How to Read a Maker Record

A maker’s page is a list of short lines, not an essay. Each line is one thing a book said, with the book named next to it. Judge each line on its own, because one can be solid while the next is thin.

The four words

Every line carries one of four words.

• Documented means it was read straight from a document of the maker’s own time.
• Reported means somebody wrote it down and nobody here has checked it against the page yet.
• Disputed means the books disagree and both sides are shown.
• Corrected means the record contradicts the usual story and says why.

Most lines say reported. That is honest, not unfinished. A name in a 1925 city directory is a real sighting, but the directory printed what it was told.

How the page was read

Every line also says how the page was read. Read by software is fast and wrong often enough to matter. Software once inserted a number into a 1908 article about plate thickness that appears nowhere on the page. Read from the page image means a person looked at it. Every line says which.

Two things worth knowing

A scan page and a printed page number are different things, and the site never turns one into the other. And a city directory canvassed the town again every year, so an entry in 1925 and an entry in 1927 are two separate sightings, while two scans of one printing are one.

One line, taken apart

Here is a line pulled live from a record on this site.

The line

Awards and exhibitions

Bronze medal, Class 17 (Musical Instruments), Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900. correctedPrinted as a gold medal by Wenberg, Henley and Holmes. The federal record says bronze, and cites no qualities. No known source has Reindahl himself claiming gold.

The document it rests on

Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States to the International Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), vol. 5, p. 68. archive.org, reportofcommissi05unit_0.

Primary

How that document was read

A person read this from photographs of the pages.

Three parts. What the book says. Which book it came from, and where on the page. And how that page was read.

Where the sources run out

Where the sources run out, the record says so. A maker named once in one directory gets a page that says just that. It is not an unfinished page. It is the right entry for what we know.

One book is typed out in full on this site, a 1916 trade directory, all 413 entries of it, every entry as printed. Inside a source: the 1916 trade directory.