What is biography

15 February 2015

"Here's my challenge," a history researcher wrote recently on social media. "How do I write a biography of someone from the 1700s with little direct documentation available?"

Oh, yeah!

We all know that problem. It is a challenge, but it's doable.

How to write a biography

Successful historical biographers—after they conclude that they have already exhausted available records for their person-of-interest—usually take this approach:

• Study every history of every type that has been written on the region—social, religious, military, economic, or whatever.

  If newspapers are available and have yielded no hits for their person, they read those papers anyway, every issue for the relevant time frame.

• Rather than looking for a particular person, they use these sources to draw an understanding of the region.

  That understanding of what life was like, at the time and place, enables them to recreate their person's environment and to place their person—acc