Source and provenance

Pick the source closest to the original event and collapse copies of the same origin into one voice.

Word reaches you through the family telephone game: your cousin is furious with you about something you said at the wedding. You heard it from your mother, who heard it from your aunt, who heard it from the cousin's husband. You're drafting an apology text based on a story that has passed through three retellings, each adding its own spin.

Source and provenance is the move of picking the source closest to the original event and collapsing copies of the same origin into one voice. The cue is noticing your evidence arrived through a chain, or that several "independent" accounts all trace back to one person. The operation: map where each version came from, notice that mother, aunt, and husband are all echoes of a single origin, not three confirmations, then go as close to the source as you can, here a direct call to the cousin. Weigh what you learn by the teller's closeness, competence, and stake in the telling. What changes is that three alarming secondhand accounts shrink to one firsthand conversation, which often tells a different story. Skip the trace when the copy is verifiably faithful, like a forwarded email you can read in the original.