Researching a Montana History Book

I released the last volume of my Montana History series of eBooks just about a month ago. Since then I’ve done absolutely nothing.

Well, that’s not quite true. This past week I got back onto it, and that means the research process. It takes time to write a history book, and it takes even more time to research. What I need to do first for this third volume is find out all the things that happened in Montana from 1870 to 1900. To make that more manageable I’m going to focus on the 1870s first.

To begin I’ll find relevant topics and create files for them. So far I’ve got 12 files open, as you can see below:

You can see that I have lots of files in this folder. The ones that have word count numbers behind them are posts that I’ve put up on this blog. Those that don’t have a number are rough drafts for the chapters of the next Montana history book I’m writing. Many will also become shortened versions that I’ll post here. I like to start out slow and create the files, or chapters, and add to them.

A Look at Gathering Historical Research

To give you an idea of how one of these files goes from a blank sheet to a chapter in a book I’m going to choose one and demonstrate.

Take a look at that file #75. It’s called William Farlin and the Start of Butte. Now, I have no idea who William Farlin is, but I know about Butte. One of the first places I might look to get some quick information is on Wikipedia. Here’s what I pulled up:

As you can see there’s no listing for William Farlin at all on Wikipedia. This site won’t help me one bit. But a site that I know will help me a lot is Google Books. Here I can find all the same books I can at a library, and usually more.

This is what it looks like when I type in William Farlin on Google Books:

As you can see quite a few books come up. And unlike Wikipedia, these are reputable sources that I can reference.

Now I’ve got to wade through everything that came up and find what’s relevant. That could take a long time – 15,300 different results came up in the search! I think the people in Butte would be surprised that one of their founders is represented so well. The truth is that most of those results are rubbish and have nothing to do with what I’m looking for at all.

Usually I’ll go through about the first 4 pages of results, maybe more if what’s coming up isn’t any good. Lots of stuff that appears is useless, and some things are great but only have one or two paragraphs. Still other books having nothing listed but their cover and a link to Amazon.

Here are what a few of the pages I chose look like:

As you can see there’s a lot of good information there. After doing a quick search like that I was able to come up with quite a few promising links. I then go ahead and put those into my #75 file and save it for later. Here’s what it looks like now:

When the time comes, writing will be easier

I’ll do the same process for each of those files, finding lots of sources. Later I’ll start going through those files and I’ll visit each of those links, or books. I’ll figure out what they have and if it’s useful to me. If it is I’ll include the book as a reference in my bibliography and use footnotes where appropriate in the text.

That’s the process I followed with the first two books of my Montana history series, and I’m just beginning to work on my third. With any luck I’ll have it done by the end of February like I plan.