Life, Death and Genealogy
By Daniel Hubbard | March 11, 2012
This week, true to the name of the blog, I’ll be meditating.
It has been a busy week. I’m working on several projects, gave a talk and have three more coming up that need preparation. I attended a genealogy get-together at our library, have an article for a quarterly to write and on Wednesday I will post a book review here.
This will most likely be a short post.
Yesterday we had a few things on our schedule—an orchestra competition, pickup from a school clothing sale, a basketball game and a funeral. Another aunt of mine passed away and now that age group is nearly gone. We’ve been balancing honoring the previous generation with the needs of the next. It brings home the steady march of the generations, a march that, as family historians, we document.
Does genealogy get in the way of life, does life get in the way of genealogy or do we balance past, present and future for the benefit of all three?
We document lives from long ago and not so long ago. Sometimes we put people on pedestals, where statues, not people, belong. Sometimes we discover their humanity and take the statue down and shake the hand of the real person we’ve just discovered. Sometimes a person appears and we slowly bring them into focus. Other times, that person’s edges remain fuzzy because they never existed or the records are too few.
As we look back, we examine lives and at the same time live our own.
At the luncheon after the funeral, my children asked me, “who are all these people?” “Cousins,” I said, “they are mostly my cousins of one kind or the other. That makes them your cousins too.” As we talked with them, my first cousins all (and all is many) brought up the family get-togethers from before I was born. They took place at the house where my family now lives, our grandparent’s house. The kids would play outside, running around the enormous spruce tree in our backyard or playing volleyball next door in the backyard of yet another aunt. The adults would gather in the cool of the basement, which just happened to be the only place big enough to hold all of them. Oddly for a basement, it is apparently a sacred space in the memories of my cousins—filled with the smell of my grandmother’s baked beans heating in a giant pot and waiting to be joined by thick slices of her oatmeal bread. Every time our basement was mentioned, peoples’ eyes lit up with childhood memories of a time before I can remember. But they remember.
We record and recreate memories but we also make memories of our own and someday we will leave memories behind.
Next weekend will be much the same as this one. There will be research to do. There will be another memorial service to attend. There will be more basketball games to cheer as my daughter’s team gets their one weekend of March Madness. The generation before and the generation after. The previous generations that we research and the future generations that we hope will absorb at least some of what we pass along will all be represented.
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Learning and Imagining
By Daniel Hubbard | March 4, 2012
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” -Albert Einstein
That is an intriguing quote. When you first encounter it, that quote doesn’t have the feel of something that a scientist, a pursuer of knowledge, would say. Surely, dreaming of polka-dotted unicorns is not what he was putting above knowledge. It isn’t really. There is more to the quote-
“For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
So what Einstein meant is that it takes imagination to learn and advance. As long as there is an “unknown” out there, it is more important to have the imagination to learn than it is to already know. It takes a certain type of controlled imagination to proceed. The imagination figures out what might be done next. The imagination might create a solution long before you have any way of knowing if the solution will work.
The Rules
The stages of learning to do just about anything fall into two categories. First comes learning what to do, what steps to take, what paths to follow. You learn the rules. Second comes learning how and when to zig-zag within the rules, bend the rules, stretch the rules and perhaps rewrite or break the rules while staying true to the principles behind them. Perhaps, as Einstein did, new rules can be imagined and then moved from the world of imagination to the world of knowledge. The idea isn’t to learn imaginative ways to get it wrong. The idea is to learn to imagine what might be right when the rules fail to provide guidance. First one learns the nature of the box, then one learns how and when to let the imagination outside of the box.
I’m about to introduce a couple of groups to genealogy. There is a lot to know. Genealogy has “rules,” made from the accumulated and summarized wisdom (a fancy way of saying things learned slowly from mistakes that have been made), and beginners need to learn those rules. “Keep track of sources” is a rule of genealogy, and one that I would argue should never be broken. “Don’t assume,” “start with yourself,” the list goes on. There are also those bits of knowledge that need to be understood even if they are not normally stated as rules—when this or that record is the best place to find a specific bit of information and what to do if that record fails to provide what you had hoped. Then there is the fact that what those records are depends on the time and place one researches. There is a truly vast array of knowledge that can be useful but there is no recipe book. Some imagination is always needed. The hard thing about beginning is learning enough or, if we go back to Einstein’s quote, knowing enough to use the imagination to lead and not mislead.
Breaking Rules
What has me thinking about this is one of the other rules of genealogy—”work backwards without skipping generations.” Everyone needs to learn that. “Don’t start with what great-aunt Florence told you about her great-grandmother” as I like to put it. Yet while some rules may be hard and fast, this one is more a matter of prioritization, probability, risk analysis and the actual necessity of forming, not assuming, connections. It seems to be a place where there are times when some imagination and rule bending can work.
If all else fails and, for example, an extended family that is likely to contain a grandfather can be identified, can this rule be broken? If there is the understanding that one risks working on a family that is not related, can this rule be broken? If you realize that you can’t simply work backwards from the grandfather, assuming him to be the correct person but that you are trying to prove or disprove a connection from grandchild to hypothesized grandfather by attacking the problem from two directions, is that ok?
I would have to say yes. With all those caveats understood, with all your hypotheses under firm control and clear in the knowledge that you may be about to work on a family that you might only be able to prove is outside your family tree, then this is a rule that can be broken.
Whenever I teach this rule to beginners, I feel a little twinge. It is something they need. There are too many traps waiting for them otherwise. Imagination needs to be restrained. Yet, I have to hope that someday some of them will get to the point were the imagination has been trained and a rule or two can be broken when needed and result in success. As Einstein implied, a well honed imagination can be a very powerful thing.
Epilogue
As for those polka-dotted unicorns I mentioned, there is a possibly apocryphal story that when an acquaintance asked Einstein how she could best prepare her young son to become a scientist. His response was to read “Fairy tales and more fairy tales” because imagination is essential. Now that is taking imagination seriously.
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Genie-ology
By Daniel Hubbard | February 26, 2012
The other day my older daughter was talking with a friend about what her parents do. She told her friend that I’m a professional genealogist. After a moment the friend replied, “What does he do, study lamps?” When I heard the story it took me a moment, or perhaps two, in order to realize that she was thinking of the genie from Aladdin’s lamp.
Aladdin working on his genie-ology or perhaps his genie's genealogy
Whenever two adults meet there is a familiar ritual that plays out. “What do you do?” It is a very useful question and I ask some version of it myself but it is one I’ve always had trouble answering. Physicist was an answer that was almost guaranteed to cause people’s eyes to glaze over. This was especially potent in the undergraduate version of the question, “What’s your major?” I always wondered if I could arrange some system of kickbacks from the local opticians.
“Genealogist” often doesn’t do much better as an answer to the question. When the question comes back, “what do you really do?” I realize that I need to give a bit of an explanation.
I’m getting ready to give my Introduction to Genealogy presentation a couple of times in the next few weeks and it has got me thinking about how to define it. Not just what it is that I do but genealogy itself. The Oxford English Dictionary’s fourth definition is
4. The investigation of family pedigrees, viewed as a department of study or knowledge.
Not bad but not good either. It lacks quit a bit and is not really something that will help a person understand.
Quibbling over Yin and Yang
Perhaps saying that genealogy is the study of a family’s history would help and yet that often leads to quibbling about the difference between family history and genealogy. Some will say that genealogy is purely the study of the blood and marriage relationships between people. That coincides nicely with the OED’s definition. In that view, family history consists of what is left after the pedigree has been reconstructed—all the stories and little facts that don’t relate to birth, marriage and death. I’ve come to the conclusion that the better one is at either enterprise the smaller the difference there is between them.
Yin and Yang- one requires the other
Genealogy is not so cut and dried that one can be regularly successful at it without learning as much as possible about the people, their close relations, then perhaps their distant relations, their neighbors and associates; their times and the places where they lived. Sometimes “small” details are the key to proving the obvious to be wrong. Other times, every facet of an extended family needs to be understood in order to figure out what the next generation back is likely to be. Writing a narrative surrounding a certain research problem can send a researcher back into the records because the story just won’t add up.
On the other hand, try to produce a family history without being able to correctly reassemble the family from records and it won’t be long before the family history is hopelessly wrong. Genealogy and family history are two sides of the same coin. Neither is complete without the other. They are yin and yang. Both may be wrong without the other. So, I don’t quibble.
Defining
That brings me back to explaining genealogy to people. If it isn’t just a matter of investigating pedigrees, if it doesn’t just involve the names and dates of few individuals who are of primary interest, then it gets much harder to explain. Perhaps it is the reconstruction of the lives of a set of individuals and their historical context to such an extent that the relationships between a subset of those people can be considered to be proven.
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In Memoriam
By Daniel Hubbard | February 19, 2012
This is not the post I planned to write. In fact, given colds, kids activities, a four-day weekend from school, a surprise party for a daughter, several chapters of a draft of a book I’m trying to get ready for a test printing, a few talks I’m working on, etc, etc, my “plan” amounted to hoping that some sort of inspiration struck me. Instead, I am going to write about inspiration that struck me decades ago.
When I was a child, I listened to a lot of family stories. My father and his siblings often sat around our living room trading tales. Most stories were things they had experienced themselves but not all. Two of my father’s sisters told much older stories and, eventually, I came to realize that some of these were stories that they had heard from their parents and grandparents but others were things that they had researched themselves. I got the idea that such things could actually be investigated. Even if no one remembered them, those stories, places, dates, occupations and many other things, were still there to be discovered.
By the time I was ten or eleven I was hooked and was going on genealogy forays with my Aunt Melva. She taught me to set up a microfilm machine and crank my way to what I wanted. She took me to libraries and cemeteries. On occasion, I went to genealogy society meetings with her. When I was twelve, she wrote to the Newberry Library in Chicago because I wouldn’t be old enough to be admitted for another four years. She wrote that even if I was only twelve, I was as serious as most of their patrons. I didn’t know she had written until the answer arrived. I still remember showing the attendant the letter that she received in reply that entitled me to be admitted. It was like entering the inner sanctum and she got me there.
When I think back upon it, I realize that it wasn’t just the family history that was important to pass on or even the interest in it. How to pursue it is also important to transfer from one generation to another. Of course, I could have and did learn from books in those early years as well. Nevertheless, having someone close to me actually teaching me what to try and what mistakes to avoid was important. I could bounce ideas off of her and get her thoughts. Eventually, she started to ask me for advice and I knew I must have learned something. It was all another way to put “family” into family history—passing down skills along with the stories.
Now that I think about it, she was even the one who gave me a few of those books I read early on.
Over the years whenever I came back home for some reason, it was always important to try to squeeze in a genealogy trip with Aunt Melva. Years ago on one of my visits, I realized that it might very well be the last chance for one of our expeditions. We went to a Family History Center and both managed to find a few things.
After I moved back to America, she gave me all her papers. She just couldn’t keep it straight anymore but she was so happy that someone cared enough to accept them. When I told her that I had begun to work as a professional genealogist, it brought a smile to her face. She’d heard it from me before before but apparently had forgotten.
She’s had her health ups and downs for years. As I write this, it was just a few hours ago that she passed away. When I thought back on what I was doing when she died, I realized that I was at a genealogy presentation. In a way that seems fitting.
So, good-bye Aunt Melva. Thanks for the forays and the stories and everything you taught me along the way, not just about ancestors but about how to find them.
Melva Hubbard Kerry, 1918-2012
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Footnotes on my Footnotes
By Daniel Hubbard | February 12, 2012
Yesterday, I was reading National Geographic, which is an excellent thing to do when you have a cold and need to sit down and relax. Even better, it inspired a blog post I can fit in between sneezes. In the December 2011 issue, I noticed a wonderful diagram. It is a diagram that explains an aspect of a document. It is the kind of diagram that I wish came with every source in genealogy.
The document in question isn’t a source but rather The King James Bible. The diagram stretches across three pages. All versions of the Bible (or parts thereof) that served as input for the King James version are shown feeding into it. All of their inputs are shown feeding into them and so on back to the originals in Hebrew and Greek. It is a simple enough diagram in a way, yet dozens of graceful, arching lines convey a great deal. Beyond how the information flowed, it shows the date and language of each version. It wasn’t just a matter of showing relationships but also of displaying data. Data that, for example, implies an act of translation each time a version in one language is used as input to a version in another. I wish that I could display it here but if you want to see it, you’ll have to look at the magazine. It isn’t much and yet it says so much.
Sometimes we deal with sources that have complex genealogies of their own. We might use a digitized version of a microfilm copy of an index prepared by hand in the 19th century from now missing records that had themselves been copied over by a clerk because the originals were disintegrating. Perhaps when they were copied over, two ledgers were combined into one. Perhaps the index we actually used was not even based on the original index but on a translation. Maybe the index was “corrected” by looking at other records.
Knowing the process behind each connection is important as well. Were dates adjusted for a different calendar? Were names transcribed as best as they could be read or were they adjusted based on standard spellings that might or might not be appropriate? Were locations given according to the names and boundaries of the day or have they been modernized? If so, were they modernized so long ago that they are no longer modern? Often we can ignore such questions. Unfortunately, the only way to know if we can is to ask such questions.
I want footnotes on my footnotes. I want to know what I can of all the inputs, even the ones that no longer exist. I want to know if the links are tenuous or robust. I want to know the chains of transformation that the information has experienced. I want to know the rationale when data is combined. I want to know the twists and turns to decide if there is anything that can be done to straighten them out.
Often we only see that we can download a digitized document, copy a frame of microfilm or write down what we see on aging paper. We don’t even glimpse the labyrinth contained within that aging leather binding. We’d be better off if we did.
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The Finding-Knowing Gap
By Daniel Hubbard | February 5, 2012
Across my office on a bookshelf, I have a book called The Knowing-Doing Gap. Not surprisingly, it is about the difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it. It is a book about management, not about genealogy but I was reminded of it the other day. What reminded me was a thought or two about a gap, not between knowing and doing, but between finding and knowing. Often we find information and confuse that for actually knowing.
Don’t get me wrong. Finding is important but it is not the same as knowing. If you never find the first bit of information you will never know but just because something has been found doesn’t mean that anything is known.
You can find a name. Is the name correct or garbled? Is it the name the person always went by? Is it even the right person? Do you know?
You can find a date. What calendar was used? Did anyone have a reason to lie—making themselves younger or older perhaps? Is the date really linked to the person you’re researching or just someone with the same name? Do you know?
You can find a place. Is it still on the map? Did it ever actually exist? Did it exist at the right time? Do you know?
You can find information in many ways. How trustworthy is it? Does it conflict with what you have already found? Does it mesh with what you’ve found to give that new meaning? Do you know?
Information can be found. Knowing arrives slowly and will involve throwing away some things that have been found and reinterpreting much of the rest. Knowing involves assembling, pondering, rearranging, leaving out, looking again, weighing, balancing, disproving, reconsidering, doubting. Different people can be found.
Knowing might involve realizing they are the same person. Different dates can be found. Knowing might involve realizing that they are all wrong.
Finding and Knowing
I’ve been researching someone’s family story. Once and only once have I found a record where the woman’s surname is what it should be if she really was briefly married. I found a son with the correct name. I’ve found a man with the name as in the story living in the right area before the son was born. Afterwards he disappears. Just like in the story. Nevertheless, I’ve also found the woman living in the household of her father not long before the supposed marriage. Her father had a farmhand. His surname was the same as her son’s would be. This man also disappears. Which man was the father? I have found but I do not know.
A bit over a year ago I was asked to investigate the family history of some brothers. I was given the names of a pair of Swedish brothers, their birth years and the approximate years that the immigrated to the United States. Their surname didn’t seem completely Swedish to me the way it was spelled, so I tried changing it. One brother’s given names seemed to be in the wrong order for a Swede so I reversed them. Their spelling seemed more German than Swedish, so I changed how I spelled his given names as well. I found a ship’s list with a man listed by his initials and surname. They matched my assumptions but I still did not know. His age was not very close to the correct man’s age, at least the age that he gave later in life. I traced this emigrant back to the family of his parents in Sweden. There I found him with the given names as I thought they ought to have been and the supposed brother as well. However, the name of the father did not match the surname I had for the sons. In one record a helpful minister had penciled in the new surname above the entry for one of the sons. It was the spelling that I assumed at the beginning. I found the emigration record for the other brother. He was using his father’s surname when he left. He was headed for the same small American town as his brother. Once he got to America he started using his brother’s surname. The only discrepancy that was left was a simple matter of one man lying about his age in a country where no one could prove him wrong. I have run out of reasons to doubt. I’m as sure as I can be. This time I haven’t just found, I know.
But…
Finding is an event. Knowing is a state. States can change. As the saying goes, “you never really know.”
This Month’s Poll
This month’s poll—How is it going with finding and knowing?
Results from Last Month’s Poll
Here are the results from last month’s poll. There is general optimism out there, at least among people who felt like answering the poll. It was nice to see that pessimism was the clear loser but there are plenty of confused genealogists out there and a not insignificant number who admit to being on a quest for a cheeseburger.
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Researching the Undead
By Daniel Hubbard | January 29, 2012
In a big project that I’ve been working on, there has been a large cast of supporting characters. People who weren’t goals of the research but who were necessary to the research. Now, as I work on the book that is based on that research, I’ve realized that I have left a few people hanging. Not literally—despite the title, no one was actually hung in the making of this post.
What had happened was that a few people had become integral to the story even if at some point in their lives, they were no longer integral to carrying on the genealogy. It didn’t seem right to simply cast them aside once their usefulness was passed. Any reader worth their salt should want to know just a little about what happened to these people in the end.
One person in particular almost gave me trouble. Her life had been hard. She was poor. She was widowed. Her husband died of disease during the Civil War when she was fairly young and still caring for small children. Not long after the war, she married a former soldier. At that point her life and the lives of the people I was explicitly researching went in different directions. Even so, the more I’ve written, the more the reader will be forced to get to know her. I can’t just leave her by the wayside as the others travel on. I need to research a little more.
Did she remain in the little hamlet where she lived? If not, where did she go? Did she have any more children? When did she die? There was little about her later life but I did find one sad document. A census enumeration that lists her new husband with another wife. So, it would seem that her hard life had been ended fairly early, not long after remarrying, just when life seemed to be improving. She had two more children as well, who were left without their mother.
It was a rather sad ending. Of course such stories abound when you do genealogical research but thinking about how to write it into the narrative made it more real.
“Going too Far”
But it wasn’t real. I sometimes like to ask what records would have been created if a person was not actually dead or if some other event had not really taken place. Looking for records produced by someone who was supposed to be dead may seem like going too far but going too far can be a good thing. Sometimes it turns out that a mistake in genealogical research or record keeping can produce a member of the undead. Zombies may be popular in fiction at the moment but they are not really welcome in family history. New York took a state census in 1892. It is not very information rich but it is far, far better than nothing. With the fate of the 1890 Federal census, and the lack of other information about her, “nothing” was a very real alternative. There she was in 1892 with her husband.
She was “clearly” dead in 1880 when her husband was recorded with another wife but with her children still in his household, some of them his, others his stepchildren. I can only assume that the enumerator in 1880 simply made a grievous error. He heard wrong. He talked to a sister-in-law and assumed that she was the lady of the house. He wrote down his own wife’s name. He simply had one of those moments people occasionally have. Whatever it was, it turns out that she lived for quite awhile after her apparent death in the 1870s. There is no sad story to tell. Going too far, researching someone after they were supposedly dead, turned out to be a good idea.
PS
Thanks to every one who has responded so far to the “half glass” poll from two weeks ago. I’ll post the results and any orders for cheeseburgers next week and probably put up another one since the first poll proved to be rather popular.
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Is it Ever as Simple as it Looks?
By Daniel Hubbard | January 22, 2012
Human beings are complicated. We all know that. We’re well aware of the complexity of our own lives, of our own times. We often think that life was simple and uncomplicated before. Part of it is that we were all children once and after we’ve blocked out the hard parts of growing up we’re left with memories of what we think of as a simpler time. Really it was just a simpler phase of our own lives. We may see life as having been simpler because some things that add to the complexities of our lives did not exist. We easily lose track of all the things that made people’s lives complicated that we no longer need to even think about.
Research
I’ve been working on a marriage lately. It is fairly cut and dried bit of genealogy. I’ve found the county record and a statement made by the groom in his pension file and they agree in their details. The births of the children start more than nine months after the marriage date. It is all very clear.
Except that it isn’t. There is further evidence and more to consider. When these two met they were both half a continent from where they were born and raised. They grew up in separate small worlds hundreds of miles apart. Any evidence for their movements is also evidence for when they might have met. His discharge from the army puts a limit on when he could have moved west. It was summer of 1866.
A few surviving letters give hints about when he actually reached the town on the frontier where they would meet. He arrived first. It was spring, 1867.
She was a god-fearing soldiers wife. She was a war widow. She remained on her farm for a while. I have her shaky, emotional signature on her application for a widow’s pension. She applied while still living on the farm. Later, I have some records of land sales. They are a sign that she may have been preparing to leave. It was late winter of 1868.
I found a diary kept by a man whose relationship to all this is less than tenuous. He was the uncle of the wife of a brother of the future bride. He did not even live particularly close to his niece. Not the first person to look to for clues and yet he supplied them. In his daily writings, he described a visit from his niece and her husband. A week later they were on their way to a nearby town to board the train but it wasn’t the train for home. They were heading west. It was early spring, 1868.
A few months later a letter from the future groom’s brother proves that when he visited his brother in the west, he met the niece, her husband and, most importantly, he met that future bride. He called her by the name she had as a widow. Nevertheless, the bride and the groom had met. It was the summer of 1868.
It was still two years before the wedding.
The Plot Thickens
A group of letters to the groom make odd references. One mentioned sons of the future groom, sons he didn’t have. It asked when he would bring his wife “back home” for a visit. Another letter turns down an offer to visit the west. Our groom had invited a friend to stay with him but the friend declined because he was afraid of being in the way when our groom decided to “bring home your wife.” Both arrived a month before there is reason to believe that he and his future bride had even had a chance to meet. It was still the winter of 1868.
She received some unusual letters as well. One referred to her by the married name she wasn’t supposed to have for another year. One asked her about a baby by surname. It was her future husband’s surname. It wasn’t supposed to be her name just yet but it seemed to be her baby’s name. It was summer of 1869.
A last group of letters make it clear that other people had very different ideas. When the bride’s stepmother learned that her stepson and his wife had left the west, she feared for her stepdaughter’s safety because her stepdaughter was now alone. It was one month before the official marriage date. Even when they should have known of an approaching wedding, her father and stepmother had no idea. A sister-in-law wrote a few months after the official marriage date to say that she was so glad to hear “that now you have a man.” It was summer, 1870.
What?
It isn’t possible to know exactly what happened but it is possible to have a few thoughts on the matter. Those that wrote to our bride before she is supposed to have been married and thought that she was married belonged to the family of her sister, her only sister. That only sister had also lost her husband to war. She was also a widow with children to feed and a life to put back together. If anyone could understand something a bit out of the ordinary, it would have been her sister. If there was anyone she could have confided in, it would have been her sister. Her brother must have known as well. He and his wife seemed to have served as escorts. They must have known why. No other family members seemed to have had any idea of anything unusual and perhaps that is exactly how it was supposed to be.
Then there is the puzzle of why a friend and some relatives of our groom seemed to know that he was married not just before he was married but before he apparently could have met his wife. The puzzle includes why his friend made it clear that his wife was not yet living with him but would be soon.
I suppose there could be a few hypotheses to explain this. Perhaps the wife referred to by his friends and family was actually a different woman. I doubt it. There was barely time between his discharge and when he clearly knew his future bride for him to have married another woman and for her to die. It would have to have been another widow with sons and without daughters. She and her children would have had to vanish without a trace.
I suspect that the biggest clue comes from the friend who wrote about our groom’s wife moving in. I suspect that he and his future wife had met—by letter. The East was short of men. The war had left behind many widows. The frontier had a shortage of women. Women in the East and men in the West were known to have run personal ads in each others newspapers in hopes of finding someone. I’ve looked for such an ad that fits this couple and have not found it, so maybe there is another answer. Nevertheless, that letter from the friend that knew of a wife who had seemingly not yet arrived doesn’t leave room for much else. I’ll probably never know. I already know more than I have any reason to expect to know.
The Point
Though I love the story, the mystery and the signs of human complexity, they aren’t the only point. If all I’d seen were the marriage record and the pension information, I’d have no reason to think there was anything out of the ordinary. Checking the births of the children didn’t turn up anything unusual either. Normally there is not much more that one can do. I’d found all that one can expect to know. Add a discharge date, a diary entry and a few letters and the story becomes quite different. Whether they were secretly married or simply considered themselves to be married, whatever it was that took place, it took place two years before the official record says it did. The evidence that we would consider sufficient was supplemented by a few accidents of timing and preservation to tell a very different story.
I have to wonder how often, when a few documents present us with clear proof of an event, would things be far less clear, less obvious and more complex if more was preserved. That wonder keeps me looking. Real people might prove to have been far less simple than we think. The question, of course, is how often?
Perhaps one can tell that one doesn’t have enough evidence when one doesn’t yet know enough to be a bit perplexed.
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Path of Least Persistence
By Daniel Hubbard | January 15, 2012
The next time you meet someone who is fairly new to research, try to notice what mode they are in. You just might be able to help them out a bit. By “mode,” I’m thinking of the classic optimist/pessimist difference that is contained in the old question about the glass—is it half-empty of half-full? Almost everyone manages to pour something into their glass as they start their genealogy. They talk to an older relative and get some information or they find a cousin who has done a bit and can help get them going. The question is, how is that first step perceived?
We’re all in some mode as researchers but one of the tough parts about starting out is to not go too far to one extreme or the other. Persistence is one of the most important things in research, though it doesn’t get an official mention as part of the scientific method. Being persistent is one of the hardest things to accomplish at the beginning. Optimism runs so high that there seems to be no need to be persistent or pessimism is so rampant that there is no point to being persistent. It seemingly will never come of anything anyway.
Neither way of thinking bodes well.
Half-Full
When some people get going, they are overjoyed that the glass is half-full. They are amazed at what they have learned and that they have learned it so quickly. Family history is easy! No need to work at it! They are giddy, ecstatic, weak in the knees… Think six-year-old boy with his first toy light saber, totally absorbed and totally thrilled.
Eventually, they will need to learn that research is difficult. They’ll get stuck. They’ll discover they don’t know as much as they thought. They’ll be misled. Getting information isn’t always the same as getting the right information.
Sometime or another, one’s information will turn out to be inconsistent and there will be a need to really ponder what is happening. It’s sort of like the glass being part full of water and part full of oil—you can do all the shaking you want, eventually they will separate and look the same as before. One of the two will need to be eliminated. If there is great joy that the glass is half-full, it can be hard to come to grips with the fact that some of the data just will not mix with the rest. There is a danger of flipping over into the other type of genealogist-
Half-Empty
Other beginners will be discouraged that the glass is half-empty. Welcome to the dark side, young researcher. They will lament that this answer or that fact hasn’t come easily. They have a long list of problems or difficulties and disregard the importance of whatever it is that they have learned.
That is where the metaphor of the glass usually ends. In one of my all-time favorite Far Side cartoons, Gary Larson extended it to two more types that can be identified with the half glass of water test. Here are the other two.
Half empty, no wait, half full, no… what was the question?
They have missed the all-important need to be organized. A lot of what goes into research is organization—keeping track of facts, keeping track of sources, keeping track of hypotheses and conclusions, reasoning through it all and relating all these things to each other.
Confusion and indecision take over.
Where’s my cheeseburger!!??
Perhaps this should be renamed “Where’s my Mayflower passenger!!??” You may have met someone who is upset that “the records are all wrong,” when all that is wrong is the expectation. Some have a specific ancestry in mind and are upset that it isn’t easy to prove, let alone that it might not be true at all. Family history always gives us fascinating things to learn, unless of course we spend our time being upset about missing cheeseburgers.
When you meet a beginner in one of these modes, perhaps your good deed for the day could be a little gentle advice, be persistent.
The fact of the matter is, in a sense, we’re all beginners. There is always more to learn—more records, localities, languages and techniques to learn and more ancestors, relatives and stories to find. In research the glass is never really full. We might be able to add water to the glass but the glass itself enlarges to remain big enough to hold ever more water. The more we learn the more we discover that we don’t yet know. Sometimes we see the glass as half-full, sometimes half-empty and sometimes we wonder what happened to our cheeseburger. If you’re persistent, you survive the ups, downs, confusions and annoyances.
One of the most important bits of advice you can give someone if they are just starting out is to avoid the “path of least persistence.” It is littered with half glasses and missing cheeseburgers.
What Mode Are You In?
I was just hunting for a young immigrant woman in Chicago. I was told her name, her husband’s name and the names of their three sons. I knew her birth date and the decade during which her sons were born. I was told that a ship’s list entry existed for her showing her going to visit her brother but with that information crossed out and her husband’s name written above. There was also a naturalization record that gave her married and maiden names as well as her address.
An effort to find people with the appropriate names in the 1930 census (the only one that was relevant) gave nothing. The address on the naturalization record did not have residents of interest in 1930. A check of the ship’s list told me that she was not going to visit her husband. The surname matched but the word “uncle” was there as well. So was an address. That address led to a census entry for a family of the correct surname but the given name of the possible uncle was wrong. The given name does match his wife pretty well so it seems that an aunt was transformed into an uncle on the passenger list.
I searched a city directory for anyone with about the right name in about the same place as the address on the naturalization record and a few years before that record was made, there was a man with the right surname and almost the “right” given name living across the street. Looking for him in 1930, I found a man whose wife has what could be an anglicized version of my immigrants 3rd given name and three sons born in the correct decade. One name matched, one was very close and the other was similar—same number of syllables, similar consonant sound at the beginning and actually more believable given the ethnicity involved.
I tend to think my glass is half-full on this one, not half empty. It certainly isn’t a sure thing. This is definitely a half glass not a full one. More work is needed but it feels promising. That makes me wonder how other people are feeling as genealogists at the moment.
So, what mode are you in?
I’ll post the “results” in a few weeks.
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The Path of Logic
By Daniel Hubbard | January 8, 2012
I’ve taken a bit of a holiday hiatus from writing about research. So far, I’ve written about repeatability, openness, goals, and searching the literature. Another important part of research is the logical path that connects the evidence signposts together and leads to the conclusion. Part of the research process is to pave that path and use it to move from one piece of evidence to the next in a way that leads you from the initial problem and to the conclusion. What is the thinking that connects a death notice to a census record to a land sale and so on to a baptism record that gives the name of the parents? Every piece of research, genealogical or otherwise, has a thought process behind it. The more difficult the research the more complex the thinking often is. I’ve written before about the need to record the reasoning that goes into a conclusion. Being able to look at the recorded logic is important for openness and reproducibility but it also lies at the heart of research. Research is an endeavor that is is based on logic.
The Paths
Any conclusion in research has to be backed by both evidence and logic. Nevertheless, there are often two distinct paths through the evidence. There is the clearest and most concise path, the path that is both easiest to specify and easiest for another person to understand. This is set of steps through the evidence that one would follow to convince someone else of the truth of your conclusion. This is the path you are trying to build.
Then there is the path that was actually taken—the wandering path of evidence collection in which the birth record whose location seems so obvious in hindsight was, in actual fact, nearly impossible to find. We have all traveled the wandering path. The path that passes by the most likely possibilities only for us to discover that there is nothing there before it finally joins the strange but direct path that leads to the answer. This is the path that swings past all the negative results that lurk in our research logs. It covers the obscure possibilities that one just happened to be able to check once the obvious thoughts were all used up. There is usually logic along each step on this path but it is also dotted with serendipity. This is the path we actually take to get to the solution of our mystery. This path might not be the most direct, it might take lot of explaining but it is also often a fascinating story in its own right.
Off the Reasoned Path
One point about the progress of research, the often wandering path, is that it is not necessarily fully logical. People often proceed by following a “gut instinct.” In a researcher that really knows their subject, that instinct my not be backed by a full logical argument but it is backed up by knowledge of what tends to be the case, what usually works, what is most likely to pay off. All those experiences, tendencies and probabilities end up distilled in the subconscious in a place psychologists call our “adaptive unconscious.” (If you want to read more about an expert’s instinct try Malcolm Gladwell’s blink). We may not be able to express clearly why our instinct points in one direction or another but it often represents the automatic functioning of a vast amount of information. Nevertheless, gut instinct cannot be used in the end result, only as a means to reach the result. Someone might be happy with me if I told them I had saved many hours of work by following my instinct. Instinct in this case is just a shorthand way of saying that I used my experience of previously solved problems stored in my subconscious to identify the tactic that was most likely to pay off without consciously thinking though the whole process. Condensed and distilled knowledge and experience is what instinct means in this case. On the other hand, if the conclusion to a piece of research contains the words “My instinct tells me that the evidence means…” then no one should be happy. It isn’t open and it isn’t reproducible.
I’ve read in studies of problem solving that under the right circumstances the best way to proceed toward the solution to a problem can be picking at random. If presented with multiple possibilities that all seem equally likely to be correct, it can be that the best thing to do is to pick a possibility at random and work to check it. The alternative of hunting for more evidence to allow you to make a rational choice can take more time and effort than disproving a few randomly chosen mistakes. There is no logic involved in that step but it isn’t necessarily wrong to proceed that way and it doesn’t mean that the eventual conclusion is not logical.
Roadside Attractions
A few days ago I was researching a man of some importance to a problem I have but he is not himself someone who is central to the problem. One can always wonder how much effort is the right amount of effort to put into someone like that. Since he plays a defining roll in an important event, I keep coming back to him. Eventually, I gathered some information about his dozen siblings. A few of them have provided a clue or two but not more. Then I discovered that one of his many sisters was a minor historian. There was nothing particularly logical about the way I discovered this. It was the kind of good fortune that occurs when you’re working hard to get down the path but still keeping your eyes open to the scenery along the way. His sister’s writings were just one of those oddly good roadside attractions that one sometimes stumbles upon. The process of finding her was not particularly logical but what I found can certainly be used in a logical argument.
I tracked down a promising book of hers and it provided some answers—information about their parents and upbringing that really helps. The path that got me to that point was winding and it might have taken much longer to find that she was an author. When it comes to reasoning through all that winding evidence, I’m sure a straighter path will appear, the path that will explain what the evidence means instead of how it was found. I can already see much of it. It is a set of well-defined, logical steps from one piece of evidence to the next that will prove the case. It will be correct and convincing and documenting it is an important part of the research process but it will lack a certain wandering charm. Luckily I can record that wandering path as well.
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