Bringing Life to the Past

It has been 30 years since I began to look into my family history. This is about the same amount of time that I’ve maintained an interest in broader history. And about the amount of time that I’ve been fascinated by travel and the unique sense of place that defines each location. Underneath all of that is the story of what it means to be human – often messy and sad, sometimes downright cruel and unfair, at times life-giving and joyful. For a long time, these were all unconnected threads to be studied in seclusion. Increasingly, I see that they all cohere, braided together, inseparable.

In these days of Ancestry-dot-com, genealogy has gone mainstream, joined the internet age. This has its benefit. At the click of a few keys, I can now lay hands on information that previously would have required at least a trip to a major family history research library, at most careful and often fruitless digging through county court records in some courthouse basement in a small town in Ohio. Information (including more and more primary documents) is shared freely and widely. Yet this has its drawbacks. Information is shared freely and widely. This is not yet another diatribe against undocumented genealogy, offered in a churlish and mean-spirited way. I sympathize with the message of such epistles, if not their spirit. My concern is a deeper one. The vast majority of this internet-age genealogy is decontextualized, unbound from the threads of history, place, and humanity that really give it meaning. 

 

This page is my attempt to tell a thicker story, a story rooted to places, to migration patterns, to lives that tell a story. It is something evolving. It is an attempt to reflect on the process and craft and art of family history, an attempt to see the story as a whole. It is, in its very nature, fragmentary and fleeting and incomplete and sometimes just a bit sad. Like life itself.