Where can you find information to help you? The same places you find information about everything else in life. Interacting with other people, watching movies, reading books, and searching the internet is each a sea of facts and details. The difficulty will be discerning which are facts and which are opinions. Be judicious in giving credence to your sources of information.

The best quality sources are “primary sources.” These include books and other publications from your target era, as well as any extant artifacts (surviving material goods) - though you must recognize that the dates assigned to these materials may have come out of the head of someone no more knowledgeable than yourself!! I regard even dates written or stamped on antiques as questionable, unless the date is clearly consistent with what I would expect from experience (born of study). You must also realize that clothing and other daily use items were traditionally passed down if still useful - - and altered to current ideas if need be. In the case of clothing, look carefully for old seamlines and pieced joints, before you assume it’s in its original form.

Secondary sources would be, for instance, accounts written by others who were not present. These are more authoritative than tertiary sources, especially if corresponding closely in time with the artifact in question. But they are not the very best evidence. When combined together, however, they can be most useful.

Tertiary sources (my friend’s mother’s grandmother; an article I read quoting a traveler who spoke with a taxi driver; a book quoting a newspaper article, which was quoting a witness) are not considered authoritative. However, they are great sources of finding the beginning of a trail to authentically sourced information. Keep your ears open!!