I know we have aome very accomplished researchers and wrtiers on this forum. iam wondering if some of you might be willing to share tips on how you research historical topics. I have been working on a short history of th eMilwaukee Mile and while it has been fun and I have been finding a lot of really good material (mostly by reading the micro film copies of the Milwaukee Sentinel at the Milwaukee library) I can't help but think I am missing resources and techniques.

I am very interested in the first 3 decades of the last century, seems to be an area that couls use some digging, but I am at a bit of a loss on how to proceed. Thoughts?

You might find other newspapers that have since died are available at the library...

Maybe even run a classified ad in the local paper asking for information? You never know, someone might have hoarded grandad's collection of programmes and scrap books.

Just a thought, have you tried to locate current owners (if any) of cars that raced there during that time period? When I have researched chassis histories, owners were usually good for hoarding anything related to their cars. Everything from race results, programmes, newspaper clippings, & in some cases contact information regarding living relatives of deceased drivers/owners/sponsors. I just looked & they list Milwaukee, try posting (continually) an advert on craigslist.org . Good luck!!

Have you talked to Steve Zautke, the Milwaukee Mile Historian? He knows his stuff.

Also, check out the folks who put on the Millers at the Mile event each July. A lot of history resides with them.

Tom

I have talked with a lot to people and I am afraid I am not stating this clearly. I am doing well on the mile, lots of material but I am wondering in a more general way how to go about this sort of research. I would be interested in looking at how A.A.A. came to control US racing. How did they pull it off? What sort of deals were made, what obstacles did they overcome. They had a long running battle with IMCA but that was later, although I want to know about that also, what sort of political and personal battles went on. How do you find the personal papers of the men who shaped these things. Do i just go to my local library and ask the librarian to help track down these sort of collections? How does one start on these things? I see a lot of very well done popular histories these days and I wonder how the authors access all the info?

And i also want to state that these have been all good ideas. Running an ad is something I would not have thought of; that might be particularly good to obtain local info, often grand kids have scrapbooks and the like.

There must be organized racing history archives but were are they? I suspect Indy has a bunch of stuff.

Thanks

Tried the International Motor Racing Research Centre at Watkins Glen?

You will get help there, as the librarians are actually pursuing the same sort of stuff as you, not just everyday history.

I've been asked by a noted historian to post the following:

I'm not sure if this is the answer you are looking for, but a different spin from "speak to X"

Structuring you systems helps immensely. As a system you are looking to:
- Identify resources
- Secure copies of those resources
- Catalogue the data you have obtained
- Analyse & interpret that data.

Identify Data
A simple Word document can help with this. As you hear of a potential source, make a note of it. Websites (with hotlink), books (ISBN No.), contacts (email address).
Note last contact (or none if that), summary of content, and other other relevant data. Under websites, you can hotlink to every TNF thread that's relevant (with a note of why). Even if you can't secure a copy of a book or periodical nw, you have at least noted is as a ToDo, and the critical information to secure it at a later date.

Cataloguing Data
There are several ways you can do this.
To compile race details, a simple tabular Word document can again help. Set up a basic template: Date, venue, event, course type. For each race you can list entrants, results, transcribe or summarise a race report, list sources, list images, and add notes & interpratation.
For images and multimedia, I use a piece of pro software called Extensis Portfolio. It builds a database of all imported elements to which you can attach a long caption, keywords, source, copyright information. Some crafty keywording (names, cars, year, venue) allows you to very quickly search for all relevant images, or search the captions. Deatails can always be updated, so as you learn more about an unknown image, the data improves. When you hold several thousand references, the ability to run a search in 5 seconds becomes rather helpful...
Searchable digital copies of data are always helpful. For info-dense sources (e.g. a motorsport magazine) an index is rather helpful. This might be issue, page number and summary of content (preview, report, driver profile, etc.). For less dense sources, it might be easier to just transcribe the words in the same way - issue, page number, content (add a space for comment & notes - e.g. "G Smoth must be Gerry Smith").

Interpretting Data
This is the process of combining multiple sources with a bit of reasoning into usable data. So for example a driver biography. Things you might want include a summary (full name, DoB/DoD, where he lived, what he did). Then a year-by-year summary, then a complete event history, perhaps a list of images, and finally endnotes/sources. This again can be rattled off in Word (which has a lot of useful features), with the added benefit that if you want to convert it (or part) to a web page you can just copy-&-paste.

I use a patchwork of Word documents, Excel tables, and Portfolio. This works well, but does mean one change might impact several different systems. A better, ultimate system would use a proper database (Access, Filemaker), so one revision (e.g. an extra entry at a race) automatically tumbles through all relevant pages (race report, driver biog, chassis history), and it could be directly hosted as a complete wbsite, as is or in edited form). That would take some decent knowledge of database construction, but is on my list of jobs.

HTH

A tip from a totally different angle: publish what you've got, identify the missing parts and ask for help.
I have got an enormous amount of help of people who where there when it happened (that won't be easy for your subject, but I've had a lot of help from sons and daughters as well), or who have different sources of information than I had.

HiRick, you want me to be organized!! Seriously this is all a big help. Organization is always a challenge for me, right now I have slips of paper everywhere.

I am very interested in historical nonfiction, sort of like the stuff Stephan Ambrose does (I am not not even in the same game as him of course) but involving cars and bikes. I always wonder how these authors get all the info to put together such detailed accounts, hence my question at the top.

Thanks again and check out "The Bugatti Queen" by Miranda Seymour. It is a bio of Helle Nice a woman who lived an amazing and ultimately tragic life. Drove some very fast cars well.

Dave Gess

Most motorsport topics have at least been touched here at TNF so the research you need to get started may be obtained by simply using the TNF search feature to access the archives.

Henry

http://forums.autosport.com/index.php?show...l=bugatti+queen

On t'internet, that's actually a good tip. When we started the potted biographies of Men & Marques at www.500race.org they were very rough and often incorrect. Some said (and a few still do) "We basically know nothing about this car"
But it gave us an end result, a target to aim for - somewhere for the information to be published, even if we knew it was flaky. As we learn more, identify a photo, and spot mistakes, we can correct the story. Eventually, someone turns up new information, and quite often relatives have got in contact to flesh out the story. Your Google rankings rise, and more people see it.
In that vein it becomes acceptable to qualify statements - "it appears" or "we believe" - because you simply don't know for sure. Obviously less so with a Stirling Moss, but with an Andre Loens (for whom there was no internet biography), you're suddenly the definitive resource.