Deed Book Nine

Who writes here

I trace my family’s past from a narrow desk under the stairs, with a lamp, a magnifier, a shoebox of unlabeled photographs and far too many printouts. I have been at it for about six years. I am not a professional, I have no training in archives beyond what I taught myself, and the people in my tree are nobody’s famous ancestors.

On these pages I write about methods and documents rather than about the people, who did not ask to be published. How a census page is read, what a deed book can tell you, how to make sense of a clerk’s handwriting from two centuries ago, and what to do when the trail simply stops. Names stay in my notebooks.