What a nag I'm becoming I didn't start out to
be quite so negative. For the last
several posts, however, I have been warning against believing everything you
find as you research your topic or your own ancestors. Before I leave this thread,
I have to add another. We'll frame
it as a positive rule: "Always check the identity of your source."
The more information becomes instantly available over the internet, the more
careful you have to be. There's a
wealth of material out there; there is also a never-ending supply of quacks, polemicists,
and other angry people. Don't accept anything without finding some strong
supporting evidence. We'll talk more about
using the internet in another post.
For now, I want to call attention to a particularly dangerous area
— personal letters or diaries that
have been transcribed, copied, or edited by someone else. The Italian language has an
important proverb: "Traduttore
traditore." It means, roughly, "a translator is a traitor."
Spanish provides a similar thought: "E
que traduce, traiciona," or "He who translates is guilty of a
betrayal." I kept the Italian version posted on the wall right above my
office computer while I was working on a translation of Latin letters, just to
remind myself that my English translation should reflect nothing but what the
author wrote, not what I thought he SHOULD have written. Back when I was first
starting to do the research for A Scratch
with the Rebels, I traveled to Penn State University to sift through a huge
collection of materials from the 100th Pennsylvania Regiment. Seven large boxes
in the library basement held a conglomeration of original letters, newspaper
clippings, and typescript copies of other letters and diaries from members of
the regiment. Nothing much had
been done to preserve the materials, so that the original documents were often
faded and ripped. I was grateful
for the typescripts and spent much of my limited time reading those because
they took less time effort. The
collection as a whole was so valuable for what I was doing that I didn't worry
much about authenticity. It had,
after all, been collected by other descendants of the Roundheads, and it was
compiled by a college English professor who taught in the area from which the
regiment had been recruited. Some time a bit later,
I was in the public library in New Castle, PA, this time looking for newspaper
articles that would reveal how much the people back home knew of the war and
how they felt about it. At one
point the librarian came back into the archives to chat. She casually mentioned an elderly
gentleman who had been there several years before. He had been looking for evidence that the regimental
commander had been having an affair with the regimental nurse. He had insisted
that the chaplain had been quite upset about the affair. Had I seen anything
about that, she asked. I dismissed it out of hand. After all, I had just finished reading a typescript of Rev.
Browne's letters, and I had not seen a single mention of such a thing. I dismissed it as utter nonsense. The
librarian was relieved; Col. Leasure was a New Castle native and a local
hero. She wanted nothing to sully
his name. I, too, put it out of
my head for the time being, but I became a bit intrigued by the
possibility. Col. Leasure was a
dapper little fellow. Nurse Nellie
was young and very attractive. And
Rev. Browne was a straight-laced Calvinist. So when I went to the Military
History Institute in Carlyle to investigate their holdings, I was pleased to
learn that they had the original letters from Rev. Browne — some three hundred
of them, many more than I knew about.
I asked for the collection and put my husband to work on one stack while
I plowed through the other.
"Look for any mention of Nellie," I told him. It didn't take long!
These original letters were full of innuendo, snarling attacks on Nellie's
character, and semi-veiled
accusations of improper relationships. It was clear that the good chaplain had
hated the nurse with a finely-honed passion and that he resented the fact that
the colonel seemed to favor her.
But why the difference?
When I talked to the archivist there, he shrugged and said, "Well,
Browne's granddaughter was the one who prepared the typescript before we received
the letters." And there was the
answer to at least part of the puzzle. The granddaughter had sanitized the
collection, systematically removing anything that might have reflected badly on
her beloved ancestor. It didn't
prove, of course, whether or not there had been an affair. It simply explained why I had not
reached the same conclusion as the elderly gentleman who believed what Browne
had believed. I remain grateful for
the discovery. It gave rise to my
next book, Beyond All Price, and in
that novel I had to deal with the question of the affair. I won't give away my
final conclusion, but I can tell you that I would have written a much different
book if I had not read the original letters for myself. |