Reading Historical Records — Grandmother's Diary and That Day's Newspaper

Grandma's Box

Let us imagine that while cleaning out Grandma's house, a paper box turns up. Inside are an old diary and a yellowed piece of newspaper. Both record the same day of heavy rain 50 years ago.

The diary says, "30 houses in the lower village were submerged in water." The newspaper article says, "10 houses flooded, no casualties." On the same day, in the same village, the numbers differ by threefold.

Which side is right? Grandma might have exaggerated, the newspaper might have played it down, or both might be correct. If Grandma counted houses where water reached the yard and the newspaper counted only houses where water reached the rooms, the two numbers counted different things.

This box is a hypothetical example created to aid understanding, and we will carry it to the end of the article. This article deals with how historians believe and how they doubt old records. Before choosing which number is right, there is a question historians ask first: Who, when, to whom, and why did they write it?

When two records of the same event differ, the first thing to ask is not which side is right, but what each recorded and why.

What Was Written That Day Versus What Was Organized Later

Let's rummage through the box a bit more. Besides the diary and the newspaper, there is a copy of a report ledger where the village office recorded damages for each household, and a letter sent by my uncle 40 years later recalling that day. At the very bottom is a thin book published in 2020 titled "50-Year History of the Village."

All of these are historical sources. Historical sources are materials that historians use as a basis for finding out about the past. Written materials are not the only things that count as historical sources, but this article deals with written records.

The historical sources in the box fall into two groups. Primary sources are records left by people who experienced or witnessed the event. Whether written at the time or in a later memoir, they belong here. The diary written that night, the newspaper the next day, and the report ledger drawn up that week are primary sources, and my uncle's letter was also written by someone who experienced the day, so it is a primary source. However, the fact that it was written 40 years later must be considered separately, and this is covered later. Secondary sources are writings that later gathered, read, and organized primary sources. The "50-Year History of the Village" is like that.

A primary source is closest to the event. Yet being close also means it was viewed from one person's standpoint. Grandmother counted the lower village visible from her window, and the reporter may have written down the numbers announced by the county office. Both are primary sources, and both were viewed from a single standpoint.

Experts and novices read the same historical sources differently. There is a study that gave several writings and drawings about the Battle of Lexington, the first battle of the American Revolutionary War, to working historians and high school seniors, and had them speak their thoughts aloud while reading. The two groups reasoned differently about the historical evidence, and the researcher saw that part of that difference came from beliefs about the very work of exploring history (DOI: 10.1037/0022-0663.83.1.73).

A primary source is closest to the event, but being closest does not mean it is the most correct.

Real or Reliable

There is a name for the process historians go through before writing based on records. Historical source criticism is the act of asking whether a record is real and whether it is reliable before using it as evidence. The questions are largely twofold.

The first is whether it is real. It asks whether Grandma's diary was really written by Grandma 50 years ago, or whether someone else forged it later. One way to spot a forgery is handwriting analysis. It relies on the principle that every person has unique habits in their handwriting, that even the same person's handwriting naturally wavers slightly, and that those habits do not easily change. Forgeries include types such as imitating someone else's handwriting, tracing it, and creating it digitally, while cases where handwriting was intentionally altered and the subjectivity of the analyst are considered difficult challenges (DOI: 10.4018/979-8-3373-3795-1.ch004).

The second is whether, assuming it is real, it is reliable. Here, four things are asked: Who wrote it, when was it written, who was it meant to be seen by, and why was it written. Grandma's diary was written that night by Grandma for her eyes only. A newspaper article was written by a reporter the next day to inform readers. A report ledger at the village office was made to distribute subsidy funds.

Knowing the purpose of the ledger makes the numbers look different. Households trying to receive subsidies would have wanted to write down their damage generously, and the office, short on money to distribute, would have wanted to narrow the criteria. Either way, the numbers in the ledger are the numbers for 「damage worthy of receiving subsidies」.

Reliability can finally be questioned only when you know who wrote it, when, to whom, and why.

Ledgers Answer Only What Ledgers Were Asked

One of the historical sources used most frequently in actual history is this kind of record made for a purpose. Much of the wages and prices in medieval England come from manor accounts. A manor account is an income and expenditure ledger written down every year by the manager of a large medieval estate, and it records how much was given to whom per day.

Manor accounts are quite detailed about the conditions of employment and the pay received for laborers who worked on the lord's land. However, laborers hired by peasants on their own land appear only fleetingly in these ledgers, even if they do appear. This is because the side that wrote the ledger had almost no reason to record them separately (DOI: 10.2307/744001). That a ledger is detailed means that the areas where the owner of the ledger paid attention are detailed.

There are also questions that the same ledger cannot answer. Daily wage ledgers record daily pay, but they do not record how many days that laborer worked in a year. The method of estimating annual income from daily wages therefore has a fundamental weakness. To avoid this weakness, one study recalculated income by gathering the money given to workers hired on a yearly basis instead of workers paid daily wages. The data from this study suggests that previous estimates using daily wages inflated the incomes of medieval workers and understated incomes during the Industrial Revolution (DOI: 10.1093/ej/uez017). Even though the value for a single day was written down, the life of a full year was not written down.

It is also common to use records for purposes different from why they were made. The eleventh-century Domesday Book in England is a survey record made by William the Conqueror to levy taxes and control the country, but one study calculated how efficiently medieval manors produced goods using this data (DOI: 10.1177/103237320501000206). In this case, what the king counted and what he did not count become the boundaries of the calculation.

Rome has a similar record. This is an edict issued in 301 AD by Emperor Diocletian setting maximum limits on the prices of goods and wages. A study that calculated the living standards of Roman workers using the numbers in this edict concludes that Roman workers earned just enough to buy the bare minimum bundle of goods essential for survival—in other words, a minimum subsistence basket—and that this level was similar to that of workers in backward regions of eighteenth-century Europe or a significant part of Asia (DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199562596.003.0016). When reading such an edict, there is one question raised by source criticism. The prices written in the edict are limits stating "do not charge higher than this," and the edict itself does not tell us whether they were the same as the prices actually traded in the market. How this calculation handled that difference does not appear in the main summary of this article.

Who made the law also becomes the boundary of the record. Following the Black Death, the English government repeatedly made laws to suppress workers' wages, prevent workers from leaving to find better positions, and force contracts favorable to employers. Over the 80 years following the Black Death, more than a third of the 77 parliaments held passed labor-related laws, the government unhesitatingly revealed that it represented the interests of the landowning class, and it called the demands of workers "the malice of servants" (DOI: 10.1017/9781846151385.006). In Cheshire in northwestern England, court records remain of people prosecuted for violating this law for 25 years immediately after the Black Death (DOI: 10.3828/archives.2013.6). Because these records were left by the side that enforced the law, the workers within them appear in the posture of standing in the dock.

Ledgers and laws answer best the questions that the side that made them was curious about, and they are silent on questions that the side that made them did not care about.

Memories Decades Later

Let us return to the letter from our maternal uncle in a box. The letter written 40 years later says, "Water rose to the roof." The uncle was ten years old at that time. For the next 40 years, he must have heard stories about that day every holiday. Those stories might have blended into the scene in the letter, or conversely, the scene might have remained vivid thanks to being retold repeatedly. The letter alone makes it impossible to know whether "up to the roof" was a scene the ten-year-old uncle saw directly or a scene he heard about from adults.

There is a method of using the words of someone who experienced past events as historical material. Oral history is a method of asking living people about events they experienced, recording those words, and using them as historical material. Paul Thompson's book "The Voice of the Past," which deals with oral history, also dedicates a separate section to how far oral evidence can be trusted and how memory works (DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192893178.001.0001).

The story of Ann Rutledge, said to have been Abraham Lincoln's young sweetheart, illustrates this question well. Ann died at a young age in 1835, and the story that Lincoln never fully recovered from her death was passed down for a long time. After Lincoln was assassinated, his longtime law partner William Herndon sought out people who knew Lincoln's youth and gathered testimonies. Ann's younger brother Robert wrote a long letter to Herndon on behalf of the family in 1866, about 30 years after Ann died.

Historians were sharply divided over these testimonies. In 1945, Lincoln researcher James Randall viewed the Rutledge family's memories as "blurred by time" and dismissed this romance as a legend. In the 1990s, it was treated again as an event with "overwhelming evidence." According to the author of a 2005 paper we will look at later, no new evidence had emerged in between; Herndon's collected materials were simply bound into a book and made easier to read. The same evidence was simply read differently. Douglas Wilson, who revived the romance theory, believed that memories recalled repeatedly among family and friends actually remain vivid. The basis for this was an anecdote about a woman. Having lived in that village during her childhood, she later recalled the old village layout like a photograph, and when asked how she remembered it, she replied that she had frequently re-heard stories of those days from her family and friends, so "the picture remained vivid" (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.26.1.04).

A paper that re-examined these testimonies in 2005 takes the opposite side. According to the author, while the Rutledge family all said there had been courtship, not a single person remembered a specific scene of Lincoln courting Ann. In the passage dealing with the engagement between Ann and Lincoln, the person Robert put forward as a witness was his brother, who had died 24 years before the letter was written. Robert stated twice that he had not directly witnessed Lincoln's grief, and noted that one of those times was something he heard from someone else at the time. Ann's younger sister told a reporter in 1899 that she did not remember the story about Lincoln being out of his mind with grief for a year, saying, "There are so many things in the newspapers that are not true." The author's conclusion is that Randall's side of skepticism did not misread the evidence (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.26.1.04). This is the interpretation of a single author, and this debate did not end with this paper.

The same paper also acknowledges that without the testimonies gathered by Herndon, many of the vivid scenes of Lincoln's youth would have vanished (DOI: 10.5406/19457987.26.1.04). Therefore, reading old memories becomes the task of separating what the person saw directly from what they heard later.

When reading memories from decades later, the first question to ask is: did this person witness the scene directly, or did they hear about it later?

What Remained Has Remained

Now let us look at the box itself. The reason this box remained is that the grandmother knew how to write, and someone did not throw it away for 50 years. The grandmother next door also lived through that day, but if she could not write, there is no diary. The original report ledger of the village office may have been discarded after 10 years. What we can read about that day is only what someone wrote down and no one threw away. Secondary sources like "The 50-Year History of the Village" are ultimately written using primary sources that survived in this way.

This phenomenon also has a name. Survivorship bias is the skew that occurs when we look only at what survived and judge the whole. In old records, it is filtered twice. Once in who could write, and once more in what was preserved.

The stage of preservation is also not transparent. Archives are the warehouses where historians fetch materials, and what to select, how to classify, what to preserve, and what to leave were the decisions of generations of archivists, and those decisions fundamentally shaped our knowledge of the past. Historians addressing this topic have written that treating archives like a transparent window reflecting a distant society is a trap they still fall into (DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtw033). Even a single classification method obscures records. The labor law prosecution records of Cheshire seen earlier have rarely been used in the meantime, and one of the reasons is that they were classified in the UK National Archives in a way that their importance was not revealed (DOI: 10.3828/archives.2013.6). Archived records reflect the power relations of society and tend to lean toward the records of powerful groups, so if record managers recognize and go beyond that bias, they can leave diverse voices more evenly (DOI: 10.1108/10650750310490289).

The past of people who did not leave writings is sometimes transmitted through other paths. Oral tradition is stories passed down through the mouths and memories of multiple generations without being written down in text. In many parts of the world where people who did not write live, oral tradition is the main historical material to retrace the past. Jan Vansina, who conducted long-term fieldwork in Africa, argued in the book "Oral Tradition" that researchers who know that language and society can sift out historical content from oral tradition (DOI: 10.4324/9781315125855).

The records that remain are the voices of the people who could write and were preserved in that era.

Reading Against One Another

So a historian does not trust just one record and compares multiple records. Speaking of boxes, they place 30 diaries, 10 newspapers, and the numbers from a report ledger side by side, and examine what each one counted. If the three records were written separately without copying from each other, what all three acknowledge—for instance, that a heavy rain flooded the houses in the lower village that day—becomes a much more solid fact. If the newspaper transcribed a county office announcement and the ledger also came from the same county office figures, the evidence is singular even if the two are the same. How many houses there were is written down along with the explanation that 「the numbers differed from record to record, and the counting criteria may have differed」.

Written records can also be compared with non-written evidence. Regarding the health of the people of England just before the Black Death, there is a study that reads together the skeletons found by archaeology and the numbers in manor records. This study interprets that most of the English population before the Black Death suffered from a shortage of protein, calcium, and vitamin B12 for at least a generation. This is a much longer period than the three years of poor harvests commonly called the Great Famine (DOI: 10.1162/jinh_a_00500). The ledgers left behind the numbers of those times, and the bones left behind the bodies that lived through those times. This interpretation came from reading the two together.

Because a single record is seen from a single spot, historians compare records against each other and also against evidence outside of text.

Try it — "Newly Discovered Diary Reveals Truth of That Day"

Now let us imagine encountering a news headline like this: "Newly Discovered Soldier's Diary Reveals Truth of Battle." We can apply the questions used in this article one by one.

First, is it real? We look to see if the article tells who verified the authenticity and by what method. Second, when was it written? How we read it changes depending on whether it was written the night the battle ended or as a memoir recalled decades later. Third, did they see it directly, or hear it? Like the letters of the Rutledge family, vivid sentences may be stories heard from someone else. Fourth, to whom and why was it written? A diary written just for oneself, a letter written to be shown to family, and a report submitted to a superior record the same event differently.

Fifth, who was left out from leaving a record? This soldier knew how to write, and his diary was preserved. Were the records of other people who were in the same place left behind? Sixth, does it match other records? We look to see if there are records of the same battle written by other people, and whether they can be checked against non-textual evidence, as in the eve of the Black Plague. We also check whether the records being compared were copied from each other.

The phrase "reveals truth" can be used cautiously only after going through all six of these questions. A single diary tells us what one person saw at that spot, and that alone makes it valuable historical material. Grandma's box is the same way. The firmest sentence a historian can write about that day is probably "That day, heavy rain submerged the houses in the lower village, and the number of washed-away houses differed across records."

Reading historical sources well means knowing what a single record can say and what it cannot say.

Where to Look Further

How far we can trust memories decades later is a matter where interpretations have diverged over the same evidence, as seen in the debate surrounding Lincoln and Ann Rutledge.

The cases touched upon in this article lead to deeper writings. "Did Wages Really Rise After the Black Plague — Where, When, and Whose Wages Were They" enters the middle of an actual debate, carrying manorial accounts and Laborers' Ordinance records. "Why the Emancipation Proclamation Was Then of All Times — Lincoln's 1862" follows how the date a single letter was written changes the meaning of that letter.

Where written records fall silent, other evidence illuminates a part. "What Bones Tell — A Person's Diary Written Across Teeth and Bones" covers how to read the lives and diseases of ancient people from remains, "Dating Age with Carbon — Radiocarbon Dating Read Through Hourglasses and Tree Rings" covers how to date charcoal and seeds, and "What Genes Tell — An Old Book Copied Generation After Generation" covers reading migration and lineage from the DNA of ancient people.

Source Papers

• "Historical problem solving: A study of the cognitive processes used in the evaluation of documentary and pictorial evidence." (1991) — DOI: 10.1037/0022-0663.83.1.73 — Historians and high school seniors reviewed Lexington battle documents and pictures aloud, showing different evidentiary reasoning methods and suggesting that beliefs about inquiry explain part of that difference.
• "Forensic Handwriting and Signature Analysis" (2026) — DOI: 10.4018/979-8-3373-3795-1.ch004 — Principles of handwriting uniqueness, natural variation, and persistence; types of simulation, tracing, and digital forgery; and the challenges of disguised handwriting and interpretive subjectivity.
• "The Social Context of Statute of Labourers Enforcement" (1983) — DOI: 10.2307/744001 — Manorial accounts recorded estate workers in detail but rarely recorded workers on peasant-held land.
• "Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260-1850" (2019) — DOI: 10.1093/ej/uez017 — Because daily wages cannot reveal annual working days, income was re-estimated using annual employment payments, revealing that previous estimates were too high for the Middle Ages and too low for the Industrial Revolution.
• "Using William the Conqueror's accounting record to assess manorial efficiency" (2005) — DOI: 10.1177/103237320501000206 — Evaluating 11th-century manorial production efficiency using Domesday Book data, which the king used for taxes and control.
• "How Prosperous were the Romans? Evidence from Diocletian's Price Edict (AD 301)" (2009) — DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199562596.003.0016 — Roman workers' real wages, seen through Edict on Maximum Prices data, were at a bare-subsistence basket level, similar to 18th-century backward regions in Europe and a significant portion of Asia.
• "The Problem of Labour in the Context of English Government, c. 1350–1450" (2000) — DOI: 10.1017/9781846151385.006 — More than a third of the 77 parliamentary statutes after the Black Death were labor legislation suppressing wages, restricting movement, and enforcing contracts, showing a government representing landlords' interests.
• "The Voice Of The Past" (2000) — DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192893178.001.0001 — Covers the history and methods of oral history, along with the reliability and memory of oral evidence.
• ""Overwhelming Evidence" of a Lincoln-Ann Rutledge Romance?: Reexamining Rutledge Family Reminiscences" (2005) — DOI: 10.5406/19457987.26.1.04 — Reexamining Rutledge family reminiscences, concluding that skepticism did not misread the evidence given that there were no specific memories of courtship and grief was not witnessed firsthand.
• "The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe" (2016) — DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtw033 — Decisions on selecting, classifying, and preserving records shaped knowledge about the past, and archives are not transparent windows.
• "Archives and memory" (2003) — DOI: 10.1108/10650750310490289 — Archival memory reflects a society's power relations and tends to tilt toward the records of powerful groups.
• "Oral Tradition" (2017, reprinted edition) — DOI: 10.4324/9781315125855 — In pre-literate societies, oral tradition is the primary historical source, and historical content can be discerned by understanding language and society.
• "THE ENFORCEMENT OF THE ORDINANCE AND STATUTE OF LABOURERS IN CHESHIRE, 1349 TO 1374" (2013) — DOI: 10.3828/archives.2013.6 — Cataloging records of labor law violation prosecutions in Cheshire, where administration and records differed due to the Black Prince's rule, and National Archives classification methods obscured their importance, leaving them rarely used.
• "Between Famine and Death: England on the Eve of the Black Death—Evidence from Paleoepidemiology and Manorial Accounts" (2013) — DOI: 10.1162/jinh_a_00500 — Interpreting skeletal remains and manorial records together to show that most of England's population lacked protein, calcium, and B12 for at least a generation before the Black Death.