Knowing Where Things Aren’t

Part of the researcher’s task is, of course, finding material. To that end, experience is worth everything. My years of experience in conducting Civil War research has taught me where the really good repositories of material are. As a general rule, I try to avoid sweeping generalizations, but they do sometimes have value. Here’s one: my experience tells me that the best repositories of primary source, unpublished manuscript material are, in no particular order:

1. The National Archives
2. The Library of Congress
3. The United States Army Military History Institute
4. The University of North Carolina
5. Duke University
6. The University of Virginia
7. The University of Michigan
8. Navarro College
9. Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park (what an awesome collection Bob Krick and company have cobbled together there……)
10. Virginia State Archives
11. Virginia Historical Society
12. Alabama Department of Archives and History
13. Museum of the Confederacy
14. Historical Society of Pennsylvania
15. Western Reserve Historical Society

I could go on, but you get the idea. Knowing this makes it fairly easy to put together a research strategy for tackling a given project. While this list isn’t exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination, it will certainly give you a damned good start on any major research project.

The Internet has also made the process so much easier. Many–not all–institutions now have on-line finding aids available, which makes it easy to get a good flavor for what’s available in their collections. That makes the task much easier and makes the process more efficient, since I can map out what I want before I ever even leave my house, and it even makes it possible to obtain some of the desired materials strictly by mail. That’s a big plus.

There’s also a real value to knowing where things aren’t. In working my way through my Dahlgren project, I thought of a few potential sources for the 6th Ohio Cavalry, a portion of which accompanied Dahlgren on his November 1862 Fredericksburg Raid, and I checked a couple of them out today. These were things that I remembered seeing during my travels, knew that they pertained to the 6th Ohio, but had no idea whether they were pertinent to my specific question. So, I called in a favor today and had someone check them out for me. Neither were pertinent. That’s okay–they are what they are. However, where it becomes relevant is that if they were, I probably would have had to have found time in my schedule to dash over to USAMHI in Carlisle, PA to get them, or hire someone to do that for me. Knowing that these two sources were a dry hole means that I don’t have to worry about them, and also means that I don’t have to go to extraordinary lengths to get what’s there.

Like I said, there is not only a real, tangible value to knowing where things are, there’s a similar value to knowing where things aren’t.