Is the story everything in genealogy?

Is it true that in genealogy the story is everything?

Yes -- in a way, up to a point.

I totally believe in stories, especially since they were at the core of my previous (journalistic) life. But loving and seeking family stories is not a good excuse to evade research and proof, or to disregard standards. Two thoughts:

(1) The story is not much good if it's attached to the wrong person or the wrong family. My grandfather thought that his maternal grandfather had watched and waited for a tax sale and bought a nice farm at a good price that way. I've never found any evidence that this happened (although I'm not done looking), but I have found evidence that his paternal great-grandfather did just that, probably more than once.

(2) Often hard-core research in property and probate and more obscure records can reveal stories no one remembers today. I found one while working on a case study for my BCG certification portfolio. I was struggling to trace a family headed by an agricultural laborer who owned no land. I thought they were in Marshall County, Indiana, and I worked all the records I could find and found only three traces there: a census entry, an entry in a book of chattel mortgages, and a brief court record. He had to borrow $90, and to secure the loan he put up "one dark brown medium sized horse, having small head and small ears, and supposed to be eight years old in the spring of 1881. Name of said horse is Frank." The court record came when he couldn't repay the loan and had to forfeit Frank, as well as a set of work harnesses and a wagon. (The story didn't contribute to the solving of that case, but it's burned into my memory even though I'm no relation to that family.)

Standards don't require anyone to suppress stories that are dubious or even proven false. Just be clear about what they are and are not. In fact it may be useful to preserve them. Sometimes a false story or a false piece of information conveys a nugget of truth either in the way it is told, or the kind of mistake it makes, or when it is correlated with documentary evidence. But that's a story for another day . . .


Harold Henderson, "Is the story everything in genealogy? ," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 January 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

But Grandma always said . . .

James Tanner recently posted a fascinating list of six signs that a genealogist has moved up from beginner status. He made me wonder why we talk a lot about "beginning genealogists," but not "beginning historians" or "beginning physicists."

One reason genealogy has such an enormous range is that it is inevitably two very different things: a personal quest based on personal memories and attitudes formed at a young age on one hand, and a demanding technique and profession on the other. The two blend and confront in many different ways, but each of us has a moment when our personal memories run head-on into original eyewitness documents that say otherwise. Beginners may reject documents that conflict with their personal impressions, often going into great intellectual contortions to do so; higher-level genealogists give the documents serious consideration, while recognizing that they too could be wrong.

This confrontation is the downfall of the popular notion of laissez-faire genealogy -- the idea that there are lots of ways to do genealogy and nothing is really wrong. There are lots of ways that work, but the denial of conflicting evidence is not one of them.

No one who dismisses documentary evidence out of hand in favor of "Grandma said..." can be taken seriously as a genealogist. Of course they may be wonderful people, and in any case we should always be polite, always be kind. But a genealogist has to be willing to weigh conflicting evidence -- to analyze and correlate and resolve contradictions. Sometimes Grandma wins, sometimes she doesn't. (Yes, even my own.)

Those who simply cling to family stories may know valuable facts that no one else does, but they aren't genealogists, any more than those who deny evolution are biologists.



Harold Henderson, "But Grandma always said...," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 November 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Family stories

This could be another way of thinking about family stories, from home-schooled historian, writer, and professor Susan Wise Bauer:

Epic tales . . . display the fears and hopes of the people who tell them -- and these are central to any explanation of their behavior. Myth, as the historian John Keay says, is the 'smoke of history.' You may have to fan at it a good deal before you get a glimpse of the flame beneath; but when you see smoke, it is wisest not to pretend that it isn't there.

That's on page xxvi of what promises to be an excellent read: The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).