Parchment, vellum, paper; handwriting from an elegant copperplate to an illegible scrawl: those captivating forays into archival records can unearth a wealth of genealogical treasures. Such historical evidence forms the bedrock of family history research, but you can’t construct a sound building on shaky foundations, so making the right choices about our evidence is paramount at every stage. Making decisions in family history research requires a finely balanced array of processes:
• critiquing evidence;
• extracting written details;
• comparing them against our previous research;
• identifying matches and conflicts. Omitting even one of those steps – or failing to unite them in a bigger picture – can result in us identifying the wrong person
Six coloured – and imaginary! – hats form the core of the Six Hats approach. Each hat represents a distinct type of thinking: when you don a particular hat, you have to direct your thinking ONLY towards that hat’s theme. as our ancestor, or making alarmingly little progress. Some of those decisions and choices that we make might feel fairly straightforward, whereas other more complex challenges can push our reasoning abilities to their limits. Intellectual ‘scaffolding’ in
