Read the Past
Research Like a Professor · Guide 6 of 9
The best history of a county isn't always in a book. It's in its newspapers, its census rolls, and its school reports, written by people who didn't know they were writing history. This guide shows you where my county's record lives, as a model for finding yours, and how to read it the way a historian would.
Primary and secondary
A primary source was made at the time, by someone close to what happened: a newspaper page, a census sheet, a school report, a letter, a photograph. A secondary source was written later, about those records: a county history, a thesis, an article.
Both matter. A secondary source tells you where to look and what others have concluded. The primary source lets you check that conclusion for yourself. When the two disagree, the primary source usually wins, though it has its own blind spots, covered below.
Where Pendleton County's past lives
Your county will have its own version of each row. Your library's local-history or genealogy staff can tell you where.
| Source | What it holds | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| Falmouth Outlook, 1907–1948 | Local news, community correspondents' columns, obituaries, school notices, and ads | Free and searchable at the Library of Congress's Chronicling America |
| Falmouth Outlook, later years | The same, through the paper's later issues | Held locally; ask the library |
| Federal census | Households, ages, occupations, birthplaces; released 72 years after each count, most recently 1950 | Free with an account at FamilySearch |
| State school reports | Kentucky superintendent's reports listing schools, teachers, enrollment, and pay | Free online at HathiTrust |
| County school directories | Every school of the time and its teacher | Local library vertical files and historical societies |
| Notable Kentucky African Americans Database | Short, sourced entries on Black Kentuckians, places, and institutions | Free online from University of Kentucky Libraries |
| Deeds, wills, marriages | Property, estates, and families | The county clerk's office |
If you don't know where to start, start with the newspaper. It names people the other records skip, and it often tells you which record to look for next.
Reading old records well
Three habits separate a historian's reading from a quick search.
Read the words of their time. Old records use old language, some of it painful now. Search with the words the record used, as guide 1 explains. Then describe what you found in the words we'd use today.
Notice who is missing. Every record was made by someone, for a purpose, and it left people out. A married woman may appear only as Mrs. John Smith. A Black school may get one line where a white school gets a column. An absence is a finding too: write it down.
Check whether two sources are really two. Local histories often copy from each other. In Pendleton County, much of what's been written traces back to a single county history from 1876. When three books agree, check whether they share that one parent. If they do, you have one source, not three. This is guide 5's trace it to the original, applied to the past.
The same goes for stories retold over time. This fall I found one 1887 event told four ways: a newspaper the next day, a column forty years later, a reprint of that column, and an AI search summary that blended them and got the date wrong. Only the 1887 page settled it.
Next: Guide 7, Find the Numbers, on public data and how to tell a statistic from a talking point.
Research Like a Professor is a nine-part series. See all nine guides.