Anytime money is involved, you can bet that someone recorded it somewhere. The donation of land, for instance, would have been recorded in the county or township clerk's office. If Miller purchased the freedom of an enslaved person, this would have been recorded--check the county prothonotary records. Oral history that mentions such events should be treated as a clue to further research, because those types of transactions can usually be found, assuming that the records have survived.

What are more difficult, sometimes impossible, to document, are facts proving whether certain families, homes or subterranean passageways had significance to the Underground Railroad. Because this was a highly illegal operation, and those caught were subject to imprisonment and very high fines, few people wrote down particulars, for fear of it being used against them at some point. One of the best places to find documentation of these places is in court records where fugitives were caught and the case went to trial. Another is newspaper accounts of incidents that occurred in relation to Underground Railroad activity. For example, in Harrisburg, a riot occurred when local African American citizens clashed with police in an attempt to free some captured fugitives. The newspaper reported the names of participants and where the fugitives were reportedly hidden.

The reason that many Underground Railroad researchers are skeptical of many claims is because there has been a proliferation of false claims in the past fifty years, and especially in the last ten years. It seems that every time someone discovers a walled-up room in a basement, or a crawlspace in a house, they immediately leap to the URR conclusion, while in reality many homes in the nineteenth century had below grade cold cellars, or other excavations, or small crawlspaces in the attic that had nothing to do with hiding slaves.

Actually, there were very few people in the north who participated in the UGRR. If you had one lone operator in every other town, that would have been considered a highly developed network. Even the largest towns never had more than a few white citizens who would help. The great majority of people were either indifferent or opposed to helping fugitives. Only in towns with a sizable African American population would you find numerous operatives, and those tended to be African American.

One more point that should be stressed is that property owners seldom hid fugitives in their homes. Outbuildings such as sheds, barns and stables, and natural outdoor hiding places, such as woods, caves and swamps, were the hiding places of choice. This stems from the very real threat of civil action by slaveholders against property owners when they were proven to have hidden slaves in their homes. Keep in mind, if the sheriff discovered slaves in your barn, you could always plead ignorance; most barns did not have locks and the slaves hid there without your knowledge. However it was more difficult to say in your defense that you did not know that slaves were hiding in your cellar or attic.

My point is, maintain a healthy skepticism but KEEP ON SEARCHING for clues, data and particularly, proof. Don't discount oral tradition, but treat it as a clue that you can follow up with research. We ARE finding new data all of the time, and sometimes we hit the jackpot and find one little bit of data that proves an entire old tale. That's the really cool part of being a historian.