Click to enlarge
17 page PDF research guide includes:
Guide for The Witch Stick and the Well: A Research Companion for Tracing Water Witching in Appalachian Records
The man who witched your ancestor's well almost certainly never signed his name to a courthouse record. But the well is still in the ground, and the records that describe it -- the improvement clause in the deed transfer, the divining rod listed between the broadaxe and the adze in the estate inventory, the newspaper column after a disputed well came in -- have been sitting in courthouse basements and archive stacks long enough to be worth going back for. This companion moves through those record types with search strategies built for each one, a volume-by-volume guide to the Foxfire accounts most likely to hold named practitioners by county, and a repository guide to the oral history collections that have indexed this kind of folk knowledge by surname and place.
What's Inside
- Record types overview table covering deed improvement clauses, estate inventories, county newspapers, WPA life histories, Foxfire interviews, university and state oral history collections, and survey plats, with where each is held, what the entry contains, and its genealogical value
- Search strategy table with specific access points, search terms, and field strategies for each record type
- Foxfire volume guide identifying which volumes carry water witching content with named informants by county
- Oral history repository guide covering seven collections across the Appalachian range
- Parallel research logging worksheets for deed records, estate inventories, newspaper accounts, and WPA and oral history collections, each with an ancestor ID block, analysis prompts, and a twelve-row entry log
- Family interview question set with opening and follow-up questions, each with a researcher note on what to listen for
- Notes pages