FamilyHistoryFiles.com - Notes on Genealogy and History

"That is most fascinating, Cogsworth. What larger sets of questions are you addressing?"

"Why, the question of changing chair-counts, of course -- a project fortuitously made possible, I might add, by the abundance of census data indicating the number of chairs per household. The data make it eminently possible to count chairs, but remarkably no one has ever done so before! As you are no doubt aware, my research has catapulted me into becoming the world's leading authority on 17th century European chair-counts -- especially after publication of my monograph, The Chairs of Languedoc -- which is quite an honor for such a humble historian. But alas, so many chairs, and so little time!"

"Indeed, Professor Cogsworth, indeed."

(Chair illustration: www.designboom.com)

Many academic historians tend to dismiss genealogy as a kind of chair-counting antiquarianism – compilations of raw data, lists of names and dates, pedigree charts, and the like, all for their own sake, without any overarching framework or larger set of questions guiding the inquiry. Mindless labor, like ants do, or ditch-diggers or factory workers (since most academic historians haven't a clue about digging ditches or working in a factory, they tend to see these tasks, wrongly, as mindless and unskilled).

In this crowd, genealogy is definitely not hip.

On the other hand -- and this is the funny thing -- genealogy comprises the one branch of practical historical inquiry that captures the imaginations of millions of ordinary people. If you walk through the doors of just about any local, county, or state historical society in the nation, you will be entering a veritable beehive of activity – people scurrying about, sifting carefully through piles of documents at the reading tables, sitting stock erect at the microfilm readers for hours on end, their eyes glued to the screens. (Photo: www.si.edu)

Historians know this, of course, but tend to regard it as an inconvenience because the genealogists always get the best chairs.

Historians ought to know better. Those genealogists are not looking for data. They are looking for a connection.

They are not engaged in antiquarianism. They are on a journey of discovery.

What is genealogy? A path into the past that inevitably leads into fog and mist. A quest to know as much as one can know about one's ancestors. An everyday practice. Something you do, like biking or gardening. Digging for information. Being creative in how you dig, and in how you interpret what you've unearthed. Infusing meaning into the past. Connecting yourself to your family's past, to family members who came before you, on whose existence your existence depends.

The enormous popularity of genealogy and family history in the modern era testifies to its power as a path, as a practice, as a way for human beings to create meaning in their own lives. It also offers a vivid reminder of the importance of ancestor veneration throughout world history. Before the emergence of world religions – Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam – the major form of communal spiritual activity in virtually every corner of the globe was comprised of various forms of ancestor veneration or ancestor worship. China. Southeast Asia. Africa. Europe. South America. North America. Just about everywhere. Ancestor worship that later synthesized with world religions.

Among the Inca of the Peruvian Andes, for instance, ancestors were honored by mummifying their corpses, dressing them in their finest garb, and bringing them out on sacred ritual occasions. The mummies were treated with great respect and deference, offered food and drink, consulted on the pressing issues of the day, sometimes even married to the living. The Spanish tried hard to stamp out such practices as "idolatry," but never succeeded. (16th century drawing depicting the transport of the mummy of Inca Huayna Capac to Cuzco, Peru, by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala; www.umn.edu)

Distinctive traditions of ancestor veneration emerged among the Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples from very early on. The Spanish tried to stamp it out there, too, and failed. (Mexico's Day of the Dead is one modern survival, as is Halloween.) African, Asian, and European religious traditions exhibited endless variation on this general theme of ancestor worship.

Try identifying an ancient culture in which paying homage to ancestors was unimportant. You will have a hard time doing it, because there weren't any.

I tend to think of genealogy as a transmuted, modern form of ancestor veneration -- especially in the United States, a quintessentially modern culture created by an amalgam of immigrants, some voluntary, some not, who left the land of their ancestors, obscured their ancestry, and left subsequent generations scratching their heads and wondering, "where did I come from anyway?" (Photo from the personal collection of web-pal C.T.M.)

In some ways websites, data searches, and written narratives have displaced oral storytelling, family and household rituals, and communal celebrations in the honor of one's ancestors, but both serve the same basic end. It is the connection to the past that is at stake -- and served.

Thus, even in the United States, genealogy is not a throwback to the past, a relic of a bygone era. It is more the stubborn survival of the innate human need to understand and connect with the past, to know one's roots as a human being on planet Earth.

Like a dope, I used to think of genealogy as a kind of antiquarianism, like counting chairs. Until I started actually doing it. At a certain point a new mental landscape opened up. Flocks of puzzles suddenly emerged. Who were these people? Where did they come from? What were they like? What did they do in their lives? Why did they do what they did?

With genealogy, as with any form of rational humanistic inquiry, every time a specific question is resolved a whole new cluster of questions appears. "Who was my grandfather's mother?" After painstaking research you finally discover her name. Great! Is the question answered? Yes! Does this information put an end to the questions? No! Who was this person, your grandfather's mother? Where did she some from? What was she like? What did she do? Who were her parents? And so on. The answers breed questions, like chickens and eggs.

♣

THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY, it seems fair to say, is the art and science of asking and answering questions about the past. Historians employ many specific techniques and methods to help them formulate and answer their questions in rigorous and methodical ways. Note the words here: asking questions; formulating questions. Historians put special emphasis not just on answering questions, but on the skills involved in asking good, smart, relevant questions.

Of the thousands of historians who've written on these topics, none have done so more beautifully or crisply than the French historian Marc Bloch (1886-1944), author of a slim but powerful book called The Historian's Craft. In the 1920s and 1930s, Marc Bloch was a towering figure among European historians, the author of numerous pioneering works on medieval history. Then came World War II. Professor Bloch was outspoken in his opposition to fascism, and so when the Nazis marched into France, he joined the Resistance and went into hiding. He had no access to any of his books or manuscripts. No libraries, no archives, no reference materials. Only his memory. And from that memory he created a marvelously succinct and elegant statement on the essential nature of the practice of the historian's craft. (Photo of Marc Bloch, www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FRbloch.htm)

Before completing his manuscript, Marc Bloch was discovered by the Nazis. He was imprisoned, tortured, and, soon after the Allies landed in Normandy, executed.

Sometimes I find it helpful to return to Marc Bloch's little book. It helps to remind me what I'm up to, what the rules of the guild are, what the whole point is.

Professor Bloch also spends a fair amount of time talking about what historians call context. Historians love context. Context is a really big deal among historians. I mean, really big. Context can be thought of as the social field, the social-political-economic-cultural universe in which human beings dwell. Very much like the story of Marc Bloch himself. How can you understand his book without understanding the context in which he wrote it?

As historians see it, if you ain't got context, you got nothin'.

As a relative newcomer to the discipline of genealogy, one thing that strikes me in the work of many genealogists is a tendency to ignore or downplay historical context. People often tend to see and understand their ancestors in isolation from broader social and historical trends, without reference to community, social institutions, local politics, changing economic conditions, religious traditions, or other wider social realities that comprise historical context. And that's too bad, because it's fairly simple to remedy, and by my way of thinking crucial to understanding one's ancestors.

For example, let's say your ancestor was born into a steel working family near Pittsburgh in the year 1874. Great! Well, not exactly. Because the year 1873 saw a huge financial panic that sent the national economy into a tailspin and threw hundreds of thousands of people out of work, especially in major industries like steel. How did these larger trends affect your ancestor's childhood? Profoundly, probably. Or, let's say your ancestor was working in the coal mines of West Virginia in the 1890s. Can you really understand their life if you ignore the history of labor organizing among West Virginia coal miners during these years? Not really.

(Illustration: www.thehistorybox.com)

Understanding the social and historical contexts in which your ancestor dwelt is essential to understanding your ancestor. Insistence on paying close attention to time, place, process, story, and context: these seem the main things that historians bring to the genealogists' table.

♣

WHY DO PEOPLE FEEL this innate desire to know and understand their ancestors? Who knows? Probably for the same reason they feel a need to connect to each other.

The plain fact is that people do feel and experience a powerful inner impulse to know and connect with their ancestors. I've come to think of genealogy as the wedding of rigorous historical research to the innate human desire to know and understand one's roots, and – in the absence of feasts and dances and other traditional rituals – as the modern world's way of honoring one's ancestors. It is a fundamentally human thing to do. Its essential nature is fairly simple, its everyday practice wonderfully complex. And engrossingly fun, with puzzle piled atop puzzle in a never-ending chain.

Genealogy feels like less a discipline than a journey, less a product than a process. It feels like a very creative act, a humbling act, a path that leads toward enriched understanding – of one's ancestors and of oneself. Science and art, it touches on every sphere of the human experience and the deep recesses of the human soul.

Maybe that's what makes it such tremendous fun.

"Genealogy is antiquarianism." What a dope.

MJS 06/06

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