Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

“I really love your columns,” the guy says, after walking up to me in a public place. “Where do you learn all this stuff? Online?”

Aaaaargh.

I just had this same conversation again, and it’s far from the first time. I thought I’d been very clear about this point, but perhaps a reminder is in order. I don’t do historic research online. Online research is about the worst way to do it, short of consulting psychics.

I mean, I’m not totally anti-internet. I have a Facebook. I send as many e-mails as anyone else. But for the kind of stuff I like to write about, online research is pointless. You can’t find this stuff on the internet, unless I personally put it there, and me re-reading my own columns doesn’t sound productive to me. And I long ago got tired of people asking me if I do this online.

Let me say it again, slowly, for the students in the back: I do not do online historic research. There is a substance called paper, which is what I prefer to use for a variety of reasons.

“But it’s so easy!” you say. Sure, it’s easy. But nothing good ever comes that easily. I think it’s worth putting in the extra work, because I find better stuff and end up turning out a higher-quality column. (By my standards. Not sure how many of the readers find it high-quality.)

Libraries are a good place to begin with this. If you peel yourself away from the computer, you can find a lot of information at the local library. There are books about our history, which is helpful, and often newspaper archives, which is even better. Microfilm is designed to last hundreds of years, as opposed to anything digital, which is designed to last fourteen minutes or until an update comes out, whichever is quicker. I have about two hundred years of microfilm to read, so it’s likely I’ll stumble upon something good.

For details on people, I have obituaries in the papers. Those are a treasure trove. And sometimes you can get good information out of the marriage records, too, which brings me to the local courthouse.

Courthouses are great. No matter where you go in America, the filing system is largely the same, which means I could travel to Oregon and still be reasonably familiar with the system. The register and recorder has marriage records, deeds, and wills, and the prothonotary has divorces, naturalizations, and criminal records. Depending on where you go, these offices may be called something different, but the purpose will be mainly the same.

All of this stuff will give you a shockingly good amount of information. People, places, incidents….All of this information is waiting there. So, in general, here’s how it goes.

I’m looking through newspapers on microfilm. Sometimes I’m just trolling for an idea, sometimes I’m looking for something else. And I find an old 1890s article about three guys who got stomped by a runaway horse. (I made that up, but it’s surprisingly close to the actual stuff I find.)

It’s a couple of paragraphs long. It would make a neat article, but I need to fluff it out a bit. (I usually write between six and eight hundred words, and it helps if I throw in a few notes in parenthesis.) So I look for their obits. When I have them, I can introduce the three guys (who are long dead by the time I write this) and mention where they lived and what they did as a career. If I want to write a line about them going home to their wives and kids afterward, I check marriage records and wills, and there I have the details.

You’ll notice how none of this can be hacked. None of it will vanish due to being dropped in a puddle. All of it is preserved to las the longest possible time, which means anyone in the future who stumbles on my article can verify it. Though I can’t possibly imagine why they’d want to.