Genealogy: At the Intersection of History and Memory

Not long ago at a meeting of northwest Indiana County Genealogists the conversation turned to those people who insist that their old family story must be true, no matter how conclusive the evidence against it. I thought at the time, "Well, some folks just are knuckleheads."

But maybe there's more going on than that. It's the difference between memory (personal and collective remembrance) and history (what can be rethought and documented publicly).

People get into genealogy because they want to preserve and extend their family memories. But genealogy is not scrapbooking, it's history. It deals with what actually happened. Often genealogists encounter facts that show their cherished memories were false. Some can deal with that, others can't.

There's a nice discussion of memory and history -- so often joined, so often at odds -- in the book Thinking the Twentieth Century, pages 275-78, a conversation between two 20th-century historians. But since this is a genealogy blog, I'll substitute a personal example of how the two can collide:

In the mid-1950s our family was driving through downtown Peoria, and one of my young sisters for the first time saw Catholic nuns in their traditional black-and-white habits. In great excitement, she yelled through the open window, "MOMMY, LOOK! WITCHES! REAL LIVE WITCHES!" My mother was mortified; we drove away; and the episode entered the family memory. For years afterward in retrospect we attributed the yell to Mischievous Middle Sister. That was our memory, confirmed and reconfirmed with every repetition.

But it was false. Decades later we were sorting through the near-daily postcards our mother had sent to her mother in those days -- just about the length and tenor of a quick email or Facebook post would be today. One of them told the story of that day, except that, contrary to our memory, it had been Sweet Quiet Sister who had yelled those words that day.

Genealogy stands or falls on our ability to recognize that a contemporary earwitness account (history, from a document) trumps years or generations of false repetitious memory.



Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 2012).


Harold Henderson, "Genealogy: At the Intersection of History and Memory," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.

Is it history or is it all clean and shiny?

Tony Judt is writing here about England, but I'm pretty sure we can all recognize parts of our own local histories and genealogies in the US:

In England's West Midland potteries district, tourists and local schoolchildren were encouraged to learn how Josiah Wedgwood, the eighteenth-century ceramics manufacturer, fashioned his famous wares. But they would search in vain for evidence of how the pottery workers lived or why the region was called the Black Country ([In his book The Road to Wigan Pier, George] Orwell described how even the snow turned black from the belching smoke of a hundred chimneys.) . . .

Industry, poverty, and class conflict have been officially forgotten and paved over. Deep social contrasts are denied or homogenized. And even the most recent and contested past is available only in nostalgic plastic reproduction.

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), pp. 772, 773

The Past Is Still Another Country...

I didn't expect to find that much genealogically relevant in Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005). But it's hardly ever a mistake to read someone who can say something this obvious and make it new -- make you really realize it for the first time:

"Throughout recorded history, most people in Europe -- as elsewhere in the world -- had possessed just four kinds of things: those they inherited from their parents; those they made for themselves; those they bartered or exchanged with others; and those few items they had been obliged to purchase for cash, almost always made by someone they knew." (p. 337)