As researchers in the kingdom of the dead, we assemble our own  ‘cabinet of curiosities’, the objects imbued with multiple meanings, which act as clues and create a pathway through the thicket of the past. Sometimes these objects or ephemera resolve research dilemmas, provide some answers to research questions, that urgently thrum in the ear. But these objects can also steer us off course, to go down the ‘sidetracks’ that biographer Richard Holmes wrote of, so that instead of taking a short dash to clarity, we end up down a side alley. Yet sometimes the side alley becomes the main event. For the book, I handled hundreds of such objects, pored over scores of out of print books, journals, documents, lists, some dry in content, others heart wringing in their directness, such as the little scrap of paper in the Hanna Sheehy Skeffington archives, attached to a donation, ‘To help against Fascism ’9/-6.’ Of course, we must be wary of investing these objects with too much freighted meaning or inclining towards whimsy in interpreting their significance. Yet the persons concerned, the owners of the objects, the writers of the letters, put down, in some vain hope  for posterity, observation  or testimony, to be heard or read, to remind future generations of the tangled web of sources, providing the skeins that might be woven into the tapestry of history, to be interpreted or ignored as the case may be.