Is Research Really Necessary?

Research is the bane and joy of every historical author. Most of the books in my personal library (which is huge) are research books. That's not counting the three shelves on how to write. I spent years learning the facts needed to make my western novels authentic. When the historical market ground to a halt, particularly for westerns, I tried contemporary. When I went back to westerns, I was appalled to discover I had forgotten much of what I had learned. Is all that work necessary?
I just read a book that really pointed out to me the difference between a book by an author who knows the area, and one that doesn't. I did a ton of research on Wales for a book I wrote a few years ago. The more I learned, the more I realized how much I didn't know. Kemberlee Shortland's book, A Piece of My Heart, is a perfect example of the difference between truly knowing your location and just researching it from a distance. Kem lives in Ireland and her book is full of the slang and dialect that only the Irish truly know. A Piece of my Heart is a great story, but Kem's expertise added a good deal of authenticity and entertainment to the read.
Has a book ever brought you to a complete halt because of an obvious error? It has me numerous times, even reading best-selling authors. I once had a favorite author of western historical romances who made enough research errors I finally stopped buying her books. Simple details, no doubt unimportant to the average reader, but they took me right out of the story and made me doubt everything the author wrote. One I remember was a reference to "tall, stately oak trees" at a Wyoming ranch in the 1800s. There are a lot of oaks in the western U.S. and some might be considered tall by locals. An easterner, however, would likely laugh at that description, the way they laugh at the creeks we call rivers. I guess they'd call our creeks trickles. In Wyoming and Utah, the most common oak is the gambel oak. The illustration for them in the Audubon Society Nature Guides for Western Forests might mislead someone into thinking they're tall, even stately, but they aren't, not compared to the oaks of New England. What you see commonly here are scrub oaks, more bushes than trees. But a writer unfamiliar with the territory might refer to such a guide for research and make such an error.
The mistake that stopped me from buying this author's books appeared in an 1800s western in which the hero referred to his undershorts as BVDs. I hooted at that one. Then to be sure I was right, I did some research. Bradley, Voorhees and Day (BVD) was a New York firm founded in 1876 that manufactured underwear, mostly bustles for women and union suits for men, but their products were not referred to as BVDs until the 1900s. The first public reference to "bee vee dees" was in the silent film, The Big Parade, released in 1925.
Another example is the Utah cedar. Even an author visiting Utah and speaking to locals could make this mistake. The pioneers who first started calling these twisted trees cedars may well have believed that's what they were due to the similarity. But they're actually junipers.
One of my hobbies in the past was studying and collecting wildflowers. I've forgotten a lot of what I used to know, so these days, even I have to refer to books to validate my research. There are plenty of books on birds and plants of every state, some foreign countries, and local areas, such as Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, Wildflowers of the Western Cascades, Birds of the Pacific Northwest Coast, and the Audubon guides that cover everything in the world of nature from spiders to rock crystals. But one must be wary of using the information such books give. Yes, the Utah penstemon is a fairly common wildflower here, but only in certain elevations. What you find growing on the west slope of a hillside may very well be absent on the east side.
Several years ago I was judging books for the RWA Rita Contest. One of the entries was a wonderful story set at the time Yosemite was designated a national park. The author was talented, the writing superb, except for the part where the hero went out hunting and returned with five-prong stag elk slung over his shoulder. It killed me to have to downgrade that excellent book because of that little error, but it really wasn't that little. Male elk are not called stags; they're bulls, and a five-point, which is moderate-sized, (note I said five-point, not 5-prong), would weigh 650 to 700 pounds. Try slinging that over your shoulder and hiking several miles. For the record, for some reason, elk often seem to skip five points and go from three or four straight to six points.
How does one avoid these kinds of errors? By being very, very thorough. Visit the site, if possible, and find someone local to the area who's willing to help. You can write a story set in a locale you've never been to and make it sound authentic. I remember one I read years ago set in New Orleans that sure had me convinced the author had first-hand knowledge. In truth, she'd never been there.

Here's this week's entertainment, another talented young lady doing what seems impossible.