Sabrina Darnowsky

The title of the documentary Turn Every Page comes from advice that the author Robert Caro received when he was an investigative journalist. The gist of it is that, as a researcher, you need to go through every piece of paper at your disposal. Caro remembers this advice as he’s leafing through thousands of documents, trying to find this one particular bit of information about LBJ. At last, he has his eureka moment! He found what he sought!

I would add to that advice another corollary: when you find something that might later be useful, write it down!

While researching information on the Children’s Home of Cincinnati during the 1860s, I had on hand copies of many printed and handwritten documents. As I read through them, whenever I found an important anecdote or statistic that fit into the narrative of the chapter I was writing, I did indeed add it to my Word file with the appropriate footnote. The trouble is that you don’t always know how your anticipated narrative might change. What might not seem important in a given moment can become important as you later make editorial revisions.

In my case, the issue related to the resistance of some Catholic parents to surrender their children to an organization that unquestionably intended to give those children a Protestant religious education. Two stories stuck in my head. In one, the mother said she would rather send her daughter to hell (or at least half-way there) than give her over to Protestants. In the other, the mother ended up sending her daughter to a convent rather than to the Children’s Home. They were vivid examples of the objections that the parents expressed, but because I didn’t think I was going to cover this friction in my chapter, I didn’t write them down.

As Vivian Ward said to the Rodeo Drive clerk who refused to wait on her in Pretty Woman, “Big mistake. Big! Huge!”

To make matters worse, these two anecdotes don’t appear in the typeset PDFs that I can easily search. No, of course they’re in one of three or four lengthy handwritten manuscripts that are too large to upload to Transkribus, the handwritten text recognition website that I have on other occasions found marginally helpful at best. The other day I tried hunting through the documents quickly, skimming each page for the key words that I knew must be somewhere. To no avail. Now I have to turn every page, again, more carefully this time, until I have my own eureka moment.

Is there any way I could have prevented having to do all this reading yet one more time? I have sometimes gone off the deep end in the other direction, transcribing multiple paragraphs of a book or newspaper article, only to end up trimming them down to a couple sentences or phrases. But at least I had the material to work with.

Perhaps, when something piques my interest as a reader, even if it doesn’t seem germane to the work at hand, I should just write down a quick note: “convent, 1864 Daily Record, page 23.” An ounce of reminder is worth a pound of rework.