There are many considerations in writing history.
One must know what one is writing about.
One interviews witnesses or those who have known them.
One records their testimony at first or second or third hand.
One reads secondary and primary sources,
one studies letters, newspaper clippings, manuscripts,
inscriptions on gravestones and old buildings.
Best, and most reliable of all,
one testifies to ones own observations,
one reports what he has heard and seen,
for that is most reliable.

The facts of the history books
don't really matter
one way or the other.
They make no difference in our lives.
Even the question of whether the world was created in six days
or in six billion years is of no practical consequence.

One model of the writing of history
is the (anglo-american) judicial process,
for it is here that the facts of the past,
that history becomes of real consequence.

In a court of law, history is constructed
from the testimony of witnesses,
and a person is permitted to testify
not to what he has been told,
not to what he has read,
but only to what he has perceived with his own senses
and what has been vivid in his own consciousness.

Logically, therefore, ones own testimony is most compelling.
In a court of law one is permitted to testify only to
what he himself has seen and heard. The reports of others,
at second or third hand, are suspect. When one relies on
documents, the authenticity, reliability and accuracy of the
document must be called into question. A photograph becomes an
extension of ones visual field. A chronicle, an extension of
ones memory; but documents and photographs, exhibits must
be interpreted here and now, in terms of what they mean to the
witness who studies them.

Curiously, in the formal study of history, 
this process is reversed.
Ones own observations are discounted.
Even the most obvious experiences
require to be seen in print, in the newspaper,
or on the television screen;
seem real only to the extent that they
are echoed in the newspaper headlines.