How others see us

There are people who hate genealogy -- often because it dealt them a nasty surprise. And there are rather more people who are just puzzled by it. William Maxwell, the late great New Yorker writer and editor, wrote a whole book of stories and memories about his family (Ancestors) in the early 1970s, but he was never one of us.

Carefully placing his own feelings at several removes, early in the book he recalled having dinner with an older cousin who was the family genealogist (and who later died relatively young). William was shy and perhaps a bit intimidated. He reflected later,

“I wish I had somehow given him a chance to say what it was that he hoped to gain for himself as he went about collecting facts having to do with births, deaths, and marriages of several generations of self-respecting, not very well-educated, for the most part devout men and women nobody has ever heard of.” (17)

It's a good question -- in a way a very "New York" question even though Maxwell lived his early life in Lincoln, Logan County, Illinois -- and one that deserves our consideration as we go about our work.

Organizing Your Article: One Resource

One frequent topic of discussion (at least when I was around) in the Salt Lake City hallways and restaurants around last week's Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy was "How do I organize my article?" -- whether it's about people or best practices or hard-core genealogy.

Now, we weren't talking about numbering systems here, but about how we tell the story that precedes the genealogical summary and any needed proof arguments. How do we entice the reader? (Even expert professionals would rather be enticed than have to plod.) How do we make it as easy as possible for them to get into the story before we arrive at the technicalities and the begats?

In journalistic parlance this storytelling is more like feature writing than hard news, so we can't really look to most journalism for guidance. And in fact every story is different, and each individual story can be told in many different ways. Some leads are more engaging than others, some conclusions leave you ringing like gong.

There is no general answer on how to do it. But fortunately one of the great nonfiction writers of the last half-century, John McPhee of the New Yorker, has just published an article in said magazine describing his own struggles to organize narrative articles far more complex than any we are likely to attempt as genealogists. (It's paywalled so check it out in any good library or bookstore.) His frank and detailed account of his struggles may spark some ideas or inspire some experiments. And if you haven't read any of his books or articles -- that read so fluently and yet took so much angst to create -- you have many more pleasant surprises ahead as well.


John McPhee, "The Writing Life: Structure,” The New Yorker, January 14, 2013, p. 46 


Harold Henderson, "Organizing Your Article: One Resource," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 22 January 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Mything the Point of the Past

Louis Menand of Harvard corrects a bit of TV-journalism mythmaking in the New Yorker and reflects:

People in any profession like to create an imaginary past, populated by the Ones Who Came Before. Sometimes, we figure these people to be narrow-minded fools and feel motivated to demonstrate our own superior tolerance and sophistication. More honorably, if not necessarily more accurately, we imagine our predecessors as nobler and braver than our small and anxious selves -- as men and women who stood up for principle . . . 

I have seen this happen in some literature in the fields of urban planning and education. I reckon this commentary could apply to genealogy as well, and often to our use of history in general, not just the history of a profession.

Was some part of our past a Golden Age? Or an Age of Dunces and Midgets? Any history that fits either plot may make a riveting story, but it has probably (at best) omitted a lot of interesting information. Like our own lives, the real past is usually more mixed and confusing than makes us comfortable.



Louis Menand, "Seeing It Now: Walter Cronkite and the legend of CBS News," The New Yorker, 9 & 16 July 2012, 88-94.


Harold Henderson, "Mything the Point of the Past," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Chicago, Edinburgh, and Gopnik

In case you haven't noticed, even a short piece by Adam Gopnik is roughly equal in intellectual content and stimulation to a semester's undergraduate college course. His review of a new biography of Adam Smith in the 18 October New Yorker is good on many levels, but as someone with family roots deep in both cities I especially enjoyed this:

Edinburgh [in the 1700s] was commonly called the Athens of Britain, though it really was more like an eighteenth-century Chicago. It had a slightly wounded, slightly imperious sense of secondness -- to London, in this case -- and was belligerently proud of being the place where thinking and teaching went on with less pretension and more common sense than elsewhere. Above all, Edinburgh's intellectual life, like Chicago's, was built around a distinctly city university, intertwined with the commercial life and the civic life of a merchant capital, rather than set off in a country town with country values.

There's a double twist here that he doesn't get to, since Chicago's university bears a certain responsibility for today's widespread misunderstanding of Adam Smith.

Fiction goes where fact fears to tread

If your life left no records, not even the best genealogist could tell your story. But Annie Proulx can imagine it (not available at the New Yorker's web site -- the May 5 issue, at good libraries everywhere, if you've got the stomach).