A Beginning
The Cambridge Dictionary defines rooting around as “searching for something, especially by looking through other things.”
It also defines roots as “family origins, or the particular place you come from and the experiences you have had living there.”
As a longtime biographer, I take pride in ferreting out little-known facts from the pre-fame days of my subjects. It’s my absolute favorite thing in the world: to dig and dig and dig until I learn that Dan Brown sold books out of the trunk of his car for months before The Da Vinci Code became a household name, Shel Silverstein’s favorite childhood dessert was a kind of custard known as junket, and Rachel Maddow was a hard-core punk fan as a teenager.
As a result, one of the most common questions I get from readers is “How’d you find that?”
I’ve been happily digging for facts since before Al Gore invented the Internet, when my idea of an ideal day was to spend it in the dusty stacks of Dartmouth’s Baker Library during winter term, when students were off for break and I could set up camp in the stacks to page through 30 years of bound copies of some obscure trade journal from the previous century.
I love research. I’m the proverbial lab rat: hit the lever, get the pellet, dopamine goes haywire. Only in my case, the pellet is some obscure factoid.
I'm hardwired that way. Just one more…as any addict will say.
My favorite fixes come from The Wayback Machine for long-defunct websites and out-of-print books, and Ancestry.com for census records and city directories. But my favorite source by far is Newspapers.com, a site that spits out more than a billion pages of decades-old grainy text from community newspapers with titles like The Times Signal and The Crestline Advocate.
I’ve come to realize that while most people spend at least a bit of time meandering down countless Internet rabbit holes on any given day, digging for more specific information is understandably more fraught.
And not everyone knows how to do it.
My aim with Rooting Around is to help you improve your own research skills, often by looking in unexpected places. I’ll reveal my secrets and the obscure online sources I use to help you find the facts you’re searching for. I’ll map out my own meandering routes and reverse-engineer passages from my books, retracing my steps so you can see how I got there.
After spending two decades writing about other people, it’s become second nature for me to hide behind the stories of other people. But recently I’ve started to work on a memoir, so I’ll also be using Rooting Around to turn the lens around on my own life while helping me grow more comfortable with telling my own stories.
Sometimes roots are out in the open, for all to see, while at others even a backhoe or jackhammer won’t jostle them free. Whether you’re working on a book or essay, digging into your family history, or just trying to shake loose a hidden fact to satisfy your own curiosity, Rooting Around will help you find facts and make sense of them, one search at a time.
Cheers,
Lisa Rogak
P.S. To learn more about me and my books, head over to my website.
