I'm editing the book of a distant cousin and I have to add an awful lot of footnotes to explain who the people he mentions are.
There's one paragraph where he drops so many names that it generated a page and a half of footnotes.
I have a few mysteries that I needed to solve with detective skills; for example, at one point he writes about a noble lady who was the model of a sculptor (scandalous!!!) and so he only gives her initial and vaguely describes the completed statue. I had to check all the works of the sculptor and check which noble lady visited him when the statue was being created.
I think I've found statue and lady, but I'll have to check the sculptor's correspondence to make sure.
You just have to have an interest in genealogy to know that the lives of women were seldom recorded properly... which takes me to last night's footnote. I found a mention of a young woman (by chance, she was linked to the same sculptor who had the noble lady model) and a specialist of that sculptor had a mini biography about her in his book. Splendid! But when was she born and when did she die? Not a word - and that bugged me beyond words because it's unfair. So I put on my Sherlock cap and got to work, but it was bumpy...
Letters mentioned the age people thought she had, then I found her marriage briefly mentioned in archives (the registers burnt and we only have reconstituted data) and I knew she had at least one son because there are descendants.
I located the birth certificate of her son, which made me go looking for his marriage certificate. Once I found it, after checking all 20 districts of Paris over two decades, I knew that she was dead by the time he got married. Then, I checked three decades and I didn't find her, or her husband who was also dead by the time their son got married. I checked the town where the son was living - no luck.
I was ready to type that she was lost in History when I thought (because I've had the case in my family), 'What if she was registered with her birth name instead of her married name - as she should have?'. I checked the decade her son was born in the same district he was born and... bingo! There she was.
The age she was given in her death certificate wasn't consistent with the possible years of birth mentioned in the letters and I ended up with four possible years. The death certificate stated where she was born, so I went to check their registers and I finally found when she was born.
That took me about nine hours. Because I'm stubborn as hell and I didn't want her to be one of those "lost in History" women.
I have a lot more respect for footnotes now (some require a few minutes of work, but others send the historian on a quest that can take an awful lot of time).
