It's almost 2014, and the digital age is still a ways off

Harvard historian Robert Darnton in the New York Review of Books, [$] reviewing Arlette Farge's 1989 book The Allure of the Archives, says there may be 129,864,880 different books. ( Google has probably scanned 30 million.) But books aren't the half of it:

The French Archives Nationales contain 252 miles of documents, measured according to shelves loaded with boxes full of manuscripts, and they do not include material related to defense, foreign affairs, and overseas territories. France's one hundred provincial archives contain far more -- about 1,753 miles. Still more can be found in municipal archives, various university archives, and private collections. Most of it has never been read, much less scanned.

Photo credit: Ben Schumin's photostream, shelves at Archives II, http://www.flickr.com/photos/schuminweb/10159531696 per Creative Commons

Harold Henderson, "It's almost 2014, and the digital age is still a ways off," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

For the historical context file

Maya Jasanoff in the New York Review of Books, reviewing Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom:

. . . it takes some effort to recall the flexibility of borders in generations past. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase [1803], what we think of as the deep South was really the Far West. At time of the Monroe doctrine [1825], Texas was part of Mexico, and Oregon jointly administered by Britain. At the time of the Gold Rush [1849], the fastest way to get to California involved going south to Central America, crossing the isthmus, and sailing up the Pacific coast. What all this meant was that, if you looked at the world from New Orleans or Natchez, you didn't necessarily see the future of your country in the West.

Nathaniel Philbrick on teenagers 200 years ago:

Today it is difficult to appreciate the level of patriotism commonly felt by those of Wilkes's generation [born 1798], many of whose fathers were fighting in the War of 1812 and whose grandfathers had fought in the Revolution.

Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 7.

Maya Jasonoff, "Our Steamboat Imperialism," New York Review of Books vol. 60 no. 15 (10 October 2013), 47.

Harold Henderson, "For the historical context file," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 September 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

History, History Everywhere

The context folder overflows:

* "Micro-history at its best" is EH.net reviewer Christina Lubinski's take on Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century. Author Andrew Popp drew on some 200 John Shaw family letters for an up-close-and-personal account of English international hardware wholesaler of the early 1800s.


* "What has changed [in the last 200 years] and what hasn't?" asks historian/blogger Dan Allosso over at The Historical Society as he wraps up his book, An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy. Part of his answer is the same as my mom (and I) would have given: "Day to day life is so much easier now, that it’s hard for readers to appreciate the sheer work that went into staying alive from year to year in the early 19th century." When Civil War pension papers discuss whether a veteran could do "a full day's work," they're talking about an amount of physical labor that few if any of us could perform.


* In the New York Review of Books, Fred Anderson reviews Bernard Bailyn's The Barbarous Years, an unsparing portrait of the first 75 years of European settlement of eastern North America:

Here the years from 1600 to 1675 appear as an American nightmare of savagery, suffering, and squalor. European colonists, seeking to establish order, created "confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and to recapture lost worlds, in the process tearing apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded."

Whatever the issues with this viewpoint, it's at the very least a necessary corrective to the conventional pieties of old-style genealogy. (My 8-great grandfather got his land in colonial Connecticut by participating in the 1637 expedition that burned to death hundreds of Pequot women and children in their village.) I'm ordering this one now.




Andrew Popp, Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012).

 Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (New York: Knopf, 2013).




Harold Henderson, "History, History Everywhere," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 March 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

False Memories

The highly readable neurologist Oliver (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) Sacks takes his own memories for a subject in a recent New York Review of Books article. He published a vivid personal memory of the London Blitz, and had to take it back when his older brother told him he wasn't there, and showed that his knowledge of it came from a vivid letter written by another brother who was. Yet Sacks's memory of the bomb he never saw felt just as vivid and personal and saturated with detail as his memory of an earlier one that he had witnessed.

Personal knowledge is not necessarily knowledge. Evolution just hasn't equipped us to be cameras who capture an image and retain it intact. That's why family historians are advised to write things down soon after they happen -- put that potentially mutable memory into a fixed form. Your great-grandmother's memory of a 1920 wedding is more valuable in the form of a letter written the day after than in the form of  a beautiful memory recalled 80 years later. Of course the beautiful memory is better than nothing, but it's not necessarily accurate even if she's sure it is. Sacks had absolutely no doubt of his. (I wrote about my own example of a collective family false memory here.)



Oliver Sacks, "Speak, Memory," New York Review of Books, vol. 60, no. 3 (21 February 2013):19-21.


Harold Henderson, "False Memories," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 8 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Always Room for More Black Sheep

The current New York Review of Books includes a nice review of what sounds like a good readable background book if your research takes you repeatedly back into the Gilded Age (say 1870-1900). It's called A Disposition to Be Rich, and follows the life of the author's great-grandfather Ferdinand Ward (1851-1925), who was the Bernie Madoff of his day and then some.

Ward grew up in Geneseo, New York, county seat of Livingston County, and it is suggested that his career of compulsive fraud may have been a reaction against the omnipresent piety of the Ward family household and the Burned-Over District in general. The side issue that interests me is that such towns often emphasize local history in their school curricula, but one Geneseo native I know never heard of the man. (It's not as though the town is deluged in celebrity.)

So the genealogical moral may be that, wherever we're working, we may well have plenty of local "black sheep" to rediscover. Then again, if they have been discovered (and are of an "acceptable" type?), they may be fantastically overexposed, like Belle Gunness of La Porte, Indiana.



Geoffrey C. Ward, A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States (New York: Knopf, 2012).


 Christopher Benfey, "A Magnificant and Audacious Swindle," New York Review of Books, vol. 59, no. 19 (6 December 2012):58, 60.


Harold Henderson, "Always Room for More Black Sheep," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]