An Expert’s Guide to Historical Research for Lutherie’s Comprehensive Volumes

By Philip J. Kass | From the January/February 2026 issue of Strings

If you were trying to enter the violin world in the 1970s and wanted to learn about the old makers, you had limited options. Unless you knew French or German, you had Karel Jalovec’s two-volume Encyclopedia of Violin Makers and William Henley’s Universal Dictionary of Violin and Bow Makers, both lists of names with putative working periods and stylistic associations. They often used that French and German information, but in most cases, this didn’t matter. Most of their history was, in fact, legend and myth. And then there were the two books by the Hills (William Henry, Arthur Frederick, and Alfred Ebsworth, of W. E. Hill & Sons in London).

The Hills’ books about Stradivari and the Guarneri family were the first serious violin books that attempted to make a rigorous historical and analytical study of the great makers in the manner that the art world had already been practicing for over a century. Art historians were using those tools to analyze and categorize the work of past artists in a way that made dating and identification both realistic and plausible. 

Since a lifetime of museum hopping placed me firmly within the art world, I found the way that things had been done simply unacceptable. The alternative was doing the serious analytical study that would make identification and attribution far more accurate than in the past. This meant historical researches, and since, so far as I could tell, no one else was doing it, that meant it was up to me. My fledgling efforts had been made when I organized an exhibition of early American violins at Penn in 1976, but my first intensive professional efforts started with a project in London in 1979, to study the English bow makers.

Now I should say that, unbeknownst to me, there were others who were making these same connections, confronting these same issues, and have made enormous contributions to our study of great makers. So the world of violins is much better understood now than it was back then, but there is still a long way to go. Fortunately, it’s not really that hard to do, so someone with an interest can pursue this solely out of fascination.

First of all, some intensive history reading is essential. Human existence has followed patterns dictated by local events that over time transformed the world. You must understand this in order to place the information you collect within its proper context. Life is different today because of what happened yesterday, and it will be different tomorrow because of what happens today. This truism will follow the lives of your subjects just as surely as it does your own.

The resources available for historical researches vary from country to country. My work has primarily been in the US, England, France, and Italy. Between FamilySearch.org, the research website of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, and Ancestry.com, much of this is no further than your fingertips online.

In US researches, these include census returns, which are taken every ten years and, at least through the 1940s, are packed with useful details. In more recent times, the Social Security Death Indexes tell you when someone died, in which county and state, and the month benefits ceased being sent. From there, you can find municipal birth, marriage, and death records; municipal trades and phone directories; and newspaper ads, listings, and personal accounts. From those you can fill in the details. 

The past can still, however, be a tricky path to navigate. While researching The American Violin, a volume published in 2016 exploring the development of violin making in America, I found that one Baltimore maker had a namesake, a doctor, with roughly the same lifespan. Same ages, same disappearance from Baltimore records. However, census returns made it clear that they were not the same person: same middle initial, different middle names. To my astonishment, while searching for further accounts of their deaths, a website called FindAGrave.com popped up that included photos of both tombstones! The doctor had indeed died in Baltimore, but the violin maker had moved to Hartford, Connecticut, to join his sister, and had died there several years later. Without the internet, how would we have known?

The French and Italian counterparts to these American resources are civil registries. First introduced in some places after the War of Spanish Succession, they were standardized in the aftermath of the French Revolution and exported to every territory where Napoleon held sway. Often, they went through transformations. Depending on the territory, the Napoleonic system gave way to varying sorts of localized systems, mostly for the purpose of clarifying inheritances and guardianships and for the simple process of head-counting a population. 

After Italian unification in 1861, they were consolidated into a more consistent form that eventually morphed into the Carta di Famiglia. These cards, one for each head of household, would contain date and place of birth, parentage, spouses, births of children, records of movements between houses and towns, death records, and of course identification of profession—in short, an entire life story on a single (or several attached) cards. Many of these resources can be found on the Italian website Antenati, although not the actual Carta di Famiglia. These are mostly kept in the local municipal archives in each Italian town, so long as wars, fires, earthquakes, and other life crises have not destroyed them.

Prior to these sorts of records, especially in Catholic countries, church records are essential. After the Council of Trent in 1564, one of the duties of the parish priest was to record all baptisms, marriages, and burials, and to keep an annual census of parishioners, noting their degree of adherence to religious rules. These records are not the best starting points for a family whose preeminence postdates 1789, but for actions before then, they are essential. 

Not every city kept the annual church census—in Turin, this was the prerogative of the king—but in smaller towns, especially those under Spanish or Austrian rule, they are full of useful information. They can also be particularly difficult to access, as many of these are still in the possession of urban parishes whose priests are often overwhelmed with parochial responsibilities (I recall one visit in Turin where the priest had to keep running off for prenuptial meetings with couples whose marriages he would be officiating that weekend). However, a growing number have transferred the ones not pertaining to those still alive to central archives, with varying degrees of accessibility.

Another useful tool for filling out the lives of historical violin and bow makers: legal documents. In Italy and France, these are generally notary acts, in which an individual or family would record the important actions that would affect the family and their finances in future times. These included property transactions, dowry agreements, last wills and testaments, estate inventories, and such. In some locales, they have some degree of indexing; in Cremona, alas, they do not, so if you seek a legal action of Andrea Guarneri, you must check the notary records of every notary who worked in Cremona during his lifetime. And even then, not every notary’s records still exist. In New York City, they have made a computerized and searchable database that includes every name that has appeared in the various courts with jurisdiction over New York County, telling you where those records can be found (often enough, at the municipal archives that maintains this database). Of course, New York City is more than just Manhattan, but they have done something similar in Queens and Brooklyn, which maintain their own municipal archives as well.

So now that I’ve loaded you with resources and leads, I must give you a few caveats. I maintain at all times a healthy skepticism for anything I’ve heard or read that is not pertinent to the documents I’m examining. It is part of human nature to take the stories we’ve heard and then try to find their confirmation. In the violin world, where old stories are mostly fiction, this can lead to catastrophe. Far too many who do this sort of work end up seeking to prove the story, not the facts. So I start by collecting all of the facts I can from those earlier times, placing them in order, and reading the story that they tell. This will give one the truth far more readily than old legends.

And the point of all this? For me, it’s expertise. A maker whose life turns out to have been much later than expected could not possibly have influenced the ones who preceded him. Far more likely that he will be influenced, and will influence, those within his immediate circle. Shared stylistic touches, such as tool usage, materials, common localized varnish ingredients, and such will put you in the right place and the right time for an attribution. The historical researches simply put the proper framework around their actions.