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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. ( )

As a professional copyeditor, I've found that no matter how comprehensive the Chicago Manual of Style is, there's always a reference that *isn't quite* represented, especially when it comes to historical and governmental sources. I think that this book will come in handy on those occasions, because it is quite exhaustive.

As I said to my husband when I first received it, "I will only need this book once or twice a year, but then I'll *really* need it!"

I would definitely recommend this book for serious historical or geneological researchers. I wouldn't recommend it for most writers, unless you hate having to extrapolate from Chicago style.

I'm glad to have this book on my shelf.

Evidence explained is a comprehensive resource for anyone who is into serious historical research (I would not recommend this for an undergrad doing his/her first major term paper, for example). Not only is there information about how to cite a given source, whether it comes from the Internet, a government archive, or library microfiche, but a nice summary of approach to sources and descriptions of the different types of sources and how to treat them is included. If you're just interested in a quick formatting guide, it has a set of summary pages that show you that at-a-glance as well. The only problem with this book, is that it's a big, heavy, expensive hardcover tome--and would be a lot more useful in an electronic, searchable format, yet I didn't see so much as a companion website for it! And I really don't want to lug this thing around the world to different archives as I do research. So in the end, I think this is one of these books that is useful in theory but not in practice--until this is all available in one place on the net (which I'm sure it will be soon) I would just get it from the library and photocopy the pertinent information to save on the back strain.