How to read a nineteenth century company ledger
A ledger is not a story. It is a list of numbers kept by a bookkeeper who assumed everyone reading it already knew what the numbers meant.
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How boundary disputes shaped early Maine coastal towns
The property lines in a coastal Maine town do not look like the lines in an Ohio county, and the reason is that Maine was divided up before anyone had a system for doing it.
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Where to look for a Civil War ancestor who never left the state
People come in here convinced that an ancestor who served in the Civil War must have been at Gettysburg, and are disappointed to find he spent the war at a fort on the Maine coast.
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What town school records actually contain and how to find them
Town school records are the most underused source in local history, and they survive in far greater quantity than people expect, because nobody ever thought they were interesting…
