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Research Sources When I started seriously doing research, almost all of
my time was spent at libraries and archives, scrolling through microfilm.
Eventually I bought a microfilm reader and now have a small collection of
microfilm, but purchasing microfilm is expensive so that isn’t a big part of my
research. The most important change is the enormous amount of work
that can now be done over the internet. Yet there are still many things
that can only be accessed at libraries and archives, so I still spend a lot of
time there. I have found the librarians and archivists at all of these
sites to be wonderful people who are unfailingly
helpful.
Since most of my research focuses on baseball before 1920, the sources I use are
geared to certain years and places. With that in mind, here is a brief
guide to the resources I use:
On-line Historical Newspaper and Periodical Collections
There are an ever-increasing number of online, text-searchable historical
newspapers, some of which are accessible to anyone, some of which are
subscription-only and some only accessible through libraries. Please click
here if you want to learn
more. There are also a few that are only browsable and I have not tried to
catalogue those.
Archives and Libraries
The Library of Michigan
in downtown Lansing has a wonderful collection that includes virtually every
extant newspaper from the state of Michigan. And it has my favorite kind
of set-up: researchers can walk in and access everything for themselves or can
get skilled help if needed. When I’m doing a Michigan project, the Library
of Michigan becomes my home away from home.
The Michigan State University library
also has a fabulous collection of newspapers that includes Sporting Life,
Sporting News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and many other great newspapers from
around the country.
A final blessing about living in Lansing is the East Lansing branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,
which has an extraordinary collection of Michigan genealogical records that is
open to the public.
The main
branch of the Detroit Public Library, located near Comerica Park, has many
helpful resources, including a Detroit death index. Of special interest to
baseball researchers is the
Ernie Harwell
Collection, which is ably supervised by Mark Patrick.
The Ohio Historical Center in Columbus is one of my favorite places to
visit. Unfortunately, budget constraints have forced them to keep the library
and archives open for only three days a week, but the great collection of Ohio
newspapers and death certificates makes it very worth a visit. The scope of its
holdings can be learned from the website, but you have to visit to use its
riches.
The Indiana State Library
in downtown Indianapolis has an excellent collection of newspapers from all
over Indiana.
Springfield, Illinois has collections of newspapers and death certificates in
separate locations, about a half-mile apart.
There are some very good collections of newspapers on microfilm on several
university libraries, including Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, Penn
State University, and
the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. The Cleveland Public Library
also has a very good newspaper collection, though less extensive than the one at
the Ohio Historical Center.
Genealogical Resources
Genealogical resources are fundamentally local; once I know where to look, I
then have to find out what resources are available there, as they vary
enormously from one place to another. But online resources will at least give
you a very good idea of what is available online and what isn’t. My
favorite starting places include:
Ancestry.com: This is a subscription
site, but well worth the cost if you do much genealogical research.
Wee Monster:
This is free and is a terrific list of online death indexes, organized by state.
Many, but not all, of the indexes are also free.
Cyndi's List: This is a vast
collection of genealogical sources, organized by location. The site is free and
so are some, but not all, of its many links.
Family Search: This is the place
to learn about the genealogical holdings of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons). There are some very valuable resources on the
site, including a free, searchable 1880 U.S. Census, and extensive foreign IGI
records. You can also learn about the church’s libraries close to you.
Find A Grave: There are a number of
different ways to search for burial sites, but this is the one I use most
frequently.
Access Genealogy is another
great free place to start a search.
And don’t forget Google or your favorite search engine. It won’t help if
you’re looking for a John Smith, but if you’re researching Huyler Westervelt,
putting that name into a search engine in quotations will produce interesting
results. Also try adding the word genealogy to further narrow the results you
get.
Baseball History Websites
There are many great baseball sites on the web, and this is just a very
selective list of the ones I use most regularly for my research on the game's
early history (or just for fun!). The Retrosheet
website is an extraordinary goldmine of information. The best-known
features are its boxscores for every major league game from 1957
through 2005 plus the NL in 1911, 1921, 1922, and 1954. But it also has
detailed career stats for every major leaguers and all kinds of other goodies.
Want to know the standings on any day in major league history? Need a
complete list of major league cycles or no-hitters? Want to read a
description of every forfeited game? It’s all here and easily accessible,
along with Protoball,
Larry McCray’s splendid chronological collection of pre-1860 baseball
references. As with Retrosheet, the
Baseball-Reference website puts
the entire statistical history of baseball at your fingertips and allows you to
immediately create extraordinary lists. For example, say you wanted to know
which Michigan State University alumni had the best major league careers.
Here’s
all the information anyone could ever want. For details on every major leaguer
ever born in North Dakota, click
here. (Roger
Maris isn’t on it because he was born in Minnesota.) And
here's
a list of players who debuted in 2007. Most statistics are updated as the season
goes along, so you can get an up-to-date listing of, say, the
career home
run leaders. And at the end of each season, you can see the leaders in
any category at any age (click
here
to compare A-Rod and other contemporary stars at age 30 to every other player in
baseball history). It’s another amazing resource, as well as great fun. The
Library of Congress has a nice collection of baseball stuff
here. But I
recommend just going to the main page,
putting "baseball" in the search field, and wandering around in the thousands of
results. You'll find gems like
this article about a man who definitely would have been a SABR member if
SABR had been around in 1929. Or
this extraordinary photo of Detroit’s Bennett Park during the 1909 World
Series (click on it to enlarge it). The SABR website also has a bounty
of resources, most of them available to both members and nonmembers (but if
you’re serious about baseball research, you should join). It’s not the
easiest site to navigate, so I create individual bookmarks for my favorite
resources, such as The Baseball Index
(an index of over 200,000 baseball-related articles), the
BioProject, Marc Okkonen’s amazing
listing of minor leaguers between 1900-1910 (go to
this page and click
download), Bill Burgess’s valuable spreadsheets of baseball writers and other
topics (search "Bill Burgess" to find them all), a database of spring training
sites and players (go to
this page and click download), the
Triple Play database, etc. Cliff Blau
has a terrific website with
definitive information on his many interests, including the history of roster
sizes, waivers, and other league operating rules.
Baseball Library has lots
of useful and entertaining stuff, include an online version of Jim Charlton’s
outstanding chronology of baseball.
The website of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown has
this excellent look at uniforms, developed by leading authority Tom Shieber.
If you're interested in the history of uniforms, also check out
Marc Okkonen's
work.
Eric Miklich has a first-rate website
about the rules of nineteenth-century baseball.
If you know how to use Microsoft Access, or another relational database program,
downloading the Lahman database
is a must. My research is not primarily statistical in nature, but I use it all
the time. Click here for my description of
some of the things I use it to do.
The website of the Vintage Base Ball Association,
an organization devoted to recreating early baseball, also has lots of fascinating
information.
And, again, these are just some of the websites that pay particular attention to
my interest in baseball before 1920. For other topics, the best place to start
is John Skilton's Baseball Links. |
