the same standard, and credited by name.

  Ways to work with us