Several years ago, the small company I was working for purchased various items for our move into a new office building. We spent a day getting our files organized, our favorite colors of sticky notes arranged on our desks, and building smaller pieces of office furniture we needed to make the office functional and efficient.

My department had ordered a rolling cart that would sit in front of our file cabinets, and when a person was filing or pulling files, it was possible to then pull out and open file folders that needed to be examined. In short, it made it easier for us to not drop full file folders on the floor, bend down all the time, or make a mess in front of the cabinets.

As I stood with my co-worker on move-in day, I was reading the instructions for building the cart out loud, while she was armed with an allen wrench, tightening each part into place. The boss, always a comedian, walked by:

“What are you doing?”

“We’re building this cart.”

“No, but what’s she doing?” His headed nodded over at me, a twinkle in his eye.

I looked down my nose over the black and white printed, almost unintelligible instructions, and cleared my throat as I answered him in my most matter-of-fact voice.

“Reading the instructions. That way, there’ll be no parts left over when we’re finished.”

“I thought those were bonus parts!”

He scoffed a little about the idea of reading instructions, smiled, and moved on. Fortunately, through our studious instruction-reading, we were able to build our cart well, and it served its purpose dutifully.

So, why read the instructions? Often in genealogy research, the introduction material, or instructions, contains clues about how to use the information in the book or database. Information that you wouldn’t necessarily get from just looking at the page of the book where your surname is listed. This material is often at the front of a book, the beginning of a roll of microfilm, or in small print at the bottom of an internet database page.

Here’s one example of how this has helped me in my research. This week, I was using a classic source for early New England research. Published in 1985, thirty years of genealogist Clarence Torrey’s research in more than 2,000 genealogy sources was compiled as New England Marriages Prior to 1700. He went through all kinds of sources to find these marriages, even noting “implied” marriages, where no date was given, but the couple had a child together that was recorded in one of these sources. Torrey’s book is so valuable, since it indexes such a large number of other sources, and before 1700 in the U.S., records of these marriages are so limited.

For instance, here’s one of the marriages that the book discusses:

From looking briefly at this, you could assume two things:

1. Jonathan Padelford was born in 1656 and died in 1710.
2. His wife, Hannah (whose surname is up for debate), was born in 1679? The couple was almost 25 years apart in age?

This doesn’t seem right. In flipping to the beginning of New England Marriages, you will find that the Introduction says if the date of marriage could not be found, the birth year of the first known child was given. Thus, Jonathan Padelford and his wife, Hannah, had their first child in 1679, when Jonathan was about 23 years old. Hannah was likely around the same age, but no source has given her birth year or age.

Next time you’re reading through a source and it doesn’t make sense, flip to the front of the book, or maybe an “about the database” page online, and read more about how the source was created. This is just one example of how the introduction can save us from making faulty assumptions.