Two kinds of knowledge
A secondary history tells you what happened, in an order, with a judgement. That is necessary. It is also the voice most likely to leak into the novel as lecture: causes, consequences, the significance of the year. Your characters do not live in the significance. They live on the day, often wrong about what the day will mean.
A primary source is a person speaking without knowing how the chapter ends. A letter worries about a fever that will turn out to be nothing, and ignores a political fact that will wreck the family. That mismatch — their attention versus history’s — is the texture of lived time. Fiction needs it more than it needs another overview.
What to read first
Start with whatever a person in your household might have touched. Letters, diaries, account books, recipes, court depositions, wills, newspapers, sermons, advice manuals, songs, the minutes of a petty session. These documents argue, boast, omit and complain. They give you syntax as well as facts: what was worth a paragraph, what was worth a line, what was unspeakable.
Read them for attention, not only for information. What do they describe at length? What do they assume you know? A diary that spends a page on a pig and a clause on a battle is telling you the scale of a life. Steal the scale. Do not steal the sentence wholesale and call it voice.
People before maps
Maps, timelines and organisational charts are calming, and they are secondary even when they are accurate. They show the territory from above, after the fact. A novel is at eye level. Who could a woman visit unaccompanied? Which street was a slight to live on? What did a servant hear through a door? Those answers are in testimony and correspondence more often than in an atlas.
When you do use a survey history, use it as a frame around the documents, not instead of them. Read the chapter so you know which week mattered, then go to a newspaper from that week and watch the week not know it yet. The gap between the two is where scenes live.
How to take the note
Copy short phrases that you could not have invented — a price, an insult, a remedy, a turn of blame — and mark them as not-for-pasting. Beside each, write the fictional question it answers: what does this household fear, what can they afford, what will they lie about in court? A note without a question is a fact waiting to be dumped.
You will not have equal sources for every life. Enslaved people, the poor, most women, most children, leave thinner paper trails. Do not pretend a gentleman’s diary is everyone’s interior. Read around the silence: court cases where they were spoken about, parish accounts, punishment books, the things the literate recorded because they were angry or afraid. Absence of a diary is not permission to write them as modern tourists.
Try this
Before you read another overview, read one primary document from your decade and write half a page about what the writer is wrong about, anxious about, or bored by. That half page is closer to a scene than the overview will ever be.