"I" and "we" in genealogy writing

This year's Ohio Genealogical Society conference in Cincinnati sparked some good discussions, including one that came out of Ohio Genealogy News editor Sunny McClellan Morton's Friday morning talk. Like many of us, she's trying to encourage new writers to take up the pen or word processor as the case may be.

I admit to being a bit surprised that there was anything to discuss. There are many kinds of good genealogical writing, and the first person can be effectively wielded in most of them.

. . . Except at the top of the pyramid. In the five most scholarly magazines -- NEHGR, NGSQ, NYGBR, TAG, and The Genealogist -- the first person singular or plural is out of bounds, I think reasonably so. The focus there should be on the methods, the records, and the people being researched -- not on the researcher's false trails and travails. Having journals like this is one of many factors that will make genealogy more respectable as an intellectual endeavor and not just a harmless obsession of geezers. Also, once you get the hang of it, leaving yourself out of the picture actually makes it easier to tell one story, without having to shift back and forth from the story of the past to the story of your attempt to reclaim the past. Scholarly accounts deliberately suppress process details because the logic of proof is often very different from the travelogue of discovery.

But this is not the only way to tell these stories, and it is not always even the best way. For one thing, up-and-coming researchers have a natural hunger for accounts of how it went. A research find can look very different in the heat of battle (or more likely in the courthouse basement) than it does in a polished article. And nothing prevents such accounts from being well-written and well-documented.

So, pretty much everywhere else -- in commercial popular magazines, in trade publications (APG Quarterly), and in quality mid-level publications (such as NGS Magazine, Ohio Genealogy News, and many state publications) -- I would expect good editors to be open to the possibility of using first person to tell a solid genealogical story. (I blogged about a couple here; Sunny has been publishing research travelogues under the heading "Genealogy Journeys" in OGN.)

Many people may find it more natural to write in the first person at first, and I'm in favor of any approach that will get more of us writing (as opposed to dying with file cabinets full of uncommunicated discoveries). But writing WELL in the first person is much harder than it looks, for at least three reasons:

(1) All storytelling and all writing is about selection, and when you write about your own experience you have to do all the selection. You know too much. (In an interview-based article, for instance, both the interviewee and the interviewer filter the direct experience, so that the result of the interview has already been winnowed down considerably from the raw experience, making it easier to craft a readable narrative out of it.) It can be hard to see the forest because you know so much about each individual tree -- but if you tell all, the reader will quit rather than figure it out.

(2) First person can tempt us into careless writing. As beginners we often rely too much on adjectives and adverbs, and on general ones at that. First-person may make it harder to realize that we are emoting vaguely, rather than painting a clear picture.

(3) First person poses a special technical problem in genealogy. We then have at least two separate narratives going: our own research chronology, AND the life we are researching. It takes considerable skill and experience to keep both stories on track, separate, and memorable.

These caveats aside, I think first person opens realms of possibility. Some of the most memorable genealogy or family history books I have ever read use it: Leonard Todd's Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave; Martha Hodes's The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century; and (in a somewhat different and slightly less documented vein) Ian Frazier's Family. I found them impossible to put down, and well worth rereading and learning from. It's true, these are world-class writers. Few if any of us can use the first-person tool as well as they do, but that is no reason to banish it altogether from our toolbox.




Harold Henderson, "'I' and 'we' in genealogy writing," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Genealogy and teacher education

Dr. Christine Sleeter, professor emerita at California State University, Monterey Bay, will talk about "Critical Family History, Identity & Historical Memory" September 25 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

It turns out that well-done family history can help new teachers recognize that their own identities and histories are not so simple -- white people have ethnicity too! -- and thus be better able to deal with the diverse classrooms they'll encounter. Sleeter discovered this for herself researching her own family history, while always asking about the context: who else was living there and what the different groups' political, economic and social relationships were at the time. It turns out that good genealogical practice is good historical and teacher-training practice too.

"Our stories are our own stories," she wrote in Educational Studies 43(2):114 [apparently available online only through academic databases], "but they need to be informed." When she started asking questions she learned, for instance, that her probable great-grandparents left east Tennessee abruptly in the early 1880s and settled in Yampa, Colorado, from which the Ute Indians had recently been forced out. In an 1885 census, she writes, "Oliver reported being from Switzerland, and Celesta from Germany. I suspect they left Tennessee to escape Jim Crow, and concocted stories about where they were from to explain the not-quite-Anglo appearance of one or both of them." There's some DNA and census evidence that her family's vague story of Cherokee ancestry may have been a mask for a less acceptable situation -- an ancestor who was the child of a slaveowner and a slave.

I had no idea that family history was being used professionally in this way; it's part of the evolution of genealogy, from telling simple stories that deify historic ancestors, to understanding that often unpleasant facts of violence and racism lurk in all of our pasts.

. . . But in that process we shouldn't lose our methodology: Sleeter assumes too much about census informants. In fact, we don't know who gave any census taker the information that was written down.

P.S. Two genealogy/history books that combine good research and uncomfortable truths are Martha Hodes' The Sea Captain's Wife and Victoria Freeman's Distant Relations.