Where to Look
Where the research in these essays comes from, and how to get at it yourself.
Every essay here is built from documents somebody else preserved. This is not a bibliography — it is the standing infrastructure behind all of them, and almost all of it is open to you as well.
I have put it up because the question I am asked most often is not what does the document say. It is how would I even start.
A word first, because it is the single most useful thing on this page.
Interlibrary Loan
If you have a public library card, you have Interlibrary Loan. It is free, it is nearly universal in the United States, and it is startlingly underused.
Through ILL a local branch will borrow, on your behalf, scholarly monographs your library does not own, microfilm reels of eighteenth-century newspapers, published document editions, dissertations, and out-of-print county histories. You ask at the desk or through your library’s website. It usually takes one to three weeks and usually costs nothing.
Most of what has been written about early American finance sits in university-press books that no public library buys and no ordinary person can afford. ILL is how you read them anyway. If you take one thing from this page, take that.
Your library card is also often a key to subscription databases from home — genealogical collections, historical newspaper archives, academic journals. Which ones vary by system. It is worth ten minutes on your library’s website to find out what you already have.
Free and open online
Founders Online — the annotated, full-text-searchable papers of Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison. Free, no account. If a name appears anywhere in the founders’ correspondence, this finds it in seconds. It is the first place I search.
HathiTrust Digital Library — millions of scanned volumes. Crucially, United States government publications are public domain and readable in full view, including runs of official registers and serials that are otherwise very hard to see. You can full-text search inside a single volume for free, without an account — which is how you find one name in a six-hundred-page government list.
National Archives Catalog — NARA’s finding aids and digitised holdings.
Access to Archival Databases — NARA’s searchable datasets, including a number of military casualty and service files.
Library of Congress digital collections — and the Manuscript Division for the originals.
Internet Archive and Google Books — indispensable for nineteenth-century printed sources and out-of-copyright document editions.
FamilySearch — free, and far broader than genealogy alone; it holds a great deal of digitised civil and institutional record. The part worth knowing about: FamilySearch has photographed the physical card catalogs of a number of research libraries and historical societies and hosts them as image sets — the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s runs to some 946,000 cards. Viewing the images requires a free account, and there is no text index, because a photograph of a card is not text. You page through drawer by drawer exactly as you would standing at the cabinet. It is slow, and it is worth it, for one structural reason: a card catalog indexes individual documents, while a finding aid indexes collections. A single letter filed inside somebody else’s papers — catalogued under the name of whoever signed it — will appear in the first and never in the second. If a collection-level search has come up empty, this is the thing to try next.
Find a Grave — useful for confirming dates and family relationships when the paper record is thin. Treat it as a pointer to be verified, not as a source in itself.
Institutions holding the originals
The manuscript collections behind this work live in a relatively small number of places. The ones I have drawn on, or expect to:
The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
The Massachusetts State Archives, Boston
The Maine Historical Society, Portland
The National Archives, Washington and College Park
The Naval History and Heritage Command, Washington
Barclays Group Archives, Manchester, England — corporate archives are an underrated category. Several of the oldest banks maintain genuine archives with professional archivists, open to outside researchers by appointment, and their holdings go back further than most people imagine.
French municipal and colonial archives, for the Atlantic trade side of this material.
Read the finding aid before anything else. Most of these institutions publish collection inventories online, free, without an account. A finding aid tells you what is in which box, and it will frequently tell you that what you were hoping for is not there at all — which is worth knowing before you plan a trip.
Most of them also offer remote research services for a fee, and can supply scans. Being far away is not the obstacle it used to be.
Military records
A separate world with its own rules, and worth setting out because so many people give up too early.
The National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis holds Official Military Personnel Files. Next of kin can request them; files become fully public 62 years after separation.
The 1973 fire at that facility destroyed a great deal — but unevenly, and the pattern matters. Army files for personnel discharged between 1912 and 1960 were about 80 percent lost. Air Force files from 1947 to 1964 lost about 75 percent — but only for surnames from Hubbard through Z; earlier in the alphabet and the file probably survived. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard records were not affected at all. Before assuming a record is gone, check which category it falls into. The answer is often better than people expect.
A burned file is not always an empty file. The Records Center reconstructs entitlement from alternate sources — final pay vouchers, unit morning reports, veterans’ claim files.
Unit records are separate from personnel records. Morning reports, after-action reports, war diaries, deck logs and general orders are held at the National Archives and organised by unit, not by person. A decoration citation originates in a general order — so a citation can survive even when the individual’s file did not.
Muster rolls list enlisted personnel, who never appear in officer registers. The Navy’s muster rolls for 1939 to 1949 are indexed by surname on the major subscription genealogy services — Fold3 and Ancestry — and give service number, rating, date of enlistment and ship. The ship is the real prize: it unlocks deck logs and war diaries.
Officer registers list commissioned officers only, and frequently only the regular component — not reserves. The Air Force Register, for instance, is on HathiTrust in full view for 1949 to 1965, and is a good illustration of the trap: a reserve officer on active duty will not be in it, and his absence means nothing at all. Know which list you are searching before you conclude somebody is missing from it.
County clerks and state adjutant general offices frequently hold recorded discharge papers, entirely independent of the federal file. Many veterans recorded their discharge locally on returning home, and those copies survived everything that happened in St. Louis.
Authentication
Worth separating two things that get confused.
Third-party authentication services — JSA, PSA/DNA, Beckett and others — examine a signature and issue a certificate. For a signature of consequence that is worth having, and if you ever intend to sell, it is close to mandatory. But know what it is: an opinion, from one firm, about one hand. It is not a finding of fact, firms sometimes disagree, and a certificate is only as good as the exemplars the examiner had for that particular signer.
What it will not do is tell you what your document is. The certificate that came with the framed document I bought in 1998 identified one famous signature. It said nothing about the other two, nothing about the date, and nothing about what the paper had been for. It was not wrong. It was answering a different question from the one I eventually asked.
Authentication tells you whether a hand is genuine. Research tells you why the document exists. You will usually want both, and you should not mistake either for the other.
A note on method
Two habits do more work than anything else.
The first is to read the back of the document. I published an essay confidently describing a bill of exchange, then photographed its reverse for the first time and found that a good deal of what I had written was wrong. The endorsements were the story. They had been there the whole time.
The second is to be honest about what a source will and will not support. Where I cannot establish something, I say so. I would rather hand you the gap than a confident sentence I cannot stand behind.
Corrections
If I have described a collection wrongly, or if you know of a holding I have missed, write to me at bigjule2016@gmail.com. This page is updated as the work goes on.