The "Genealogy" of the Document Once a document is determined to be genuine in the sense just

described, the next obvious question is Wachter it is an original, a copy of an original. Or a copy of copy.
Most copies announce themselves as such, but of course that is not always the case, and it is exactly
those cases that can be the most treacherous, for a "copy" is not always a perfectly accurate rendition of
the original. This is particularly true in the case of handwritten documents, for example it is true even in
our day, for the photocopies ,faxes, magnetic tape, and digital processing used today to make copies are
often imperfect because of unintentional technical failures or because of voluntary manipulations

Copies contain all kinds of "faults, “most of them unintentional. Manu- script (and even typed) copies
regularly repeat words, for example they reverse lettersSome mistakes were more easily made by
copyists who were transcribing a text being read to them; others characteristically occurred when the
copyist was working from a written model. Sometimes n copyist did not understand the meaning of what
he was copying and thus mis transcribed the text.

2.Genesis of a Document

Here we return to the question of where the source was produced by whom, and when. What kind of
institution or individual produced a source with what authority, under what circumstances? What
surrounding events gave the date of the place special meaning? Sometimes the source itself gives direct
answers to these questions, at least in the literal sense. Our concern here is slightly different here we
want to investigate the noon of author-ship. What does it mean to say that a certain person or institution
document? is he the person who conceptualized the document

3.The "Originality “of the Document

are products of an intellectual traditionality historians using an isolated text must know some- thing
about this tradition in order to read their text responsibly.

4.Interpretation of the Document

To the nineteenth-century historians who founded history write scholarly discipline. The problem of
"interpretation of a document one of deciphering its intended meaning.

5.Authorial Authority

With what authority does the author of a source, perhaps a newspaper re-porter or a compiler of facts
about a nineteenth-century harvest, speak? Was he even alive when the events he records are meant to
have taken place? Is his information second, or third, or fourth hand? Is some of what the source relates
a firsthand account, while other parts of the document are based on information that is taken from
others.

6.Competence of the Observer Although no account, no source, is completely "reliable," the

trustworthy-ness of an account, at least as a report of events, may vary enormously, de-pending upon a
great many factors. to give a source-in deciding on its "competence." Historians have traditionally