You need to be open to changing your ideas and questions and be prepared for not finding documents that fit your thesis precisely. Also, you may have to look through hundreds of diary entries about the weather before you find the one entry about sex. The unique discoveries you will make often make it all worthwhile. It is, as the word itself suggests, a story, written by subsequent generations. If you want to get a sense of how historians analyze and interpret primary sources, you can find student projects using primary sources to answer questions about women and social movements in the United States from 1830-1930 at this University of Binghamton site .
Research using primary sources and rare documents is highly rewarding.
Please keep in mind that serious investigation or research into any subject is infinitely fascinating, but often very labor-intensive . There are some ways to facilitate the process. For instance, we have created guides to many of our collections. Collection guides are designed to explain the order and make the contents of manuscript collections more accessible to the researcher. If you want to visit Cornell's Human Sexuality Collection to see a specific manuscript collection, you can request a copy of an individual collection guide ahead of time to get more details about the contents .