The Book of Daniel

My father told me stories. They contained names, dates, towns and occupations, delivered the way anyone delivers them from memory — out of order, approximate, and with the interesting parts assumed rather than explained.

Every one of those names is a thread into an archive somewhere, and there were roughly two hundred of them.

Autonomous research agents pointed at the recordings, chasing everything the tape mentioned: pension records, census returns, local historical society holdings, newspaper archives.

A passage that began as a remark about a great-great-grandfather lowering himself into a frozen canal on a rope becomes, after the research, a dated account with the Bureau of Pensions order that governed his veteran's pension and the address he farmed tobacco at for the rest of his life.

The oral history is the index; the archive is where the book actually comes from. That inversion is the part worth paying attention to.

A human researcher could do all of this, and some have spent retirements on less. What changed is that chasing two hundred loose threads from a recording is now a weekend rather than a decade.

170 pages, typeset in Typst — two columns, period photography, running heads. My father has a copy.