"Frank the Mank" on Historical Research

[STS Lincolnite]

The point of my post is that just because someone wrote something about someone -- whether it was last week or 150 years ago -- it does not necessarily mean that it was true. That is the challenge of historical research.

Very true. I have been trying to come up with a way that works for me to weight sources. One of the important criteria is corroboration. The hard part, as you said, is to determine whether a statement is actually corroborated or if a bad source has just been repeated again and again without examination.