Methodology
Every timeline event must cite at least one accessible source. An entry’s label communicates what the current evidence can support:
- Sourced fact means the statement is directly supported by the linked material. The confidence label reflects source quality and corroboration.
- Research lead means a source points to a potentially useful fact, but the project has not yet confirmed it in an authoritative or primary record.
The event summary is intentionally narrow. It states only what the cited source supports; context and interpretation should be added only when separately documented.
Confidence labels
- High: an official or institutional source, or agreement between independent references.
- Moderate: a useful secondary source that should eventually be checked against primary material.
- Preliminary: a clue retained to guide research, not presented as established history.
Source register
The initial archive uses only the following web references:
- Penbrook Borough, Local Geohistory Project.
- Penbrook Borough, Living Places.
- Penbrook, Pennsylvania, Wikipedia. Secondary source; retain for orientation and seek a primary record.
- Penbrook profile, RoadsideThoughts. Research lead; the underlying postal record has not yet been verified.
- Citizens Fire Company No. 1, Borough of Penbrook.
- Dauphin County Volunteer Firemen’s Convention Collection, 1956, Historical Society of Dauphin County.
- Our Mission, Penbrook Revitalization.
Local documents
The documents catalog links to the original files through a relative symbolic link at public/source-documents, pointing to ../../../documents/source-material. This keeps one canonical copy of each large file while making it available in local development and in builds that preserve or dereference the link.
Deployment systems vary in how they handle symbolic links. Before publishing, confirm that the production artifact contains the four linked files; if the host strips links, its build configuration should copy that directory into the output rather than creating another maintained source copy.
Scope
The current release establishes the research structure and a small evidence-based starting point. It does not claim to be a complete history of Penbrook. People, places, organizations, documents, and events each have independent data models so the archive can grow without flattening everything into a single chronology.