The first lesson I learned from my Research Project was to begin with scholarly secondary sources. Scholarly books and articles provided me with a extensive contextual understanding of my topic before I began searching for primary sources. Since I was researching Daniel Cloud and Thomas Conrad, who were Confederate Spies, I read books and articles about Civil War Espionage. As a result, I became familiar with the methods Civil War spies used to infiltrate the opposing military and collect information. I read through the footnotes in order to determine where the authors found the bulk of their primary sources. I found that a great deal of them came from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). By searching for Cloud and Conrad in NARA’s catalogue, I located a number of relevant primary documents. One book I read specifically mentioned Cloud and Conrad and referred to the fact that they were college roommates. A footnote attributed this information to the diary of their Dickinson classmate Horatio King, which is held in the college archives. I was able to quickly find the diary and confirm the claims made in the book.
Another useful piece of advice is to pinpoint specific dates and events relevant to your topic or topics when conducting newspaper research with electronic databases or microfilm. Before using databases and microfilm, I made a list of dates of relevant events using Conrad’s memoir, Ancestry records, primary documents, and secondary sources. I narrowed narrowing my searches to the weeks of their college graduations, the weeks following their deaths, and the weeks surrounding their purported plot to kidnap Lincoln, and the months following the publication of Conrad’s memoir in 1892. By creating these specific targets before conducting my research, I saved a great deal of time and found more relevant sources.
A final piece of advice is not to restrict your search for archival materials to a certain geographic region, regardless of your ability to travel. Even though an event may have taken place in a certain location, people involved possibly lived elsewhere at some point or had friends, associates, or relatives elsewhere. Therefore, relevant materials may be found all over the country. The most efficiant way to determine where such sources may be located is to determine where the people involved were born, lived, and died. This can be ascertained by using primary and secondary sources as well as Ancestry.com. Once you single out a geographic location where someone lived, you should contact the local historical society by phone or e-mail and explain specifically who and what you are searching for. In many cases, these historical societies will not require fees in order to recieve scans of primary documents or images by mail or e-mail. I pinpointed Conrad and Cloud’s birthplaces in Virginia and discovered that Conrad died in D.C., and Cloud died in Vicksburg, Mississippi. I then contacted the historical societies in their hometowns and Vicksburg and therefore discovered some useful primary documents and images. Regardless of where someone lived, you should access the NARA catalogue online and search for their name, especially if they were ever a federal employee or served in the military. If the search produces any results, you should fill out the request form on the website in order to recieve photocopies of the documents in the mail.