When Does an Absence Become Evidence?

A missing account can mean several things: an event never happened, no one recorded it, or the record was lost or left out. Those explanations aren’t interchangeable.

When you read an archive, a news story, or even a family history, what helps you tell whether a silence is meaningful? One useful starting point might be to ask what kind of record we would expect to exist—and who had the power or opportunity to preserve it. But that still may not settle the question.