Nineteenth-century credit reports

You'll never get to eyeball these records unless you can convince the gatekeepers at Hahvahd (Business School, Baker Library) that you're a "scholar," a word they use in opposition to "genealogist."

So you might as well learn what you can from historian Dan Alosso's critical examination of this original source that seems to resemble death certificates in that it contains a mix of primary and secondary information -- or to put it another way, a mix of first-hand knowledge and gossip, with the power to make or to ruin local businesspeople who depended on out-of-town credit.

"Primary Sources"

If you haven't already, check out Dan Alosso's "Reading Primary Sources" posts at The Historical Society -- one on estate inventories, the other on bank notes. If you can get beyond the historian's entrenched and hopelessly imprecise terminology of "primary source," they're quite interesting, especially the one on bank notes. Inventories have tended to fall between the chairs of history and genealogy (some published will compilations purposely omitted them).