Sources

Primary Sources are manuscripts or printed works which were written at the time they are describing. For instance, if you wanted to find out what was happening in Dunfermline in 1700, you could look at that year's entries in the Town Council minutes, the register of the Bailie Court and the Kirk Session minutes. The wills and testaments of people who died in that year would be primary sources for 1700. Newspapers are a primary source and so are diaries and letters. So are things like contracts, bonds and property deeds. Most primary sources, especially the earlier ones, are manuscripts. Some of them have been transcribed and printed but in most cases you would need to be able to read the handwriting. From the eighteenth century onwards this is not too difficult, but earlier than that you would need to learn the techniques or to know or pay someone who could read and transcribe them for you.

Paintings, drawings and photographs can also be primary sources, although pictures can be affected by artistic licence and digital photographs are easily manipulated. Pictures which are ‘artists impressions’ of events or scenes cannot be relied upon for authenticity. Plans of buildings and estates are usually accurate and are good primary sources.

Secondary sources are the results of other peoples’ researches and are almost all printed as books or pamphlets. They vary in their accuracy and sometimes the information you get from them needs to be checked with a primary source. Sometimes the author has not read the original manuscript properly, sometimes the printer has not read the author’s handwriting properly, sometimes the author has repeated what he or she has read in other secondary sources without checking to see whether they were correct. Sometimes the author has reported the facts accurately, but has put a particular ‘spin’ on them in order to prove a point. This can happen with primary sources as well, of course, especially with diaries and letters. It is as well to think around any information and decide whether the writer had a reason to slant the facts to suit a particular point of view. After all, this happens today with newspapers – the Daily Record and the Daily Telegraph would each report the same incident in a very different way, or a music journalist and a gardening journalist attending the same function would each write about it from the viewpoint of their own speciality.