Analyzing Sources

As an IB school, my high school is very focused on teaching good writing and researching standards. A lot of these apply very directly to genealogy. For analyzing sources, we use the acronym OPVL.

The letters each refer to a different element of a source to analyze. O stands for ‘origin’, P stands for ‘purpose’, V stands for ‘value’, and L stands for ‘limitations’.

Origin is essentially a more in-depth description of a document than a citation. When considering a document's origin, these are the questions you should ask yourself:

1. Is the document a primary or a secondary source?
• A primary source comes from somebody who has firsthand knowledge of the subject, i.e. they were present at the event under question. Government records and statistical data, such as censuses, are considered primary sources.
• A secondary source comes from someone with second-hand knowledge of the subject. This might be an analysis of primary sources made by someone after an event has occurred. The most common source you may come across that falls under this category is a family history book.
2. Who was the author of the source?
• The author is the one that wrote the document. You may also wish to include the agency that uses the document if it is a governmental record. For instance, for a census, you might say the census taker was John Doe and the document was from the U.S. Census Bureau.
• Who the author was also includes information about them and their credentials. Only include what is important to your evaluation of the source. Sometimes the information on the author will be easy to find, and sometimes not so much. If it is a book you may want to look up what education they have had and if they have a background in research. It’s also sometimes useful to know where they were born and during what time period they lived. For a census, you may consider looking at other census sheets they did to see if they had any peculiar habits when taking censuses, such as rounding ages or dates. You may also wish to check their accuracy when documenting other families if an important conclusion is dependent on the validity of the source.
3. When was it created?
• This refers to the date or approximate date the source was created.
4. When/Where/how was the source published?
• Here you can put the date it was published, the agency/website that published it, if it was online, on paper, microfilm, etc., or if it was never published.

Purpose defines the reasons the document was written and how it was used. These are some guiding questions to help you along:

1. Why was the document created?
• Did a government agency want statistical information?
• Did a genealogist want to share information on their family?
2. Why did the author create the work?
• This will mainly be applicable to secondary sources. What was their motive in putting out the publication?
3. What was the author’s intent?
• Did the author want to inform, persuade, or entertain the reader?
4. Who was the intended audience of the source?
• Was it just the members of the government agency or church?
• Was it intended for people interested in a location's history?
• Was it intended for people interested in a specific family or surname history?

Value is best defined as the information in the document makes it useful to you. Here are some things to consider when evaluating a source's value:

1. What information about your research subject does the source provide? Does it give the person's age? Their occupation? Their immigration year?
2. Does its status as a primary or secondary source add to its usefulness/trustworthiness?
3. Does it somehow prove or disprove the information in other documents?

Limitations are the elements of your source that could be detrimental to its value or trustworthiness.

1. Was it a document type known to be prone to errors? Example: censuses
2. Is there any bias in the source? (this is mainly applicable to secondary sources)
3. Does it only tell part of a story?

It's really only realistic to do full analysis of your sources when the source is significant to a major conclusion or when you have multiple conflicting pieces of information, but it's good to be thinking about OPVL while researching regardless.