This is all pretty comical. TEPaul seems to be confused between access, on the one hand, and quality research and analysis, on the other. As has always been the case, his forte is the former. And while we keep hearing about these "administrative records" I doubt there is anything more to them that what Weeks put in the book:
'At a meeting of the Executive Committee March 1894 it was decided to build a golflinks on the Myopia grounds.'
TEPaul reads this as meaning that the course was staked out in March 1994, but obvously that is not a foregone conclusion. As for the rest of the Weeks description, it sure reads like storytelling to me. These club histories are after all vanity pieces -- a celebration of oneself -- so it would be surprising if there wasn't some poetic license added here or there for the sake of making a more compelling story out of it. I don't doubt that in March 1894 it was decided to build a golflinks on the Myopia roungs. One can assume the source of that information was the "administrative records" but I cannot imagine the rest of the description would be the type of thing that would be contained within the administrative record. In fact, TEPaul has all but admitted that the rest of the Weeks' story is not traceable to the administrative record.
In short, the conclusion that TEPaul draws does not appear to be based on any actual source material other than the above snippet, apparently from an administrative record, via Weeks' book. But the snippet on its face is entirely consistent with the THREE reports that Campbell laid out the course. Myopia decided to build a course in March 1894. Willie Campbell arrived on the scene soon after and laid out the course between his arrival and when the course was ready for play in June, 1894.
Hardly worth arguing about, given that there is nothing in the FACTUAL record that contradicts the three accounts of Campbell designing the course! At least nothing that has been brought forward here, and that is all any of us can go on.
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Phillip, you have a strange understanding of what is hearsay and what isn't. Let me put it this way . . . unless you have a time machine where you can bring Tillinghast in so we can question him under oath, then his words are hearsay as well. While some hearsay might be considered more reliable than others, at the very least if a scholar is to be taken seriously then his peers must have access the source material so they decide for themselves whether or not the documents are reliable and whether or not the analysis makes sense. So with your Tillinghast example, if we doubt you we can read Tillinghast's writings ourselves and decide for ourselves. If you relied solely on super-secret information that no one else could see, then you might find that others did not take your work seriously.
As for your reliance on unproduced medical records in your book, if your conclusions from these records were controversial or disputed then another scholar would and should demand to examine them for himself. If you refused to allow the scholar to at least review them, then you ought to expect that the scholar would not accept your findings as sound, and others shouldn't either. This would be especially so if ALL of your source material was unavailable for verification, or if you had a long history of mistakes (innocent or not) when presenting source material.
In short Phillip, your research and analysis is in no way comparable to what TEPaul is trying to pull here. He isn't even telling us what the supposed "adminsitrative records" say. He is insisting that the supposed records prove that his version of the story is correct but won't even let us decide that four ourselves. He is demanding that we take his word for the ultimate question at issue! That is not historical research and analysis.