Life in front of the bulldozer

I have thought of professional genealogists as an island surrounded by amateurs, but it had not occurred to me that the same might be said of historic preservationists until I read this article by
Kate Wagner: "The Archivists of Extinction," 19 October 2018, in The Baffler:

"What if I told you one of the largest ever undertakings in American historic preservation was happening not through the graces of any large institution, but through the autonomous participation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of individuals across the country, who are collectively stitching together their own narrative of architectural history? The 'Kmart' group on the photo-sharing website Flickr has amassed a staggering twenty-five thousand photos of its subject, a struggling American discount store. . . .

"This is the ice-cold reality of the retail death spiral. It’s why people feel the need to collect motel postcards, share old photos of their hometowns, and document the finale of Kmart. The end time is always lurking; the only thing you can do is take pictures and post stories before it happens. . . ."

Much more here.

Her blog is McMansion Hell.

Could genealogists investigate how local economies disappeared in the 20th century?

Once upon a time -- about 100 years ago, when my grandparents were younger than my children are now -- small towns and small cities were real economic entities. Their very city directories were often locally (or regionally) published. Purdue historian John Lauritz Larson wrote in The State of Indiana History 2000:

"At the turn of the nineteenth century, Indianapolis and half a dozen smaller cities in Indiana boasted hundreds of factories, mostly family owned. In towns such as Lafayette, Terre Haute, Evansville, and Fort Wayne, one could buy bread flour, buggies, and even locomotives of local manufacture. Everything from automobiles to bicycles, boots, baking powder, caskets, cheese, cigars, doorknobs, furniture glassware, grits, handbags, harnesses, hats, lawn mowers, pianos, pork-and-beans, roller skates, sheet music, and wagon wheels was available -- all marked 'made in Indiana.'"

What happened? Some few entrepreneurs got big and eventually elbowed the rest out of the way -- they had easier access to capital and made things shinier and cheaper than their competitors who stayed local.

But how did it happen? What were the left-behind manufacturers thinking and doing as the levers of power moved out of town in the 1920s and 30s and 40s? What about the family capitalists? Once they were local decision-makers, who were settled for the duration and who belonged to the place -- now their "successors" run multinational corporations that have little loyalty to any particular nation, let alone any smaller place. Most local businesses (by dollar volume) are franchises or chains whose bosses have none of the same local commitment or clout.

Did someone say "family"? Actually, genealogists might be in a position to contribute to answering these questions. (To my way of thinking they are microhistorical questions, in that don't primarily deal with issues of relationship or identity, but the methods are much the same.) Studies of these families, conducted with these questions in mind, might be very interesting. It wouldn't surprise me if some have already been done. The interesting ones will stick to the facts and avoid big-picture assumptions, either positive (that it was all a painful but inevitable and wonderful change) or negative (that it was some kind of dastardly plot).



John Lauritz Larson, "'Striving after Wind': The Changing Sources of Hoosier Prosperity," pp. 249-271 [quote on p. 255], in Robert M. Taylor, Jr., ed., The State of Indiana History 2000: Papers Presented at the Indiana Historical Society's Grand Opening (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 2001).


Harold Henderson, "Could genealogists investigate how local economies disappeared in the 20th century?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 November 2014 (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.]

Book Review: How History and Genealogy Fit -- or Not

A few years ago a colleague asked me what kind of "microhistory" my blog title refers to. I had to admit that I didn't know there were kinds, and that I had only a vague notion of what the subdiscipline was officially supposed to contain.

I could answer that question better now that I've read Anne Patterson Rodda's new book, Trespassers in Time: Genealogists and Microhistorians. The author is a veteran genealogist and Irish specialist who is certified by the Board for the Certification of Genealogists. She looks at various flavors of history: political, economic, social (often quantitative), cultural, local, and micro. She concludes that microhistory -- basically a very small-scale approach that tries to let the records and ordinary individuals speak for themselves rather than go directly to overall theories -- was a good fit for genealogists to relate to. I think she quotes more from the Icelandic microhistorian Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson than anyone else.

Genealogists have to deal with the fact that the particular people we happen to study may not fit the historical generalities -- to take obvious examples during the Civil War, a Unionist enclave in Mississippi or a Confederate volunteer from northern Indiana. They are sometimes outliers who don't fit the overall narrative -- neither would likely appear in even an encyclopedic history of the war -- but whose reality cannot be denied. We can't understand or tell about these people unless we do two almost contradictory things: know the history of the Civil War, and at the same time not force these people into categories or theories about the war that don't really apply to them. That kind of "double vision" is not easy to maintain.

At some points Rodda follows Magnusson into a rather extreme position:

My original intention was to find out how to place genealogy in historical context and, surprisingly, my research brought me to discard that idea in favor of treating each family story as a microstudy. {66} . . . [Genealogists' and microhistorians'] narratives may be quite microscopic views of certain aspects of local or family history, without reference to the wider history surrounding it. {185}

I don't know if this is possible or advisable, but all of Rodda's own case studies in the book's last three chapters do make ample use of big-picture history. And elsewhere she writes,

The key to producing a family history that can benefit current generations is in staying free of preconceived notions of what was typical for a time and place. . . . the researcher must be open to what the evidence suggests about the family being studied rather than looking for indications of ways their lives reflected the trends of the times. {184}

This thought-provoking book raises questions most of us don't spend much time on: How do we use our knowledge of history? Exactly how can we put our ancestors in the context of their times without abusing them?



Anne Patterson Rodda, Trespassers in Time: Genealogists and Microhistorians (N.p.: author, 2012).


Harold Henderson, "Book Mini-Review: How History and Genealogy Fit -- or Not," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Local, the quarterly (maybe)

Kickstarter, an on-line grass-roots "funding platform for creative projects," has a project called Local: A Quarterly of People and Places. Its funding window closes next Saturday the 28th, and it intends to be devoted to local history or perhaps what I would call microhistory: "seeking out the overlooked American narrative, chronicling one town per issue." The first issue, on Jersey Shore (Lycoming County), Pennsylvania, apparently is not yet available, but it looks gorgeous on screen.

What they say on Kickstarter: "Like traditional journalism, we do investigative pieces, humor and meditative columns, reviews, and special sections.  The difference is, we do so from a microcosmic vantage point. Think when This American Life meets National Geographic and your daily newspaper. Well, something like that."

As genealogists, we know local history and local historians. They're wonderful indispensable people, but they also have to live there. There are some stories they don't touch, some depths they don't plumb, some analyses they don't make. Maybe these folks will, if only because they get to move on after they've "done" that particular place.

There's always been a tension between locals and cosmopolitans. Sociologist Lyn C. McGregor captured it nicely in her 2010 book, Habits of the Heartland: Small-Town Life in Modern America, her participant-observer study of Viroqua (Vernon County), Wisconsin. In her view, locals may be either quiet or boosters, but they are committed to that particular place in way that even long-term "cosmopolitan" residents aren't. Cosmopolitans want certain qualities of small-town or rural life -- and if a given place fails to provide them, they will seek them elsewhere. Locals don't normally do that. (Her terminology is a little different. There's an interesting critique of the book here, but I don't think he does it justice.)

Can Local the quarterly -- evidently a cosmopolitan bunch themselves -- bridge this gap, speak to all three groups and to outsiders as well? I hope so.

Hat tip to AHA's "What We're Reading."


Lyn C. McGregor, Habits of the Heartland: Small-Town Life in Modern America (Ithaca NY:  Cornell University Press, 2010).

Harold Henderson, "Local, the quarterly (maybe)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 22 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]