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10 page PDF research guide includes:
Guide for Old-Time Remedies & Healer Records
A midwife who delivered half a valley's babies almost never has her own file in the courthouse. She survives instead in the attendant field of a birth certificate, a county health department registry entry noting who trained her, a physician's daybook mentioning a patient's prior herbal treatment, or a granddaughter's WPA interview forty years later. None of these sources was built to document her directly, and most researchers never think to check them. This companion moves through a healer identification worksheet, the record types most likely to document a healer's work, a thirteen-state repository guide plus the specific archives holding Appalachian folk medicine collections, a cross-reference guide connecting a healer record to the standard genealogical trail, and a lineage tracker for mapping healing knowledge passed down through your family.
What's Inside
- Healer and Midwife Identification Worksheet with fields for name, role, active years, and a families-served log for tracking every patient or family a healer is known to have assisted
- Eight-record-type reference table covering midwife registries, birth certificate attendant fields, WPA oral histories, physician daybooks, family Bible remedy notebooks, census occupation columns, ethnobotanical fieldwork, and Frontier Nursing Service records
- Thirteen-state repository and access guide, plus the Library of Congress, for healer and midwife research across the Appalachian range
- Named Collections of Note guide covering six specific archives with deep Appalachian folk medicine holdings, including Frontier Nursing University Archives and the Archives of Appalachia at ETSU
- Cross-reference guide connecting eight kinds of healer records to the census, vital record, church, and probate searches that confirm and extend them
- Healer Lineage Tracker for mapping healing knowledge passed down across generations within a family
- Two ruled notes pages