Anne asks:
Just out of curiosity, how many written sources are required to triangulate
a given whisp of history?
---------

Maybe none. Archaeology provides quite a lot of good evidence for some
claims; tax tallies, recordings (for the last century or so), photographs
(for the last 150+ years), seals, personal possessions, and possibly other
concrete items may corroborate oral statements. If I had found 18th-century
gold buttons in the ruins of my ancestor's Quebec farm, I would have been
more inclined to believe the family story.

Written records made for purposes other than the narrator's claim are good
backups to oral histories. Examples are court documents, wills, parish
records, military records, medical records, censuses, diaries, letters, and
newspapers. Historians do not accept any of these as gospel either--they are
EVIDENCE, not PROOF. If documents contradict each other, as they often do,
discrepancies may be resolved by recourse to other records, analogy, and
just plain logic. Some records are forgeries. Some written accounts are
malicious or self-serving. We must evaluate the sources of our evidence.

Multiple independent oral statements may tend to confirm certain claims--but
note that they must be *independent*, not statements from people who have a
vested interest in chiming in on a particular claim or people who all heard
it from the same person. The fact that three branches of my family had
passed down the "Revolutionary escapee" tale did not corroborate it, as they
all had the same (mistaken) source.

DNA is a very recent addition to historical evidence. Obviously it is still
quite limited, and it can be misused, as some of the people on this list
have demonstrated.

Historians are obliged to draw conclusions from the evidence they have.
Honest ones are obliged to reveal their biases as they do so. Readers are
entitled to weigh the opinions against the evidence presented and to draw
their own conclusions.

Kathleen Much
The Book Doctor

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