Historical inquiry creates an expectation that if you keep looking long enough, eventually you will find the answer. A name appears in a census or a deed establishes ownership. A newspaper provides the missing date. A probate file identifies a wife or child. An old map suddenly explains why a road, building, or settlement existed where it did.
There is something deeply satisfying about watching fragments become a record. But eventually, every researcher encounters silence. This can include a person disappearing between census years or a family leaving a place without explanation. Indigenous histories were often recorded by people outside the culture, if they were committed to paper at all.
Human temptation is to fill the empty space. Instead, I began separating what I encountered into three different ways of knowing: documentation, inference, and intuition.
Documentation is the easiest to defend. A deed exists, dates are validated, and a person becomes factually matched to the record. A newspaper reported an event, and even if the source may contain errors or bias, an artifact exists that can be examined and verified.
Inference begins when the documents stop answering the entire question. Several independent records point toward the same conclusion without any single document stating it outright. Inference is not fact, and it is not invention. It is an interpretation built from what the evidence makes reasonable.
Then there is intuition, and that territory is more difficult. These are the moments when I knew, or believed I knew, something before I could explain why. A place felt important. A name demanded further attention. An unexpected image, physical sensation, dream, coincidence, or thought sent me toward a record I had not previously considered.
An intuitive experience could become a reason to investigate. It is not evidence simply because later events made it feel meaningful. If a historical record confirmed something, I could document the confirmation. If it did not, the experience remained what it had always been: my experience.
Researchers don't always want to acknowledge the other possibility: that absence itself becomes part of history. Over time, I came to simply respect the silence. It reminds me that archives are not the past; they are merely what survived.
The distinction is enormous.
Research therefore requires something beyond curiosity. It requires restraint.
And sometimes the most accurate thing we can write is: “I don't know.”