The method, in plain words

Everything above rests on five habits. First-hand reads. The books and documents that carry this record were opened and read — Griswold's two volumes entire, the 1889 county history's organization chapters, the 1887 charter's roster, Taylor's war volumes, the city's council proceedings — not summarized from other summaries. Where a work was reached second-hand, the entry above says so in as many words (Doxsee, through the Indiana Lawyer; Mather, Vosmeier and Alerding, not opened at all). Files you can re-hash. The original deep-dive page from which this record was drawn is preserved untouched, and every section of it carries a verified checksum, so any reader can confirm that what is quoted here is what the page says. Conflicts printed, not resolved in private. When sources disagree — six flood dead against seven, three portage lengths, two History Center collection counts, the Sentinel's obituary against a century of Appleseed retelling — both sides are printed with their sources, and the record says which it follows and why. Negatives published. The searches that found nothing are findings too and are printed as such: no 1840s use of "Summit City," no Billy Graham crusade in the Graham organization's own list, no Fort Wayne work by Yamasaki, no verifiable Lebamoff scandal, no flu death toll in existence. Bad sources named. Machine-made content farms and unsourced social-media catalogs encountered along the way are listed in the newspapers entry above, so a checker can see the standard applied.

Where the notes live. Every leg of this record was built from a written note that lists its sources, its conflicts and its open routes before a line of the section was drafted. Those notes are kept with the section files in the project's Fort Wayne working folder (history/indiana/fort-wayne-full/) — one note for each section, named for its expansion: the Story of Fort Wayne section, government, business, people, famous people, artists, sports players, events, major events, wars, schools, libraries, folklore, stories told, current, wealth, sports, crime history, charities, communities, architecture, religion, and the before-the-city, land and tribes notes, with the extraction note that accounts for the original page and the comparison note that measured this record against everything else in print. Any claim in any section can be walked back to the note that sourced it, and from the note to the book, archive, register or newspaper named in this section. That is the whole design: nothing here asks to be believed — it asks to be checked, and it hands you the shelf it stands on.