questions

Learn about the questions to ask yourself when reading, understanding, and evaluating ancestor writings and others.

As you review ancestors’ writings, don’t conduct an in-depth analysis of every word, sentence, or meaning in every artifact. To examine the artifacts by carefully identifying and analyzing the items. Then reflect on what you’ve learned.

Identify the Source

Ask yourself about the primary source itself:

  • What is the item?
  • Who created it?
  • Where and when was it created?
  • What’s the history of the item?

Questions to Ask Yourself

  • Ask yourself the following questions about the primary source:

Questions for Creator

  • Who created the primary source and why?
  • What was this person’s role in the event, period, or activity?
  • What was the person’s perspective, point of view, opinions, interests, or motivation? How did this impact the content?
  • What was the purpose of creating the source?
  • Was the source intended to be public or private?
  • Was the intention of the creator to inform, instruct, persuade, or deceive? How did this impact the content?
  • Which events—trivial or monumental—do ancestors choose to share?
  • Are any events or topics ignored or skirted?
  • Who among the correspondents seems the most intimate and most at odds?
  • How does each writer seem to value formal respect and careful language, on the one hand, and humor, exaggeration, and slang, on the other?
  • Does one individual seem to be the central person in the correspondence, and, conversely, is there an individual everyone seems to regard as shy or silent?
  • Which relationships seem most stable throughout the correspondence and which are most volatile, and how do events in their lives reveal these qualities?
  • How do all of these relate to the identities of the various correspondents in terms of gender, class, or age?

Questions for Timing

  • Was the item created before, during, or after an event?
  • How might the timing of the creation impact the emotions, accuracy, or perspective?

Questions for Setting

  • What is the setting of the primary source? Where was it created?
  • What were the conditions or circumstances related to the creation?
  • What information (such as facts and opinions) does the primary source contain?
  • What could details easily be misunderstood?
  • How does this resource compare to other information from the event or period?

Visual information

  • What story does the image tell?
  • What is the perspective or point of view of the image?
  • What is the setting of the image?
  • What details are emphasized or missing?

Questions Just for the Diary and Journal

  • Who is the “other” the diarist seems to be writing to a friend, a wiser self, a future self?
  • What other literary forms does a given diary resemble a letter, a novel, a ledger?
  • What kinds of events, times of the day or week, and emotional state motivate the diarist to write?
  • Does the diarist always write in the first person, or does he sometimes distance himself by avoiding the “I”?
  • Which people in the diarist’s life appear most frequently in their pages, and why?
  • Do any or all of these features of a given diary change over its course, and if so, in what way?
  • Reflection upon findings
  • Ask yourself the following questions about your findings:
  • What information was fascinating or surprising? What would be interesting to investigate further?
  • What questions do you have about the information? How could they be addressed?
  • What inconsistencies or conflicting ideas did you identify? How could they be resolved?
  • How does this document connect to your life? What are the relevant issues for today?

Additional Google Articles on BeginMyStory.com

The following are other articles you may enjoy to help you Google your ancestry.