This book seems to be a first-rate handbook about evaluating and citing evidence, intended for historians and genealogists. I am neither, but my mother did some genealogical research and my education was mostly in the sciences, so I appreciate the difficulty and importance of questions of evidence.

The Foreword begins with the statement "All sources lie" by 'Lawrence of Arabia'. Fascinating to see the intellectual kinship between T. E. Lawrence and Dr. Gregory House. The first chapter is a concise, lucid exposition of epistemology applied to historical evidence. Points to the author for including references to two books by Joe Nickell about photographic evidence and detecting fraud.

The rest of the book is an extensive discussion of types of evidence, such as artifacts, government and church records, and various publications. To show how complete it is, one can learn here how to cite Frakturs and samplers.

One thing I learned from this book was the word 'presentism': interpreting the past through current ideology or opinions. The example given is that the phrase 'free people of color' did not mean just African Americans: it included Native Americans and other ethnic groups. Another thing I learned was how content analysis can help detect fraud: forgers often include extra detail to make their documents plausible, and this extra information can be tested for accuracy (p. 32). Finally, I learned that there is such a thing as negative evidence: some states will issue a Certificate of Failure to Find if a search for a death certificate does not reveal one (p. 463-4).

The astute reader will see a problem with the book: it discusses how to cite online data such as web pages, blogs, etc. Since the book dates back to 2007, it is already being overtaken by technology. For example, a future edition will probably mention Facebook and YouTube explicitly, as well as photos taken with cell phones. In other words, to be most useful, this book should be available online, with updates more than once a year. I don't see a reference to an online version mentioned in the book itself.

Otherwise, the book is quite complete. The only other thing that I did not find therein was a discussion of how to cite cuneiform tablets. ( )

A very useful book for researchers. The author provides an exhaustive list of resources (online and off) for verifying data. Aimed at historical research. ( )

Signed by author

I joined Library Thing because this book is not classified in LOC with genealogy as subject. Published by Baltimore's Genealogical Publishing Co. and written be well-known genealogy author I felt I needed a place to come and properly Catalog this item. Historians and other researchers will most certainly benefit from this reference resource but genealogists certainly can't live without it!

The first substantive page of this book begins as follows:

"As history researchers, we do not speculate. We test. We critically observe and carefully record. Then we weigh the accumulated evidence, analyzing the individual parts as well as the whole, without favoring any theory."Librar

This high-minded description is reminiscent of the neat-and-tidy descriptions of the Scientific Method that appear in the opening chapters of high school science textbooks. Its relationship to the way professional historians actually work is, based on my quarter-century in the business, akin to the relationship between textbook descriptions of scientific method and the work habits of real scientists. In a word: tangential. Most working historians begin with a question, a problem, or a speculation and then gather data that seem likely to shed light on it.

Evidence Explained is a reference manual for people interested in swimming in a sea of historical data. Serious genealogists (the audience at which it seems, implicitly, to be aimed) will find it valuable, as will serious amateur historians compiling the histories of towns, counties, and local institutions or organizations. The opening chapters provide a useful synopsis of basic historical-research concepts (the short of thing you'd get in a methods course as a senior history major or first-year graduate student). The subsequent chapters give detailed, comprehensive guides (with multiple models) to how to cite just about any type of historical source you can possibly imagine.

These guides-to-citation chapters are strongest where they deal with the ins and outs of birth and death records, military records, church records, and other materials that are bread-and-butter to genealogists. This kind of information is simply not available in most general-purpose academic style guides (like the MLA Manual of Style or Chicago Manual of Style), and readers who use it regularly will find this book invaluable. Undergraduate or graduate history students or professional historians will--unless they do extensive work in vital records--have little reason to embrace this book. The MLA or Chicago manuals (as well as software like Endnote or the superb, free Zotero) handle 99% of archival and common non-archival sources economically and clearly, and Barzun & Graff's The Modern Researcher is a better primer on research methods.

Large public libraries, or smaller libraries with a strong historical or genealogical focus, will find this a useful addition to their collections. ( )