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9 page PDF research guide includes:
Guide for The Girl in the Song Was Real: Using Mountain Ballads in Appalachian Genealogy
The songs your ancestors sang about murders, disasters, and family tragedies were often built around real names, places, and events. These tales are the bones of the records in courthouses and archives. Folklorist collectors who came through the mountains in the early twentieth century wrote down not just the songs but who sang them, where those singers lived, and who had passed the song down through the family. Those field notes are genealogical sources sitting inside folk music collections most researchers have never searched. This companion gives you the method for treating a ballad as a research lead, from extracting the verifiable details in the song text to matching them against the record types most likely to corroborate them.
What's Inside
- Reference table of twelve key Appalachian ballads covering the documented event or person each preserves, date range, region, Child number where applicable, and record types most likely to yield corroborating evidence
- Eight-step analytical framework for extracting names, places, and event details from a song and tracking them into the archives
- Repository guide to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the West Virginia and Regional History Center at WVU, the Digital Library of Appalachia, and Smithsonian Folkways, with access notes for each
- Ballad research identification worksheet
- Names and places extraction log
- Ballad-to-record cross-reference log
- Notes pages