A family history writer is something very different from a family history researcher even if they are embodied in the same person. A researcher ransacks the vital records to discover the facts. A writer goes beyond those facts to find their meaning.
“History at best has to be literature or it will go to dust,” said historian David McCullogh during his 2003 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.
How does that transformation of fact to literature occur?
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Have you watched a young person’s fingers fly across the keyboard of their computer or contort in seemingly impossible gyrations as they text on their smart phone? The dexterity of the so called “digital natives” is amazing to those of us who were educated in the pre-electronic age. We spent hours in elementary school classrooms trying to master Spenserian Script, the Palmer Method, Getty-Dubay, the D’Nealian Method or some other form of cursive writing.
On the other side of the coin, for the current generation the gently flowing script we all worked so hard to cultivate has become nearly as remote as hieroglyphics or cuneiform.
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What was it like to live in Great Grand Dad’s day? That’s a question any family historian trying to bring his ancestors to life in the pages of a book ought to ask.
Getting beyond the rather cold facts of a relative’s genealogical record requires drawing upon family stories when they are available. But it also means trying to recreate the time and place in which that person lived, their historical context. That’s the realm of the social historian.
The City University of New York has placed the work of its American Social History Project a mouse click away.
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A week from today is National Day of Listening, a new national holiday started by StoryCorps in 2008. On the day after Thanksgiving, StoryCorps asks all Americans to take an hour to record an interview with a loved one…”
It’s an extension of the mission of StoryCorps, an independent non-profit that has recorded over 35,000 interviews conducted by over 70,000 participants since the organization was founded in 2003.
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"There are attics and trunks of letters all over South Carolina, parts and pieces of our collective story," she said. "We're just the custodians of a few threads. It's our challenge to pass it on," said Marty Daniels.
The efforts of Daniels and 11 of her relatives to preserve a piece of their family’s history and “pass it on,” recently reported by the Associated Press, produced quite a detective story. The story concluded when the family announced that it had obtained nearly 200 photographs that Daniels’ great-great grand aunt, Civil War diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut had collected to illustrate her journals of that war years.
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One form of memoir, the ethical will, is designed to provide a statement of the author’s accumulated values, beliefs and life lessons.
Originally described in the Talmud and the Bible, ethical wills have recently recommended by a diverse group of advocates.
All agree with Scott Friedman and Alan Weinstein writing for the American Bar Association who said, “A parent’s insight, knowledge and wisdom are the most important assets they can transfer to a child.”
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The next time somebody asks you why family history is important you might want to share a story that recently appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.
In January, 2011, Ed Lee, was chosen by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors to serve as interim mayor to fill the remaining year of the term of Gavin Newsom who had been elected Lt. Governor. Lee was the first Chinese American to become mayor of a major American city.
A few weeks ago Lee, who had previously said he would not be a candidate, decided to run for mayor in the upcoming election.
What does family history have to do with city politics? Chronicle reporter heather Knight explains, “Shortly after Ed Lee became interim mayor in January, the rumor spread around Chinatown…Lee, the whisperers said at banquets and festivals, was not a Lee at all.”
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Author Bruce Bothwell describes how he revised his father's journals into a narrative form to make his book interesting and entertaining for readers.
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We are always looking for resources to recommend to people seeking to add depth and context to their memoirs and family histories. The National Women’s History Museum site is certainly such a resource. It defines its mission as to “…illuminate the role of women in transforming society…”
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We’re looking forward to attending the Midwest Family History Expo in Overland Park, Kansas, this Friday and Saturday. Family History Expos are great events. We enjoy the opportunity to talk with people who are serious about creating family history books. We will be presenting four classes this weekend:
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A family history writer is something very different from a family history researcher even if they are embodied in the same person. A researcher ransacks the vital records to discover the facts. A writer goes beyond those facts to find their meaning.
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We’re packing for the Loveland, Colorado Family History Expo this Friday and Saturday. We love appearing at conferences like Family History Expos. The people who attend are always fun to meet and anxious to learn. We’ll be teaching three classes at Loveland:
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The Library of Congress has recently launched an online National Jukebox at www.loc.gov/jukebox/ . Created in collaboration with Sony Music Entertainment the Jukebox contains 10,000 rare historic recordings of music and the spoken word produced between 1901 and 1925 now available to the public for the first time digitally. It's an exciting resource for historical and family history researchers.
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This post examines what may be lost as people transition from writing in cursive to writing exclusively on computers and smart phones.
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A fellow member of the Association of Personal Historians recommended consulting Maureen Taylor, whom the Wall Street Journal called “the nation’s foremost historical photo detective.” The Journal’s article describes how Taylor unravels the mysteries contained in old photos. It’s a fascinating process.
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I walked into my hometown branch of the Shasta County Library on Monday afternoon. Near the front desk a colorful sign invited me to Celebrate National Library Week. As it so often happens, I missed the memo. The celebration was last week, April 10-16. But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to join the celebration, no matter how tardy I might be
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Once the family historian moves beyond what direct sources can tell her the Ancestry Insider’s chasm opens. Finding stories and narrative details becomes more problematic. She must rely on indirect sources, written records. These may be obscure and difficult to locate. The other alternative, when the records don’t materialize, or never existed, may involve speculating from the historical context of the ancestor’s time and place. How does the responsible family historian who wants to stick to the facts do that?
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I’m still reflecting on my recent trip to the Oakland Museum, and how we can apply the methods used by these curators of culture in our own learning. In my last post on the subject, I talked about their interactive timeline.
The interactive map below is another example of using the information provided by a large group. How simple – a map, and stickers. In this case, the question is, “Where did your family come from?” Yet there are other questions you might ask, such as where have you traveled to, or where did your ancestors live in the 1600’s – each of which would produce wildly different data. You can do this - anyone can.
The graphic doesn’t have to be a map, either. Like the timeline I discussed earlier, these are just representations of the scope of the question we’re asking. If we want to know about places, maps are good. Time? You get it. The key is the ease with which people can give their answer. That’s what is clever here – a sticker, or a post it note is very user friendly. And the internet has made this kind of data collection even easier.
I first fell in love with the idea of crowdsourcing when Wikipedia appeared ten years ago. It seems the ideal way to tap into the knowledge of the masses. Crowdsourcing is controversial - in this Wikipedia article about crowdsourcing, I just discovered that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales objects to the term. It has a negative connotation of taking advantage of free labor. (If you have a moment, check out the article’s list of terms related to crowdsourcing, including citizen science, collective intelligence, and a new one to me – dotmocracy.
So this most commonly used term, crowdsourcing, is a misnomer. Instead, the admirable model used at the museum would be called mass collaboration, or mass cooperation. That’s what’s happening on Wikipedia, and in different iterations it’s happening everywhere else, too. I always read the user reviews on amazon.com before I buy, and I’m careful to check that the majority rated the book highly. Don’t you? I filter my Yelp! searches so that I only need to consider 4-star restaurants. My favorite use of crowdsourcing (sorry, the term is imprecise, but you know what I mean) is the excellent user reviews on newegg.com, without which I could not navigate the world of technology.
The thing that ties these examples together is the absence of “experts”. It assumes that all of us have useful knowledge to share. The charm of crowdsourcing is that no one can force people to contribute; and yet people do, willingly. We are happy to help, happy to give what knowledge we have, especially when it’s a subject we care about.
The interactive map in the museum is just the tip of the iceberg – a literal, hands-on sign that people are willing to contribute. If you want to frame a question, any question, posting it to an well-chosen internet bulletin board will gather results from masses of distant strangers – and isn’t that something to bolster your faith in humanity?
What was it like to live in Great Grand Dad’s day? That’s a question any family historian trying to bring his ancestors to life in the pages of a book ought to ask.
Getting beyond the rather cold facts of a relative’s genealogical record requires drawing upon family stories when they are available. But it also means trying to recreate the time and place in which that person lived, their historical context. That’s the realm of the social historian.
The City University of New York has placed the work of its American Social History Project a mouse click away. The website is maintained by the University’s Center for Media and Learning. “Informed by the latest scholarship,” promises the Project, “we make the past, and the lives of the working people and ‘ordinary’ Americans who shaped it, vivid and meaningful.” The website “presents history from the perspective of working men and women, pairing a lively narrative with extensive visual and written documentary evidence.”
It’s a wonderful resource for a family historian.
There are a variety of windows into the past. Three I found of particular interest were:
- Who Built America? From the Great War of 1914 to the Dawn of the Atomic Age in 1946 is a multimedia exploration of three of the most tumultuous decades in U.S. history. Spanning two world wars and the Great Depression, this CD-ROM presents a comprehensive and engaging overview of the history of the period along with an extraordinarily rich body of primary sources: dozens of oral interviews, period songs, speeches, radio programs and film clips, hundreds of illustrations, and thousands of pages of primary text documents.
- The Lost Museum: Exploring Antebellum American Life and Culture “a three-dimensional re-creation of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, the most visited cultural attraction in the nineteenth-century United States.”
- The September 11Digital Archive “contains more than 150,000 digital items, including more than 40,000 emails and other electronic communications, more than 40,000 first-hand stories, and more than 15,000 digital images.” (I know, Great Grand Dad wasn’t around then, I just liked the archive.)
The American Social History Project offers several other multimedia resources and much more including podcasts, blogs, and documentary films. Check it out! Not only will it help you add colorful context to your family history book, it’s just fun to surf.
Let us know what you think! Leave a comment.
Are you a mystery fan? I am. I love to watch detectives on the trail of clues, unraveling the past before my eyes.
Old family photos can offer the mystery-lovers among us a chance to become the detective. We’ve all got at least a few of those family photos that are interesting and probably important, but they feature people we simply can’t identify. It’s frustrating, but don’t throw the photos back into a box and bury them back in the garage. Here are some tools to help you discover your mysterious ancestors.
Kimberly Powell on About.com offers 5 Steps for Identifying People in Old Family Photographs. Her suggestions:
- Identify the Type of Photograph – Daguerreotypes were popular from 1839-1870, Cabinet Cards from 1866-1906, and no Polaroid photo could have been taken before 1948 (when the Polaroid camera was invented).
- Who Was the Photographer? – Check the front, back and frame or cover of the photo for the photographer’s name and possibly location. Local city directories, libraries, and historical or genealogical societies can help you track when the photographer was in business.
- Check Out the Scene or Setting – Clues to the time or location may appear when the family is posed in front of the family automobile or home. The Family Chronicles site on Dating Old Photographs suggests that it is often possible to establish the date by carefully comparing with other pictures of known date. For example, note details in the painted canvas background used for a studio shot. The drapes or woodwork in the scene may be clues to the photo’s date.
Visit Family Chronicles Dating Old Photographs to see how to date this photo.
- Focus on Clothing or Hairstyle – The Costume Detective website helps you to analyze costumes, fashion, hats, and jewelry to achieve a date within five years of the date the photo was taken. The Costumer’s Manifesto site offers numerous links for dating old family photographs, using fashion history and styles of photo-mounts. It promises, “These links are provided so you can teach yourself to do this for yourself.”
Visit The Costume Detective to see how to date this photo.
- Match Up the Clues with Your Knowledge of Family History – Once you’ve identified the time and place of the photo, use your knowledge of ancestors to begin trying to identify who is in the picture.
Click here to read Kimberly Powell’s 5 Steps for Identifying People in Old Family Photographs
Click here to visit Family Chronicle’s Dating Old Photographs
Click here to visit the Costume Detective
Click here visit the Costumer’s Manifesto