Methodology Monday: Is a good memory a method?

This morning Jill Morelli's excellent blog post reminded me of one of the six qualities Donald Lines Jacobus required of a good professional genealogist: "Ability to grasp and retain an infinite amount of detail."

The idea that a genealogist (or anyone) needs to know lots of facts was more fashionable 80 years ago than now, when we can always look things up on line. But the reason to have them in our heads is to be able to flag things as we see them and make the connection.

Some examples from a set of records recently viewed. What would you suspect about the parents, or the place, or the time of birth, if you found a child with one of these given names?

W. H. H.
Wilbur Orville
Byron Garfield (1880s)
James Blaine
Chester Arthur
Grover Cleveland
Benjamin Harrison
Raymond Roosevelt (1899)

The more we know, the more we can learn.

Do you have more obscure examples? Share them in the comments!



Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday: Is a good memory a method?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 June 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Try to remember . . .

Our memory is not like a video camera; indeed it may change every time we recollect something. Here's a fascinating view of memory -- and a reminder why we prefer sources created soon after the fact!
http://hnn.us/articles/how-memory-works-interview-dr-daniel-l-schacter





"How Memory Works: An Interview with Dr. Daniel Schachter," History News Network (http://hnn.us/articles/how-memory-works-interview-dr-daniel-l-schacter : accessed June 2013).


Harold Henderson, "Try to remember...," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 June 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.]

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.