Historical Societies Editing and Proofreading Services

Local historical societies hold material and knowledge that exists nowhere else, maintained by volunteers whose expertise is real and whose training is usually not in history. That combination produces work of genuine value alongside a recurring problem: a claim entering print because it has been repeated locally for forty years, with no source anyone can now identify, after which it is cited by the next researcher as established fact. Once a story is in a society's journal it becomes very hard to dislodge.

We edit what historical societies, heritage groups and local history publishers produce — journal articles and society transactions, local history books and pamphlets, newsletters and members' bulletins, exhibition text and interpretation panels, walking trail and guide material, oral history transcripts and their introductions, transcriptions and calendars of documents, indexes and finding aids for society holdings, memorial and commemoration text, planning and heritage consultation responses, grant applications for heritage funding, and guidance for contributors and volunteers. Our editors work to your house conventions and to the referencing standard your journal uses.

Sourcing is the discipline that separates a society whose work is cited from one whose work is discounted, and the failure is rarely deliberate. A contributor writes that the mill closed in 1874, because that is what everyone knows; a later writer cites the article; a third cites the second; and the date is now attested three times and evidenced never. We work on articles so every factual assertion carries its source in a form a reader could check — the census return, the parish register entry, the newspaper of a stated date — so local tradition is identified as tradition rather than reported as fact, since "it is said locally that" is both honest and often the more interesting sentence; so an inference from indirect evidence is presented as an inference with its reasoning; and so anything the society has previously published and now doubts is corrected explicitly rather than quietly dropped. We also press contributors on the difference between an absence of evidence and evidence of absence, which in local history is where most confident claims about the distant past come from.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished research and material about living people. We are editors rather than historians or archivists, and we offer no view on interpretation, attribution or the accuracy of any account — we work on how clearly the evidence and the argument are presented. Contributors writing their first article are especially welcome.