missing history file

My warm standby server is looking for a history file when booting up.  It is looking for 00000001.history file to be exact.  Since my *live* server doesn’t produce such file, I create an empty 00000001.history file in the archive directory and that seems to satisfy this requirement allowing the standby server to come up in the recovery mode. 

It would be nice to know though how such file is created.  I know that the *live* server creates *.backup file as a result of pg_stop_backup() command and this file is accurately archived on the standby server.  Should I be renaming this file, or is there some other mechanism to tell my standby server what the history file is?

Thanks in advance,

~george