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Making Names for Ourselves

By Daniel Hubbard | August 29, 2010

When I mentioned the reuse of the names of deceased children in a recent post (Geneanthropology), it got me thinking about naming patterns. As genealogical evidence goes, I wonder if evidence from naming patterns, onomastic evidence, isn’t both one of the most underutilized and most overly valued indications of relationship. It is valuable if given the proper modest weight. It can be a clue to increase your chances of identifying the correct records but sometimes it seems that people treat it as a guarantee.

Yet as tentative as those indications can be, sometimes names can give guidance to family ties. An odd first name matched with an uncommon surname might appear in more than one generation, though without any known connection between the individuals. That can certainly raise suspicions. It should raise suspicions. It is no guarantee.

A Patterned Mystery

In my own ancestry there is a family where every child received a surname as a middle name. In one case, the given name of a daughter was the same as her paternal grandmother’s name and that daughter’s middle name was that same grandmother’s maiden name. A son was given the first name of his paternal grandfather. In that case, with the son’s and the grandfather’s surname already being the same, the son was given another surname as a middle name. The meaning of that middle name remains unknown. In fact, aside from that one daughter, only one of the middle names has been explained. I found that a son was named for a nonrelative who was in the midst of his fifteen minutes of fame. Today, the name means nothing but then its origins would have been clear. Origins as clear as why little Benjamin still gets the middle name Franklin.

The mother of these children is a mere shadow in the records—without known parents, without a maiden name. Somewhere in the names of those children may be not just her maiden name but the actual full names of her parents, and yet those parents have never been found. One pattern that was sometimes followed, was to name the first born son for the paternal grandfather, the first born daughter for the maternal grandmother, second son for the maternal grandfather and second daughter for the paternal grandmother. The two children named for the father’s side in my case fit that pattern. Still maternal grandparents matching the first born daughter and second born son have never been found, even though the possible surnames are right there as grandchildren’s middle names. Either the pattern wasn’t followed or the right evidence has eluded many searches.

How Far Does Memory Stretch?

We all know that names run in families but for how long are their beginnings remembered? I’ve seen the same name passed on from father to son for at least five generations. You may have seen more. Does that long-ago son, five generations into a string of boys all given that name, ever learn how far back that name really stretches or is that something that we only learn now while poring over records? Is that something that such people never knew themselves? In my family there are a few odd names that popped up three generations after disappearing. Is it a coincidence? These children would have been named for great-great aunts and uncles that even their grandparents barely knew. People separated not just in time but who lived half a continent away. It ought to be coincidence and yet it all happened within two generations of the same family. Not often enough to give certainty but often enough to make me wonder if those children weren’t named as their parents thumbed through a family Bible. If that is what happened, where is that Bible now? I need to see it.

The Genealogists’ Children

I have to wonder about one more thing. Now, as genealogy becomes more and more popular, how stretched might our naming become? I am named for a great-great-great-great grandfather on my mother’s side and a great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather on my father’s side. On my mother’s side there was a memory that had been preserved. On my father’s side, only genealogy made that possible.  Who in the future would dare think that my name hinted at those connections?

I have to say that I enjoy onomastic evidence. I suppose part of that is its very nature as being so full of uncertainty. When problems are easy, any pattern in names is something we barely notice and then we only find charming that we can see who was named for whom. When problems are really hard, any half developed pattern we can discern in the names we know may be the only faint whisper of a clue we have. That pattern may also be a mere figment of the imagination. Only more evidence will tell.

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Topics: Genealogy, Memory, Methods | 2 Comments »

Begging the Citation

By Daniel Hubbard | August 23, 2010

I’ve recently been reminded of a few things that seemed to fall together into a somewhat oddly named post.

What is the Logic?—Begging the Question

First, I was reminded of the logical fallacy that goes by the name “begging the question.” Nowadays, that phrase is often used to mean a statement that seems to demand that a question be asked, that is, a statement that raises a question. The “beg” in the name of the logical fallacy means not to ask or request, as one might think, but to avoid. I’m always disappointed when I’m reading or listening to something and the logic should be an important part of the whole but it is missing or clearly wrong. Do you ever get the feeling when reading something that it somehow isn’t really proving what it claims to prove? You may have run into one of many logical fallacies. The last one I encountered was begging the question.

The fallacy “begging the question” occurs when one of the premises that goes into a logical argument is for all practical purposes, identical to the conclusion that is being sought. In other words, the output is identical to part of the input. It is a bit like claiming that if the listener would kindly give you the following input, a roll of chicken wire, some live weasels, a flashlight, a Prius and a wheelbarrow of kitty litter, you could prove the concept of hybrid cars. It would be an impressive feat if it wasn’t for the Prius in the input. If the listener lets you have the Prius to start with, all your work with the kitty litter would be wasted time and if the listener tells you that there is no such thing as a Prius, you probably won’t make much progress in convincing them that there is such a thing as a hybrid car of any make or model—even with the help of the weasels.

Here is an attempt at a genealogical example of begging the question. It is a very short, imaginary monologue defending the correctness of the reconstruction of a particular ancestor. The person who has doubts wonders if the John Smith claimed by the researcher really was the researcher’s ancestor and gets the response, “I found my John Smith in Smith’s Chronicle.* That source is impeccable. Therefore, my John Smith is my ancestor.” Right there, hidden in the first statement is the assumption that a particular John Smith, found in Smith’s Chronicle, is the ancestor of the researcher. Even if you don’t doubt the second statement (and you should!) there is a problem here. This John Smith may have existed but that doesn’t automatically make him the correct John Smith to be the ancestor in question. The evidence and logic to show ancestry may exist, but here they are missing. We only have the hidden assumption that everything up to John Smith is correct—that is, that the conclusion is correct before the logical argument even begins.

What was the Source? What was Evidence? What was Conclusion?

Second, one of the biggest complaints made by and about genealogists is the missing or poor source citations in genealogical work. I’ve been looking at a secondary source for a client. It is one of those older works that frustratingly lacks source citations but that checks out far too often to be ignored. It is definitely better than nothing as a provider of clues but it could have been so much better. As I was reading, a thought came to me. The book wasn’t just often begging the question (among other logic problems). The author did such a good job of avoiding stating his sources that the book was also “begging the citation.”

Perhaps the most frustrating thing isn’t that a vast amount of time and effort were laid down with only hints about the origins of the information. It is that often there is no way to tell the difference between information that was found explicitly stated in some source and a conclusion drawn from several lines of evidence painstakingly pieced together with reams of logic.

If the logic that got from the evidence to the conclusion was only there, it could be checked. It might be sound, it might be faulty, it might be correct but lack the needed input. If wrong, it might be salvageable. If clearly correct, I could go off and worry about something else. The logic would even make it easier to figure out what sources had been used as input. Without the logic, why should anyone believe anything except perhaps the most obvious conclusions?

When an author does not include sources, when references are avoided, when the author “begs the citation” and doesn’t let you know the origins of the evidence that acts as input to their reasoning, you have a problem. How do you judge its correctness? How do you check the authors statements? As I read a secondary source that lacks explicit statements of how the author arrived at point B from point A, I can’t judge the validity of the conclusions.

Preserve the Logic Too

I think that one of the most important lessons to learn when doing genealogy (or really, any type of research) is that the logic you use is important. Not just getting it right, but writing it down. When I look back on a notebook that I started when I was ten or eleven, I often find notes copied from some source. I usually wrote down the source, perhaps not always a proper citation with a lot of detail but at least I can still tell what I was looking at. Then there will be what appears to be a conclusion. Sometimes it is clearly a conclusion drawn by someone else in a secondary source, sometimes it is clearly mine. Either way, the question is raised, why this conclusion? Just as it is important to be able to know what the evidence was that went into a conclusion, it is important to know how one makes that journey from evidence to conclusion. If later you see a fallacy in the logic, you might just understand why things aren’t fitting together as they should with research on related people. The evidence may be correct, the conclusion may seem acceptable at first glance but without the logical argument recorded in an easy to follow manner, all that evidence will need to be pondered all over again.

A difficult conclusion with only the input evidence recorded is something like a travel memoir that consists of, “Saturday, August 1: I pulled out of the driveway and made a big slow left turn without any real goal in mind except being somewhere else. September 12: Home at last! Now, only now, can I finally call this place home.” That the author returned and was apparently somewhat enlightened is a nice conclusion but the intervening month and a half, with all of its experiences, was left sadly unrecorded.

____________________________________________________

* A title made up for the example. Please, don’t go looking for it.

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What’s Hiding in a Place?

By Daniel Hubbard | August 16, 2010

Though we think of hope as something for the future and memory as something of the past, they are entwined and entangled. Our dreams are imprinted by our past and our memories are shaped by our desires. Hope springs eternal, so the saying goes, and eternity is not only the future, it also includes the past. The names we give to our places reflect many things. Most importantly they reflect both hopes and memories—New Athens, New Albany, New Jerusalem, New Britain, New Bergen… Sometimes hope for the future, sometimes memories of places left behind, and sometimes both. As our ancestors moved from place to place, they brought those hopes and memories with them, and left behind names.

Sometimes our places exceed the original. Who today even thinks of York when New York is named? How many even know that there is another Boston for which Boston, Massachusetts is named? More often the names, if they do represent someone’s hopes, seem to have gone unfulfilled and in retrospect appear bizarrely unrealistic.

There are many possible origins of place names. They can come from earlier place names—sometimes with “New” (New London, Connecticut; New Rome, Ohio; New Glasgow, Ontario) and sometimes without (Stockholm, Wisconsin; Dublin, North Carolina; Paris, Tennessee). Some, like those just listed, seem rather obvious. Others can be more subtle. Hartford, Connecticut was named for Hertford in England. Some such small changes might seem obvious and yet be hiding the real origins. Frankfort, Kentucky was not named by German settlers pining away for Frankfurt. It simply means Frank’s Ford.

Places can be named for people. That can be in honor of someone who had little to do with the area. Think of all the places in the United States named Washington, Adams and Jefferson. More interestingly for the family historian, it can also be after a founder or early settler of the town (Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Hubbardton, Vermont). At least for one place, honor was implied but not really given. Bismarck, North Dakota, was named for someone in an apparently shameless ploy to attract outside investment. In this case, naming the town for Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was designed to attract investment from Germany. As far as I know, it didn’t. (Don’t blame the townsfolk for the scheme though. It was a railroad company that named it).

There are places named for events. Marengo County, Alabama was named in honor of Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Marengo. You might be tempted to think that a place in Alabama named for a battle between France and Austria, that took place in Italy would not have much to say to a family historian. If it turned out that you descend  from some of the French exiles who left after Waterloo and became the area’s first white settlers, it might seem more intriguing.

A place name can originate with earlier inhabitants. Sometimes it seems that all the European place names to be found in North America sit like a thin patina on an enormous number of older names, though often only misunderstood versions of them. Whole provinces and states have names that make no sense in European languages. We take those names for granted but to people from other places, they seem as alien as Greek does to me.

In any language, a place name may describe what the place was like when it was named. Sometimes the name still rings true (Death Valley would still seem to be an apt description). Other times the name says something specifically about the past. The garbled name of native origin, “Peoria,” may once have aptly described that part of Illinois as a “Prairie of fires” but it can’t be said to be true any longer.

All place names tell a story but it is the stories of memories of other places that are probably the most valuable to the family historian, because they give us an arrow pointing back to a place that may be a part of our origins. The arrow may not point correctly. Pittsfield, Massachusetts was the first of many American towns by that name. Some Pittsfields, like the one in Illinois, are named for that place. At least one, Pittsfield, New Hampshire was named for the same man, Prime Minister William Pitt, as the Pittsfield in Massachusetts. At least Pittsfield, Maine has a name that has a different origin all together. One of my ancestors, who came from the original Pittsfield, later turned up in Pittsfield, Wisconsin. Coincidence? Maybe, but maybe not. Had I first found him in Pittsfield, Wisconsin, perhaps I would have thought to look back to an older place named Pittsfield.

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Topics: Forgotten History, Genealogy, History, Methods | No Comments »

Geneanthropology

By Daniel Hubbard | August 9, 2010

So many years ago that I don’t quite remember where this took place, I was in an art museum with a friend or two and we came across a strange family portrait. I happened to know why it was so strange and so I got a chance to play tour guide, if only for one painting. It was one of those moments that sticks in one’s mind. I was lucky to have just read about that kind of painting and, as I talked, a small crowd formed and listened. Far be it from me to give an art lecture but for a brief moment, a few strangers decided that it was worth their time to stop and listen.

Genealogy plus Anthropology

As genealogists, we always hope for that one document that will clearly tell us what it is that we want to know. It could be a birth date, a parent’s name, the identity of a missing sibling. Often we find that magic bullet but it is usually not so easy. It would almost be a shame if it was. Instead we put together hints and arrange them until they tell us what we want to know, or prove that we are on the wrong track. We make use of odd bits of cultural context to turn seemingly unimportant facts into the information we need.

When first learning genealogy, one will eventually come across something like this—a John son of Robert and Mary was recorded as being born seven years after a John son of Robert and Mary. Without knowing the cultural context it is hard to know what to do with these facts. You need to be a bit of an anthropologist. You might assume that there were two different couples with the same names that you were confusing. Perhaps you would just record the second John in the same family as the first as another son of those same parents. Maybe you would decide that there was only one John and that there was some confusion about when he was born. Depending on other factors like culture any of those might be most likely to be along the right track. Often the culturally appropriate assumption is that the first John was dead and his parents reused his name. Not something most people would do today. To us it feels on the verge of taboo.

Back to the Art Museum

So, what was it that I was explaining in the art museum? It was something else that has the taste of taboo. Something that today seems alien. My memory of that particular painting is perhaps somewhat faded but in that family portrait were a mother and father and their children, all posed in their family library. One son was facing away from the viewer, caught in the act of fetching a book. A daughter seemed oddly faded, almost transparent and in front of the mother was a baby with pale grayish skin. These children were not there to be painted with their parents, they were beyond he eyes of any painter. They were dead. That painting was a genealogical document in a way that family portraits occasionally once were. It was, in a way, the death certificates for those children and evidence that the culture that prevailed then was different from ours. The daughter was probably added from a likeness made in life. The artist probably had no image of the son to work from and so the son had to be made to face away. The baby was probably just a generic baby, resembling the dead child only by virtue of being very young.

We might not always be aware of how different the cultures that we deal with actually are from our own. After all, these people were our ancestors and somehow their culture was one of the ancestors of our own. So we get lulled into a false sense of security and believe we understand them. Then there is a danger that though we might understand the words they wrote, we won’t understand what they actually meant. Assuming similarity can cause us to miss things. Rejecting possibilities simply because they seem strange to use can cause mistakes.

There were living children in that painting and in other paintings like it. Children who might have left descendants. What would it be like to be one of those descendants and have a painting like that be one of your family documents? Would it be understood?

For us that family portrait is alien and macabre, interesting yet disturbing. I find myself asking how people who could cherish a painting like that, could have lived with the same folkways as my forebears. What parent today would want spectral children and deathly gray babies to inhabit their family portrait? Looking at that genealogically fascinating painting, requires not just a genealogist’s eyes but an anthropologist’s as well. It was painted in an age when losing children was far from unusual and so in a way it is not surprising that parents saw death differently. For those parents, it was a way of cementing memory, of preserving the family that should have been, and of honoring the dead. Perhaps it was even a way of allowing their living children to grow up with their departed siblings. It begins to make sense when seen from the inside.

Culture matters.

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Topics: Genealogy, Memory, Records | 2 Comments »

1st Blogiversary and The Power of Negative Thinking

By Daniel Hubbard | August 1, 2010

Like many bloggers of yore (in internet terms I suppose “yore” means more than a year or two ago), I’m shocked to discover that my blogiversary is upon me. It has been exactly one year since my first post. At the end of this post, I’ll celebrate a little with links to some of my favorite posts but now, on to this weeks “real” post—

The Power of Negative Thinking

This tongue-in-cheek topic, I’m sure, will take some explaining. Sitting down to work on a family with the typical negative-thinking thought, “I can’t do this,” is not going to get anyone anywhere. In fact, no one would even get to the point of sitting down. So, here is the personal experience that put this post title into my head.

The other day I was translating an old handwritten note. It was found mixed in with some family papers but there was no way of knowing what it was. The handwriting was terrible, the note, as it turns out, was for personal use only, so it was written with only the author needing to read it. Even a doctor’s prescription needs to be read by a pharmacist. The script was an old German style that often looks nothing like modern script and that doesn’t differentiate so very well between different letters. Oh yes, the vocabulary was outdated and oddly florid for a note meant for one’s self, and some things were abbreviated.  It was an enjoyable puzzle and though I wasn’t sure what, if anything, would come out of analyzing it, I was determined to figure it out even if it looked as daunting as the Rosetta Stone. When I had gotten to the point where I had transcribed more than enough to get a feel for what it was, I decided that I couldn’t really justify spending more time on it. It was  a minister’s notes for a funeral. It named a cemetery with a rather generic name but did not name the church or a town and it did not name the deceased. There was really no way to find where it was written. It was time to give up and write up a translation of what I had. It was time to end the struggle.

Yet, it turned out that it wasn’t. Sometimes there is nothing so liberating as calling it quits. After walking away from it, grabbing some lunch and then sitting down to finish up what was really already done, I couldn’t help taking a last farewell glance at the original and I read about half of what I couldn’t read before. It was the absolute most poorly written part of something I had looked at on and off for days. I suddenly learned the deceased was a man and I found him identified by his initials. If I hadn’t given up, I don’t think I would have gotten nearly so far after many more days of picking it up and putting it down with a bit of frustration.

There is, of course, a difference between thinking so negatively that you never want to have a problem mentioned in your presence again (unless you are allowed to make cathartic death threats) and the realization that what you are doing has reached its limits. At that point it might be time to relax and preserve what you have. That is a good idea anyway. You just may end up with much more than you had. Sometimes just a dash of slightly “negative” thinking makes things turn out much more positively in the end. Sometimes stress-free eyes see things that bound-and-determined eyes miss. Sometimes a relaxed mind realizes things that an intensely concentrating mind doesn’t and a bit of both ways of working is often the best.

Back to the Blogiversary

Time to stop thinking about dashes of negativity and put on my party hat.

My very first post, Boltzmann’s Grave, is still one of my favorites. A friend from my physicist days even planned to use it in a physics class she was teaching. That one also gets a lot of hits from Google. I don’t know what people looking up Ludwig Boltzmann think of it but I’m happy they stop by.

The other post that seems to generate more than its share of search engine visitors is Locusts on the Plains. Like Boltzmann searchers I suspect most of the people looking for information about the Rocky Mountain Locust are not genealogists but if they learn what they were out after, why not?

Most of my posts aren’t about my own ancestry but a few that I’m fond of are, if only slightly, about the people in my personal past: A Seemingly Insignificant Place, Pilgrimage and Grave Portents.

A post that got the honor of a couple of response posts was Not How-to but Why-do? There was Why do you research? at Family History Research and Why Do I Do Genealogical Research? at Stardust ‘n’ Roots. It was fun to start a small conversation.

Thanks all for year number 1!

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Topics: Genealogy, Methods | 2 Comments »

Knowing by Metes and Bounds

By Daniel Hubbard | July 26, 2010

Land records can be a great place to find evidence of relationships between people but I am going to write about a part of land records that normally makes the eyes glaze over. In many places, such as the eastern U.S., land holdings were not specified by the convenient lines derived from latitude and longitude with which many people are familiar. Instead the much older system called “Metes and Bounds” was used. “Metes” are sections of the property boundary given by a point,  a direction, usually a distance and a point at the other end. “Bounds” are existing lines and curves such as walls and streams. This is the part of a land record that has such a strong effect upon the eyes. Try saying “I love metes and bounds!” in a group of genealogists and you might as well have just sworn in church—at the top of your lungs—while throwing off your clothes.

A Run-in with Metes and Bounds

I suspect lots of people, often already engaged in a life and death struggle with terrible handwriting, decipher the beginning of the land record where the identities of the grantor (seller) and grantee (buyer) are defined then continue until they realize that the metes and bounds are beginning. Suddenly the eyes glaze, the room spins, comprehension fades, and the will to go on trickles away. Dazed, they skip to the end and check who the witnesses were in a desperate attempt to retain consciousness. Of course there are reasons why your genealogist friends might recommend a good therapist if you admit to loving metes and bounds. Here is a made-up example of how a metes and bounds description might begin-

Beginning at the west end of the old stone wall just north of where the bridge crosses Mill Creek. Proceed N 17 degrees E 67 rods to a pair of white oaks. From there follow a line N 74 degrees E 103 rods to a stand of pine saplings and from there follow the line of Jonathan Browning’s land S 15 degrees W 87 rods to where it reaches Mill Creek. Next follow Mill Creek upstream to a large stone commonly known as Watkins Rock, thence…

There is, admittedly, a lot not to love here. When the handwriting is bad, this is not always easy information to figure out from context. There is no obvious specification of where the land is. (Earlier in the record there should have been a statement of the jurisdiction in which the land is found but that isn’t even part of the metes and bounds.) There is no clear way to convert any part of this description to a point of latitude and longitude. “Rods” as units of distance will cause some head scratching (a rod is, of course, 1/40th of a furlong, 1/4th of a chain, 5.5 yards or 16 feet 6 inches). The trees will have died of old age. The stone might still be in place but is it still known as Watkins Rock? Has the stream shifted? Has another name taken over from “Mill Creek?” Where were the bridge and the wall? There are certainly more problems that one could worry about but that should suffice. You don’t get a guaranteed easy time extracting a location.

On Second Thought…

Let’s think about what you do get. Things that you would not get from a more mathematically precise description. There was a bridge, which implies that there was a road running through the area and that the stream was deep enough or that the area was developed enough that everyone simply fording the stream was not a god idea. The land was host to both white oaks and pines (and perhaps a full metes and bounds description would have told you even more about the trees growing there or even the crops being raised.) You know that the land had access to a stream that drove a mill and the mill was close enough to provide the local name for the stream. Having grown up in a part of the Midwest where the only stones to be seen are ones bought at a garden supply store, even the fact that there was a large rock in the area is interesting to me. It just might indicate that the soil was rocky and certainly adds to your mental picture of the place.

You may get some people as well. In this case, you have the name of a neighbor, Jonathan Browning, and the names of neighbors can come in handy. He may have been a relative or he may show up elsewhere later and help you track down your ancestor in that new place. You may not know why Watkins Rock was given that name but someone named Watkins was certainly associated with that place and even if that means nothing to you now, it may come to be important. Or, perhaps you’ve gotten a few vague clues already that the name Watkins is to be found a little further back in this part of your pedigree.

In short you get a description of what the locale was like decades and decades ago—before photography, without finding a diary or a newspaper story, without a mention in a county history—just a description of a boundary in a form many people shy away from. Every metes and bounds description gives you a chance to walk an ancestor’s property. The walk may be at dusk in a heavy fog but you will still be able to make out a few details. You probably can figure out a few things that lie behind those details and if you are lucky you might even get to meet a neighbor or two.

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Quantum Genealogy

By Daniel Hubbard | July 19, 2010

I just ran across an article in an old newsletter that I found among my aunt’s papers. The title was Quantum Genealogy and as a former research physicist, it caught, or perhaps even grabbed, my eye. The article mostly discussed the author’s research experiences without so many references to the quantum world, so in my mind, I began to write the article that I thought I was about to read.

Accepting the Strange

The quantum world is a strange and wonderful place. Without our understanding of it, I wouldn’t be able to write this on my computer. I couldn’t have just watched a DVD and my television would be far more primitive than it is. Yet quantum mechanics can’t help but seem truly strange to us. The quantum world is a world of uncertainty and probability. It is a world where particles can be in two places at once and yet not really be in either place, and what seems impossible to us happens all the time. Without those strange things going on among the tiniest bits of reality, we and our everyday world could not exist. When studying these things one simply has to develop a sense of wonder to go along with all the mathematics, logic and experimental results.

That kind of acceptance of the strange, not in opposition to reason but wedded to it, can serve the genealogist well. It is, perhaps, part of the art of genealogy—learning the often small difference between gullibility and the tentative acceptance of something that seems odd but just might be a possibility worth investigating. The other side of that coin is the ability to weed out the ridiculous without rejecting all possibilities that are not obvious. Those are not trivial skills. The path to a mysterious ancestor is often a winding one (otherwise there would by no mystery). If after failing with the straight paths, we neglect the crooked ones, we won’t make discoveries. If we unconditionally believe the first crooked path that roughly seems to fit, we’ve likely made a mistake.

Feeling Certain

In quantum physics, the closer one looks at things, the more they seem if not totally random, probabilistic. The objects we deal with in out daily lives do not jump about as they would in the quantum realm. If you put your toothbrush in a glass in the evening, you won’t find it in the toaster in the morning (unless of course, you have a three-year-old in the house, but that is another matter). Yet to speak about the position of an electron in an atom is nearly meaningless. We are reduced to discussing the probability it has of being in a given region of space. Peer down even deeper and space and time, matter and energy jump about seething with randomness. The closer we look the less certain of anything we can be.

Such is the past. Write down a name, a place and a date and feel certain. Then ask who, where and when. Is this person really the person we are investigating or just someone with a similar name? Where was this place that appears on no modern map? Ask what that date means. Look closer at it. How does it relate to our calender? The harder we look, the less sure we may become—until we do the work to complete our understanding. Wrong results are very easy to come by, right answers can be much more effort.

Socrates’ Cat

When Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” he was speaking in the present to encourage the listener to examine his or her own life. Genealogists and biographers take that exhortation into the past. The unexamined life was perhaps not worth having been lived and we try to save our ancestors from such a fate. Yet in the quantum realm, examining and observing change the subject of the observation. Schödinger’s famous, though imaginary, cat was neither alive nor dead until an observer’s observation forced reality choose for it to be one way or the other.

So it is with past lives. When we examine them we change them, though not as dramatically as the cat in Schödinger’s thought experiment. We change the reconstruction of the life we are examining. We change its meaning. We do hope, of course, to come ever closer to the truth but we always make a change.

Feeling Uncertain

One well proven fact of the science of quantum mechanics is the “uncertainty principle.” It states that certain pairs of measurable quantities can never be known to perfection at the same time. The better an object’s position is known the less that can be known about how it is moving, the better its motion is known the less that can be known about where it is as it moves. In everyday life we never notice this because we never know anything with the extreme precision that makes its partner quantity nearly unknowable. When a child rolls a ball across the floor, we have no problem knowing where it is and how it moves well enough to grab it. It is hard to imagine otherwise, yet when precisely measuring at ultrasmall scales, the uncertainty principle comes into play every time.

I often find a similar principle to be true of past lives. The more we learn about some parts of a person’s existence, the more puzzling and unknowable, even mysterious, other parts seem to become. There is no natural barrier here to learning more, as there is in quantum physics. It is simply that without the successes elsewhere we would not know enough to be puzzled and our expectations about what we can know wouldn’t be high enough to give us the feeling that we have the right to be puzzled. Perhaps there is also a part of the art of genealogy here—the optimism that it is only what one has accomplished that makes it possible to be confused.

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Migration Routes for City Dwellers

By Daniel Hubbard | July 11, 2010

Being a “modern person” means many things. One of them seems to be being as independent as possible of the forces of nature. That is nothing new, after all you could say that putting a roof above your head is a separation from nature and people have been doing that for a very long time. What is different from earlier times is both the speed with which we have recently made the separation larger and, of course, the degree of separation. It is hard today for most of us to really understand what it meant to feel the whim of nature for things smaller than earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes. Even though we are forced to drive around things like mountain ranges and canyons, we always have the choice of simply flying over them.

All that makes it harder to really get a deep, intuitive feeling for how it was to migrate in the days when flat-bottomed boat, horse and foot were the dominant means of getting from point A to point B. It makes it harder to realize just how far apart those two points were in time.

Imagine you have an out of town guest that wants to get across town to visit an acquaintance that just happens to live in the same city as you. If you can’t identify with a city dweller, image you are the out of town guest. The tourist map gets spread upon the table and your conversation goes something like this-

“Where is the nearest bus stop?”

“Oh, that’s a long walk and the bus service isn’t all that reliable. Anyway you’d have to change three or four times before you got close enough to walk at the other end.”

“Ok, it doesn’t look like that bad a drive”

-A finger is run over the map in hopes of a reaction-

“No, no, no! You can’t drive through that neighborhood, or that one either.”

“Well, how ’bout this detour?”

“It would be ok, except Jackson St. is one way for three blocks right there.”

“Hmm… well, could be worse, I’ll just take a left over there.”

“Not at rush hour you won’t and, if you managed, you’ll move at a crawl until the traffic clears downtown.”

You get the point. There are so many factors that dictate how we get from place to place that a flat map just doesn’t convey. The journey often does a great deal to control the traveler. This isn’t just true of modern cities. It was even more true long ago.

Of course, your pioneer ancestor almost certainly had no map. They looked at the journey ahead of them differently. Instead of a map, which they could use to find and follow a path, people often traveled by well known, tried and true migration routes. First, they actually were ”well known,” people knew of them and had some hope of following them. Those routes determined where people might go, even where they could conceive of going. Migration routes avoided obstacles like unfordable rivers, mountain ranges, hostile tribes and foreign forts. Some journeys forced people into groups for the safety of numbers and the assistance that others might give. The most difficult routes also came with prescribed starting dates and benchmarks like the famous Independence Rock on the Oregon Trail, a point which needed to be reached around the 4th of July. People who got the timing wrong on these routes generally won’t be an ancestor of yours, or anyone else’s for that matter. Remember the Donner Party?

Migration routes determined, at least in part, where your ancestors might have settled or if you know the destination, from where they might have come. They even helped to determine when the journey was made.

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Topics: Ancestors, Genealogy, History | No Comments »

Independence Data

By Daniel Hubbard | July 7, 2010

Independence is an important topic this time of year. Though inspired by that 4th of July kind of independence that is not what I’m thinking about. Instead, I’m thinking about data independence.  As we gather our evidence, one question that always needs to be asked is, “is this data independent of the data already collected?”

A scientist needs to understand his apparatus, otherwise he may introduce all sorts of errors into his study. Trying to use a device faster than it was intended to be used might change the results if a measurement is influenced by the measurement made immediately before. That thought occurred to me as I worked on a new presentation about the census. In 1900 the census asked for a person’s age as of June 1 just as had been done for decades. Then it asked for birth month and birth year. Age and birth year are usually redundant as soon as birth month enters the picture. How did the enumerator ask the questions? If given an answer for age and birth month the enumerator simply wrote down the birth year without asking, then the age and birth year are not independent. If the informant rounded the age, the birth year will automatically agree unless the question is asked and the informant gets a chance to be more specific. If one is wrong so will be the other. One doesn’t add weight to the other. Even if the enumerator asked for both age and birth year, the informant may state both based on the same faulty memory or even the same lie. The information is not independent. Given an age and a birth year that clearly don’t agree, would the enumerator simply write them down or would there be some attempt to correct one or the other?

As soon as one bit of information is derived from another they are not independent. If they also convey the same thing, they are no different from one piece of data. One is totally dependent on the other. Mistakes often gain the power to convince by being repeated. It looks like massive amounts of evidence all pointing in the same direction but it is only the same single morsel of data copied over and over. The data are not independent.

Secondary sources often contain the same information but it would be wrong to conclude that by agreeing, they all give weight to the correctness of the information. Instead they may all be relying on the same primary source or they may even be drawing on each other. That doesn’t necessarily make them all wrong but it does mean that they are not independent. In a sense, they are all the same source repeated over and over. Observe the sky once at sunset and one can then repeat the statement 1000 times that the sky is red but those thousand bits of data are not independent. Make a few observations throughout a cloudless day or two and you can conclude the sky is blue because now your data is independent.

At a simplistic level, I like to think of data as getting a vote. Information does not get a second vote by putting on Groucho glasses and a third trip to the poling place wearing a Marge Simpson wig. Different evidence might get different weight when you are pondering what conclusion to draw but each piece of evidence should still only get to vote once no matter how well its repeat appearances are disguised.

So this July, whether you celebrate Canada Day, the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, the storming of the Bastille or none of the above, think about the independence of your data.

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Topics: Genealogy, Methods | No Comments »

Doing Some Unresearch

By Daniel Hubbard | June 27, 2010

There is a little bit of unresearch I like to do every so often. It can be a simple what-if or a real exercise in going through my records, notes and thinking.

It is not hard to get the idea. You experiment with the life of an ancestor that you think you understand fairly well. Pick a source at random and forget about it—pretend that you never found it. That may not be easy. You will need to ask yourself some questions—

With all that you no longer know and all the things that you can no longer know as well or be as certain about—

In an alternate universe where you really did not know these things, is it likely that you would manage to learn them?

It can be an interesting exercise to deconstruct your research this way. Some of the questions are not easy to answer unless you have really kept track of the hows and the whys and all the logical steps as you progressed. It also says something about the importance of being thorough. If you think about a life that you don’t know much about, it can help you imagine the difference that the sources you haven’t tracked down could make and what they might contain and where they might lead you. It can also give some insight on how wrong one can be when the sources are few and far between.

Last week I posted about a trip to Fort Snelling. When I do this exercise and eliminate one specific record, I’d only be left with vague clues that I should have made that particular pilgrimage.

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Topics: Experimental Genealogy, Genealogy | 1 Comment »


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