Telling history through families

Historians are using families to tell history. Some examples, of which I have read only the first:

Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). It's not news that long-range business transactions worked better when family ties were involved. The same was true in the fur trade and other trades on the far side of the Mississippi. Among other things that meant that the Chouteaus and the Bents had family connections with their Native American trading partners. Generations of mixed-race people worked together. But their world began to end as land-hungry squatters advanced on the west (loudly insisting that the government protect their often illegal intrusions), eastern Indians were forced westward onto the plains, and scientific racism sought to classify and divide by blood quanta. Although the book feels disorganized, reading it gave me a new outlook and attitude on the whole process (and on its less documented form east of the Mississippi a generation and more earlier).

Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hebrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). According to reviewer Maurice Jackson in the April 2013 American Historical Review, "a superb microhistory and a transnational history of Atlantic migration," focusing on a family beginning with Rosalie, kidnapped and enslaved from Senegal in West Africa and enslaved in Haiti, then to Cuba after Napoleon's 1801 invasion, then to New Orleans, then to Pau, Basses-Pyrenees, France. The story spans several generations, several revolutions, the US Civil War, the Holocaust, and Belgian tobacco merchants -- all in this mixed-race family.

Erika Kuhlman, Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers, and the Remaking of the Nation after the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 2012). According to reviewer Nancy K. Bristow in the June 2013 American Historical Review, "a triumph," bringing together many historical approaches and human voices. After World War I, officialdom in both the US and Germany "celebrated widows as symbols of patriotism and devotion to the nation." They "often served as justification for continued militarism. Widows, though, did not necessary accept this role."



Harold Henderson, "Telling history through families," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Indians had a property system too

McGill University historian Allan Greer gets down to the details of how European property rules took over the New World in an article in the April issue of the American Historical Review. It was not a case in which the Native Americans had no concept of property and the Europeans imposed it, he writes. Both groups had private/family ground where they grew crops, and various common areas that belonged to the larger group. There wasn't anything just lying around in either hemisphere that was free to all or in some kind of state of nature.

One way the European system won out was the practice of letting stock run free. "When settlers proclaimed, in effect, that the Indians' deer, fish, and timber were open to all, colonists included, yet the hogs and cattle roaming these same woods remained [the settlers'] private property, they were indeed attempting a wholesale appropriation."

By the time the settlers got around to actually fencing the Indians out, it was all over. The settlers' free-ranging hogs and cattle had destroyed both the native gardens and wildlife in the area. "Privatization of land was not the main mechanism by which indigenous territory came into the possession of colonizers; by the time that sort of enclosure occurred in many places, dispossession was already an accomplished fact, thinks in large measure to the intrusions of the colonial commons."

Greer cites a book I would like to read: Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York, 2004).


Allan Greer, "Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America," American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (April 2012): 365-386.


Harold Henderson, “The Indians had a property system too,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post.]

Methodology Monday with Oglala Sioux

Is there even such a thing as specializing in "Native American" research as opposed to a specific tribe? This month's discussion article in the NGSQ study groups provokes thought on this point. But mainly it applies standard genealogical reasoning to identifying parents in the largely oral Oglala Sioux culture, which has an elaborate kinship system unfamiliar to other Americans, and which includes name changes during an individual's lifetime. It's by Dawn C. Stricklin: "Namesakes, Name Changes, and Conflicting Evidence: The Search for the Mother of John Little Crow," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 94 (December 2006): 245-58.

Don't expect to get it all on the first reading. Visit your good genealogy library, or pony up for an NGS membership and you can print out a PDF copy.

Methodology Monday: another look at "mug books"

Those old county histories have always been a bit dodgy sources for genealogy -- requiring vigilance at least, and a realization that they left out those who couldn't afford listing -- but there is also good reason not to take their history without several grains of salt.

A new book from the University of Minnesota Press (not seen by me, said to be due out in March or April) goes into this in some detail. In Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, historian Jean M. O'Brien drew on "more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880" whose authors "insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England's original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled."

Indian men and white women in Indiana and Michigan

Two wonderful articles combine genealogical and microhistorical chronicles with deep thoughts about race and intermarriage in the Midwest. They're just out in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, unfortunately available only if you have access to an amazing bookstore, or a library that subscribes to the journal itself or to Project Muse (hat tip to the Legal History blog):

"'They Found Her and Left Her an Indian': Gender, Race, and the Whitening of Young Bear," by Jim J. Buss, historian at Oklahoma City University (volume 29, issue 2&3, page 1). It was a famous story in the 1800s -- Frances Slocum, taken from her Pennsylvania home as a young girl in the 1780s, rediscovered by her brothers some sixty years later, having made a good life as an Indian wife and mother. The story was retold not just because of its inherent fascination, but because it called into question the racist ideas that justified clearing Indians from the Midwest. Buss reviews the retellings and shows how they often describe a mixed-race society in central Indiana in 1840 even though the authors wanted to deny the possibility of any such thing. He's working on a book to be titled The Winning of the West with Words: Clearing the Middle Ground for American Pioneers. Some of the 19th-century versions are recorded at this Rootsweb site -- but keep in mind that a characteristic vice of us genealogists is to take those stories as gospel truth.

"Miengun's Children: Tales from a Mixed-Race Family," by Susan E. Gray of Arizona State University (volume 29, issue 2&3, page 146). Regular readers will recognize her as author of The Yankee West. Working with some data provided by genealogists, she tells a collective biography of the children of a Lakota man (Miengun/Payson Wolfe) and the daughter of missionaries (Mary Jane Smith), and how the children made their way in the world of the late 1800s and early 1900s -- a world that wanted to pigeonhole them either as uncivilized Indians or as civilized white people. These folks aren't as famous as Frances Slocum/Young Bear was, but their struggles in Oklahoma and northern lower Michigan may be closer to our own experience. Gray is working on a book also: Lines Descent: Family Stories from the North Country.

All Things Civil War and Michigan

Ohio has its own publication tying genealogy and the Civil War. Michigan may not match that, but John M. "Jack" Dempsey's Michigan Civil War Blog sure helps. Recently he posted about a forthcoming Civil War extravaganza, "Michigan's Fight for Freedom: The Civil War Era" (PDF), Feb. 27-May 4 at Macomb Community College, with multiple presentations getting down to as much detail as a talk about Company K of the First Michigan Sharpshooters, "the only all Native American company to serve in the war from Michigan."