Preface
I have had this little book in mind for more than thirty years, and would like to record at this point my state of mind in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when it was first conceived. I was at that time quite new to genealogy, and had in the prior decade or so tried my hand at two other "careers," military intelligence and molecular biology. These two pursuits, seemingly quite distant from genealogy, provided both the basis for my genealogical skills and the impetus for the writing of a book on methodology.

Overview
Elements of Genealogical Analysis is a book about how to solve genealogical problems. As the director of the Great Migration Study Project, which examines all people who migrated from England to New England in the years between 1620 and 1640, I have developed a strict methodology that has helped me establish complete genealogical definitions of the people I have treated. Although my experience is in early New England, and the examples in this book derive from that place and era, you can adapt these methods to solve genealogical problems in any time period and geographic area.

Chapter One
Source Analysis
Before you begin to work your way through the basic problem-solving sequence, presented in Part Two of this volume, you need to be familiar with the analytic tools that will be applied at all steps of that sequence. The first two of these tools, explained in this chapter and the next, are closely related to one another: source analysis and record analysis. These two tools implement the third element in the First Fundamental Rule: "All statements must be based only on . . . exhaustively analyzed records" Before proceeding to these analytic steps, it is necessary to define source and record.