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Research dossier · People & Ideas

Harold Matthews

Australian rules footballer

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 29, 2024
Entity authorityQ5661684 ↗
Source-derived summary

Harold Turner Matthews (7 December 1902 – 29 August 1986) was an Australian rules footballer who played with St Kilda in the VFL.

A defender, Matthews was the joint winner of the St Kilda Best Player award in 1926 and won it again the following season. In 1931 he finished equal 9th in the Brownlow Medal count.

Editorial summary

“Harold Matthews” enters the record as australian rules footballer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Harold, Matthews and Australian can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1902, 1986, 1926, 1931—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1902-12-07. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Harold, Matthews and Australian.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Harold Matthews” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Harold, Matthews and Australian provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 29, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q5661684. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1902, 1986, 1926 and 1931.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Harold Matthews”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Harold Matthews primary sources, Harold Matthews archive and Harold research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Harold Matthews”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Harold Matthews” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.