Orange County Indexed · Research guide
Questions to ask of any source
A source can be valuable without being right about everything, and a source that is wrong on one point can still be good evidence on another. These questions help you decide what each source can support, so your conclusions rest on the right evidence.
Features used in this guide: The chronology · Historical records
A primary source was made at the time by people involved or close to events: a deed, a court minute, a newspaper report, a marriage register. A secondary source interprets earlier evidence: a county history, a National Register nomination, a thesis. A tertiary source summarizes or points to others: an encyclopedia, a bibliography, an index. Orange County Indexed is tertiary. The same item can be primary for one question and secondary for another; a 1950s history of a church is a secondary account of the 1790s and a primary source for how the congregation saw itself in the 1950s.
Ask who created the source, for whom, and for what purpose. An advertisement wants to sell or rent something. A nomination argues that a building is significant. An anniversary history celebrates. A court record exists because someone went to law. None of this makes a source untrustworthy; it tells you what the source was built to say and what it may leave out.
Separate what the source states from what you infer from it. Keep its exact dates and qualifiers ("about 1820", "by 1838"). Keep the date of an event apart from the date a newspaper reported it, and the date a deed was made apart from the date it was recorded.
Several pages that agree may all rest on one earlier account. Follow repeated claims back to where they started. A published abstract and the index entry drawn from it will agree because one copies the other; that is one source, not two. Reading laterally helps: look at what other researchers and institutions say about a source and its author before you rely on it.
Records were made by courts, churches, governments and newspapers, and they recorded some people far more than others. Enslaved people appear in many records as property, often by a first name only; women often appear under a husband's name; some communities kept their own records, or none survived. Name the people and experiences your sources cover, and look for others: community newspapers, church records, oral histories, family papers.
Write down each claim with its source before choosing between them, and check whether they describe the same thing. When historical sources disagree works through an example.
For each key source, a sentence on what it is good evidence for and what its limits are. Those sentences become the backbone of your conclusion, and they let someone else check your reasoning.
Bring a source you are unsure about to the Local History Liaison; evaluating sources together is part of what librarians do.
This guide applies the Reference and User Services Association's Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Service Providers (2023), Guidelines for Developing and Maintaining Genealogy and Local History Collections (2022), Guidelines for Secondary Source Literacy for History (2023).
