What is your methodology?

Developing Categories

As a work meant to be encyclopedic, showhistory.com has as its difficult task the developing of a taxonomy of this show business world. Necessarily fluid and impermanent, in our branches of the business performers frequently changed their acts, names, sobriquets and they way they presented themselves to meet the fickleness of the show-going public, as well as the insatiable demand for novelty. Furthermore, because some performers fit into multiple categories, and because some categories overlap, there may be an arbitrary feel to the way some performers are listed. We solicit and encourage your input and corrections.

Sources

Drawing from a list of performers compiled at Baraboo by James Taylor in July 2000, the Bernard L. Kobel catalogue, Toole Stott's bibliography, various private archives, most of the standard books, as well as a small cache of back-issues of The New York Clipper and Billboard— the initial listings here are certainly a work in progress. Please feel free to email us with your lists of performers we have left out, or clarifications on names, dates, etc. (Unless otherwise noted all images are from the Doghouse Collection.)

Methodology

Initially we would like to simply list every performer we can find mentioned or found in published and unpublished sources. Our second task is to match photos with names, compile birth and death dates, marriages, siblings/parents/relatives in the business, specific performer associations with particular shows, descriptions of acts performed, family histories, etc. of all the performers listed in our database. Our third line of attack is the writing of articles on the various categories of performance under the novelty and variety banner— offering finally an overview of the entire novelty, variety and sideshow amusement industry— carefully staying well outside the realms of traditional or "legitimate" theatre, and the worlds of film, television and fine arts— except where these intersect with our primary categories.

Structure

If a performer's First and Last Name are known, the performer is listed "Last Name First, First Name Last", i.e. "Durks, William" under "D". If a performer's stage name is known, then performer is listed alphabetically within his category by his stage name, i.e. "Admiral Dot" under "A" rather than "Dot, Admiral" under "D". An effort will also be made to list alternative names, alternative spellings, aliases, alter-egos, variations of stage names, and cross categories for each performer we receive relatively reliable data on. Since much of the information from major published sources (see Bibliography) is secondary and unattributed-- and very often full of conflicts, inconsistencies, errors, misspellings, misidentification, inaccurate dates, etc.— we ultimately make corrections to the information presented here only when we have the primary sources at our disposal.

Attributions

showhistory.com has as one of its several watch-words "correct attribution". This simply means that we attempt to locate where each piece of information we use came from originally. Unless the source of the information is known, we try not to use it. We have made several exceptions here at our start in order to populate our lists of performers— however, eventually every piece of information, every performer we list or present will be cross-referenced to a written, photographic, printed, or "hard-copy" source. We firmly believe that if a little-known or heretofore unknown performer is mentioned or listed on our site, then the place where the information or name has been obtained must be sited. To fail to do so is to invite questions of credibility. Thus you will often see brackets used after a performer's name, like [blk], which indicates either where we originally found that performer listed/named, or where you may find a photograph of him/her/it.