Genealogy in Early America

WEBVTT

00:00.111 --> 00:08.817
[SPEAKER_03]: This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention.

00:09.697 --> 00:11.779
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host, Kelly Theresa Pollock.

00:12.539 --> 00:19.424
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do.

00:20.564 --> 00:26.008
[SPEAKER_03]: Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode.

00:26.868 --> 00:27.289
[SPEAKER_03]: And please,

00:27.769 --> 00:33.873
[SPEAKER_03]: Tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen to.

00:37.456 --> 00:46.982
[SPEAKER_03]: In the summer of seventeen eighty seven, Abigail and John Adams traveled from London to Deppin in the southwest of England.

00:48.263 --> 00:56.589
[SPEAKER_03]: At the time, John was the first United States minister to Great Britain, and Abigail was living with him in London.

00:58.057 --> 01:04.520
[SPEAKER_03]: Abigail was not fond of London, and her doctor had advised her to travel for her health.

01:05.880 --> 01:22.627
[SPEAKER_03]: She wrote that the visit was, quote, one of the most agreeable excursion I ever made, unquote, remarking, quote, the country is like a garden and the cultivation scarcely admits any other improvement, unquote.

01:24.087 --> 01:25.808
[SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't just a vacation, though.

01:26.758 --> 01:40.453
[SPEAKER_03]: It was also a chance to see the county where her Quincy ancestors had lived, including a possible ancestor, the Sayards of Quincy, Earl of Winchester, who was a signer of the Magna Carta.

01:41.655 --> 01:57.387
[SPEAKER_03]: Although Abigail couldn't prove for certain that she was related to the Earl, she had reason to think she might be because of the similarity between the Quincy coat of arms and Britain and those of her American Quincy family.

01:58.608 --> 02:04.973
[SPEAKER_03]: And also because of family documents that had said that her family line traced back to William the Conqueror,

02:06.555 --> 02:12.684
[SPEAKER_03]: Abigail and John Adams, like most of the founders, were keenly interested in genealogy.

02:13.565 --> 02:19.975
[SPEAKER_03]: Abigail remembered using herself as a child with a genealogical table her grandmother had possessed.

02:21.098 --> 02:25.002
[SPEAKER_03]: Twenty-nine years before Abigail Adams' genealogical journey.

02:25.663 --> 02:36.454
[SPEAKER_03]: Benjamin Franklin took his own trip through England with his son to research family history for both the Franklin family and the Reed family.

02:37.215 --> 02:39.778
[SPEAKER_03]: Benjamin Franklin's wife was Deborah Reed.

02:41.356 --> 02:47.902
[SPEAKER_03]: With information he gathered from grave stones and parish records, along with what he already knew.

02:48.803 --> 03:05.419
[SPEAKER_03]: Franklin wrote out a genealogical chart on a fifteen inch by twenty inch piece of paper, tracing his line back to his great-great-grandfather Thomas Franklin, who lived in Ecton in Northampton in the mid- sixteenth century.

03:06.658 --> 03:25.150
[SPEAKER_03]: Although the family may have lived there for a long time before that, as he wrote to his wife that Echtin was, quote, the village where my father was born, and where his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had lived, and how many of the family before them we know not, unquote.

03:26.130 --> 03:31.474
[SPEAKER_03]: From his success and eventual wealth, he may assume that Franklin was an oldest son.

03:32.372 --> 03:48.875
[SPEAKER_03]: But, as he wrote to a cousin, quote, I am the youngest son of the youngest son for five generations, whereby I find that had there originally been any estate in the family, none could have stood a worse chance for it, unquote.

03:50.796 --> 03:55.917
[SPEAKER_03]: Inheritance, of course, was one major reason for people to track their family histories.

03:56.990 --> 04:04.995
[SPEAKER_03]: but it wasn't the only reason, and long before Franklin and the Adams' traveled to trace their family stories.

04:05.755 --> 04:17.923
[SPEAKER_03]: American colonists were recording family histories, often on whatever paper they had available, including in accounting books, Almanacs, and Bibles.

04:19.724 --> 04:25.948
[SPEAKER_03]: Most of the Bibles in the colonies were Geneva working James Bibles printed in England.

04:27.475 --> 04:33.003
[SPEAKER_03]: Bibles were printed in the Americas, though, with the first being the Indian Bible.

04:33.724 --> 04:40.875
[SPEAKER_03]: Printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in sixteen sixty-three by Puritan Minister John Elliott.

04:42.264 --> 04:52.832
[SPEAKER_03]: Elliott hoped that by translating the Bible into the previously unwritten Wampanog language, he could convert Native Americans to Christianity.

04:53.673 --> 05:05.122
[SPEAKER_03]: Rising tensions between the colonists and the Wampanog people slowed conversions, and most of the copies of the Indian Bible were destroyed during King Phillips War.

05:06.437 --> 05:25.445
[SPEAKER_03]: More recently, though, the Wompenock Language Reclamation Project, founded by MIT trained linguist Jesse Little Dobeard in nineteen ninety-three, has used the Indian Bible to bring back the Wompenock Language, which went extinct in the nineteenth century.

05:27.066 --> 05:31.768
[SPEAKER_03]: Through the American Revolution, Americans were still reading British Bibles.

05:32.958 --> 05:37.442
[SPEAKER_03]: But after the war began printing their own bibles in larger numbers.

05:38.903 --> 05:53.977
[SPEAKER_03]: In seventeen ninety-one Boston printer Isaiah Thomas, publisher of the newspaper Massachusetts by printed an American Bible with all of the engravings done by American engravers.

05:55.425 --> 06:05.727
[SPEAKER_03]: Benjamin Franklin called Thomas the Baskerville of America, after the famous printer and type designer John Baskerville of Birmingham, England.

06:07.367 --> 06:16.449
[SPEAKER_03]: Thomas put a lot of time and effort into deciding on the correct text for the Bible, and he also included an innovation.

06:17.669 --> 06:24.270
[SPEAKER_03]: Pre-printed pages at the front of the Bible for family's to record their genealogical data

06:25.712 --> 06:31.494
[SPEAKER_03]: Prior to that, people had simply been using blank pages or open spaces to keep these records.

06:32.474 --> 06:40.697
[SPEAKER_03]: But now, Thomas gave them columns for, family record of marriage and births of children, and family record of ducks.

06:42.277 --> 06:46.779
[SPEAKER_03]: Families used these pages differently, even with the pre-printed columns.

06:48.250 --> 06:58.533
[SPEAKER_03]: Ebenezer Lamson's Bible of seventeen ninety-four included not just the dates of his children's birds and their marriages, but also a self-portrait he drew.

07:00.314 --> 07:06.115
[SPEAKER_03]: Thomas' own children had copies of the Bible and recorded family information in them.

07:08.076 --> 07:14.258
[SPEAKER_03]: Some of these early Americans may have been just as genealogy obsessed as their modern counterparts.

07:15.274 --> 07:20.336
[SPEAKER_03]: but they couldn't have predicted how big of a business genealogy would become.

07:22.036 --> 07:29.899
[SPEAKER_03]: After Alex Haley published roots in nineteen seventy-six, interest in genealogy skyrocketed.

07:31.039 --> 07:38.182
[SPEAKER_03]: And by twenty-fourteen genealogy was the second most popular hobby in the United States after gardening.

07:39.499 --> 07:53.182
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the largest of the genealogy websites, ancestry.com, began in the eighties as ancestry publishing, producing genealogy reference guides and family history magazines.

07:54.342 --> 08:02.204
[SPEAKER_03]: And now boasts over thirty billion records in its online database and millions of users.

08:03.658 --> 08:16.340
[SPEAKER_03]: In twenty-twenty, the Black Stone Group, a global asset manager, acquired a majority stake in the ancestry.com in a deal worth four points seven billion dollars.

08:18.460 --> 08:33.243
[SPEAKER_03]: Joining me in this episode is Dr. Karen Wolf, director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library and professor of history at Brown University and to author of lineage

08:34.242 --> 08:38.210
[SPEAKER_03]: genealogy and the power of connection in early America.

08:49.983 --> 08:51.343
[SPEAKER_00]: It's up completely then.

08:51.644 --> 08:53.824
[SPEAKER_00]: My friends and friends will need to stay.

08:54.164 --> 08:56.205
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought that was your system.

08:56.425 --> 09:16.472
[SPEAKER_00]: But I smile at him and said, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah,

09:21.458 --> 09:23.320
[SPEAKER_03]: I care and thanks so much for joining me today.

09:24.081 --> 09:25.782
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

09:25.802 --> 09:26.763
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm delighted to be here.

09:27.704 --> 09:32.249
[SPEAKER_03]: I would love to start with just hearing a little bit about how you got started on this project.

09:32.289 --> 09:34.191
[SPEAKER_03]: You of course have written several other books.

09:34.591 --> 09:36.293
[SPEAKER_03]: So what got you started on this one?

09:37.934 --> 09:40.897
[SPEAKER_02]: I suspect that my story is like a lot of historians.

09:41.077 --> 09:47.302
[SPEAKER_02]: I started out pulling one archival thread and then continuing to pull it.

09:47.562 --> 09:50.945
[SPEAKER_02]: And in my case, I started pulling that thread a long time ago.

09:51.005 --> 09:52.326
[SPEAKER_02]: This book took a long time to write.

09:52.806 --> 09:54.188
[SPEAKER_02]: And I've done something simple.

09:54.668 --> 09:58.972
[SPEAKER_02]: But that archival thread, or I guess it's fair to say it was really a scrap.

09:59.612 --> 10:11.375
[SPEAKER_02]: was really little bits and pieces of paper, eighteen centuries scraps of genealogical research that I was finding in families that I was looking to for other information.

10:11.415 --> 10:26.159
[SPEAKER_02]: I was researching other subjects and I kept finding these little bits and pieces of what looked a lot like the kind of genealogical research that many of the folks in fact who were sitting at tables right next to me in the same libraries and archives were boosting or were working from.

10:26.339 --> 10:26.859
[SPEAKER_02]: And I thought,

10:27.499 --> 10:29.701
[SPEAKER_02]: What are these eighteenth century people doing?

10:30.542 --> 10:39.029
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't they know as I thought I did know that genealogy doesn't really get going as a kind of practice until the nineteenth century.

10:39.229 --> 10:54.001
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't they know that in the eighteenth century they're living in the world of increasing individualism and nuclear families and why would they possibly care about these kind of extended kin and lineage connections, or at least that's who I thought then.

10:54.141 --> 10:54.721
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just

10:55.562 --> 10:58.711
[SPEAKER_02]: was curious and just kept kind of digging.

10:59.011 --> 11:02.380
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think part of what happened is that

11:03.559 --> 11:08.623
[SPEAKER_02]: For me, genealogy becomes the subject that is absolutely everywhere in the eighteenth century archive.

11:08.663 --> 11:11.846
[SPEAKER_02]: And once you see it, you kind of can't unsee it.

11:12.066 --> 11:16.050
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's in so many different kinds of archival material.

11:16.710 --> 11:23.216
[SPEAKER_02]: The pulling that thread became more like loading a echo and feeling like, oh my gosh, they're so much.

11:23.296 --> 11:27.520
[SPEAKER_02]: And how do I even begin to think about this in a comprehensive way?

11:28.773 --> 11:31.014
[SPEAKER_03]: How did you go about doing that research then?

11:31.054 --> 11:36.017
[SPEAKER_03]: Because a lot of what you're finding is hidden inside people's account books or their bibles.

11:36.477 --> 11:38.138
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you go about finding it?

11:39.692 --> 11:44.393
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's so, it's kind of funny because in some ways, it's like hidden in plain sight.

11:44.873 --> 11:47.134
[SPEAKER_02]: The account books are a great example.

11:47.254 --> 11:48.814
[SPEAKER_02]: So thanks for mentioning that.

11:49.434 --> 12:06.339
[SPEAKER_02]: People have often asked me, how do you know how to find people's family records from the team site if they're not stored in the places that we might typically think of like in family bibles, which aren't really a major phenomenon until much later in the end century, really at the end of my period.

12:06.879 --> 12:07.719
[SPEAKER_02]: So how did I find them?

12:08.459 --> 12:14.564
[SPEAKER_02]: So one thing that happened is I started identifying kind of genres and formats where family history could be found.

12:15.044 --> 12:19.688
[SPEAKER_02]: And rather than being described as genealogies, they were described as something else.

12:19.908 --> 12:21.410
[SPEAKER_02]: So in a countbooks, a great example.

12:21.950 --> 12:27.495
[SPEAKER_02]: I would go to a library or an archive, and I'd ask, can I see basically all your ADC and tree account books?

12:27.915 --> 12:36.182
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would know that I could mostly open those account books, either to the middle or to the end, and find a family record there.

12:36.482 --> 12:39.264
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, not always, but very regularly.

12:39.724 --> 12:47.209
[SPEAKER_02]: But in the cataloging, in the subject description, in the description of the particular item, genealogy didn't show up there.

12:47.789 --> 12:50.771
[SPEAKER_02]: So that family history was there the whole time.

12:50.971 --> 12:59.517
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't hiding except in so far as our understanding and description of the item sort of kept it a little submerged.

13:01.093 --> 13:13.424
[SPEAKER_03]: I suppose there's a more basic question if we think of genealogy as something that didn't start until the nineteenth century, but you found that in fact people were doing this in the eighteen century, what is genealogy?

13:13.684 --> 13:17.588
[SPEAKER_03]: And what is its relationship with the academic study of history?

13:18.863 --> 13:30.235
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's funny because a friend of mine recently said, oh, Karen, I love how you describe that like genealogy is like the kind of formal recording, but family history is like the stories people tell and I was like, did I say that?

13:30.836 --> 13:32.398
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what I said.

13:32.418 --> 13:37.903
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that, you know, I sometimes use genealogy and family history almost interchangeably.

13:38.464 --> 13:42.206
[SPEAKER_02]: Geneology is the dictionary definition of it isn't the count of ancestry.

13:42.347 --> 13:49.691
[SPEAKER_02]: So when people talk about parents, my grandparents, my great-great-grandparents, all of that is genealogical.

13:49.951 --> 13:59.278
[SPEAKER_02]: And as you know, in the book, I talk a lot about, in fact, one of the chapters is titled vernacular geneology, which is also the title of my Instagram account, or I put a lot of stuff, too.

14:00.291 --> 14:17.564
[SPEAKER_02]: But I use that term vernacular genealogy because I think it captures a way of thinking about less formal genealogical production than we may think of as became slightly stereotypical and probably not even the real story in the nineteenth century either.

14:18.105 --> 14:19.306
[SPEAKER_02]: But when people started

14:20.006 --> 14:31.929
[SPEAKER_02]: Organizing genealogical societies and started producing enormous family volumes with some of the kind of old settler families and their longer lineages that could be discovered and then documented and then printed.

14:32.089 --> 14:37.150
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, you know print revolution of the nineteenth century, cheap print revolution of the nineteenth century.

14:37.590 --> 14:45.632
[SPEAKER_02]: But what people were doing in the eighteenth century by tucking something in their account book or by keeping a little record with an object.

14:46.092 --> 14:51.833
[SPEAKER_02]: or any one of the other myriad number of ways that I've described here that was also theology.

14:53.454 --> 15:05.336
[SPEAKER_03]: Many of the records that we have of course are written by men because most of the records that we have period are written by men but you have found genealogies from the eighteen century by women as well.

15:05.796 --> 15:10.517
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you talk about the different ways that men and women were approaching genealogy?

15:11.928 --> 15:20.870
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you know, it's kind of a tricky question because of course, as with all things are a couple, it matters a lot.

15:21.610 --> 15:32.693
[SPEAKER_02]: What we're left with and what we think the totality was before the selection process of preservation, cataloging and institutional records production.

15:33.213 --> 15:36.994
[SPEAKER_02]: So what did the whole picture of genealogical production look like?

15:37.054 --> 15:41.735
[SPEAKER_02]: Like was there a difference between how many men versus how many women kept these records?

15:42.575 --> 16:01.967
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe in the sense that one clear pattern I identified was that men who had what I would call chronicling lives, men who were ministers, or men who were town clerks, or lawyers, or school teachers who had lives in which they wrote a lot, and they were expected to keep records in another way.

16:02.687 --> 16:10.310
[SPEAKER_02]: often also kept family records and women didn't often or as often have that same opportunity.

16:10.370 --> 16:11.830
[SPEAKER_02]: So maybe there's a real difference there.

16:12.350 --> 16:18.392
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think there's a real similarity in many of the formats that I see when women have account books.

16:18.632 --> 16:20.453
[SPEAKER_02]: They keep family records in them too.

16:20.913 --> 16:25.475
[SPEAKER_02]: These little hands-own family records, women created those two.

16:26.055 --> 16:31.617
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, women are really centrally important to genealogy in all kinds of ways.

16:31.777 --> 16:32.037
[SPEAKER_02]: Women

16:32.857 --> 16:35.399
[SPEAKER_02]: create, you know, all-gies and lineages through having children.

16:35.999 --> 16:51.070
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, in the cruelest inversion of this kind of very patriarchal society, heritable slavery, the status of slavery and heritable food, the mixed women in many ways, the originating lineages for enslaved people.

16:51.490 --> 16:54.893
[SPEAKER_02]: But women's lineages are important for all people to free people.

16:55.773 --> 17:00.237
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a sort of like, do women produce genealogies and the records that we have,

17:00.897 --> 17:04.500
[SPEAKER_02]: differently are women different subjects of genealogy.

17:04.540 --> 17:07.422
[SPEAKER_02]: These are kind of different questions, both hard to answer.

17:07.442 --> 17:16.309
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the the clearest thing I can say is the gender matters so much in genealogy in the way that it does in almost everything in the eighteenth century.

17:16.689 --> 17:20.732
[SPEAKER_02]: How people understand what's important, what kind of weight they give to certain things.

17:21.072 --> 17:28.678
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, how they hierarchically arrange people and ideas and objects and then ultimately archival stuff.

17:30.132 --> 17:37.414
[SPEAKER_03]: The modern genealogists, of course, can go on ancestry.com and say, find a birth certificate for me.

17:38.134 --> 17:44.856
[SPEAKER_03]: How did these people in the ageing century know so much about their lineage, about where they came from?

17:45.617 --> 17:52.979
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no records for them to go look at, in some cases, or at least no official legal records for them to go look at.

17:53.019 --> 17:53.899
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no internet.

17:55.379 --> 17:56.620
[SPEAKER_03]: How did they know what they knew?

17:57.971 --> 18:21.328
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's another great question that I think is so informed and certainly my approach to it was really informed by the kind of idea that records and a modern record system really came out of nowhere in the nineteenth century and in the mid-ninth century in particular and then the birth certificate and the birth certificate movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century comes out of like, you know, the tatters of no record system.

18:21.749 --> 18:25.411
[SPEAKER_02]: But the thing is in the eighteenth century people of course had record systems.

18:25.572 --> 18:27.033
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just there looks so different.

18:27.533 --> 18:28.114
[SPEAKER_02]: to ours.

18:28.614 --> 18:34.098
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's start with one, which is people telling one another, you relate to this person and that person.

18:34.619 --> 18:39.463
[SPEAKER_02]: And that kind of oral testimony shows up in court records in all kinds of ways.

18:39.843 --> 18:56.177
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe one of the clearest examples is in freedom suits or manual mission lawsuits, where enslaved people want to document their descent from a free woman in order to kind of change their own status and the status of their children.

18:56.877 --> 19:07.359
[SPEAKER_02]: And in many of those cases, it's really extraordinary, the extent to which they can recount their lineages, particularly their maternal lineages in quite detailed ways.

19:07.460 --> 19:14.381
[SPEAKER_02]: And sometimes bringing in testimony from folks to say, yes, I knew that person, yes, I knew ham other, yes, I knew them in the neighborhood.

19:14.741 --> 19:15.181
[SPEAKER_02]: And so on.

19:15.221 --> 19:19.682
[SPEAKER_02]: So we can never underestimate the value of families telling one another stories.

19:19.922 --> 19:22.483
[SPEAKER_02]: That's just super valuable, always.

19:22.663 --> 19:26.404
[SPEAKER_02]: And we have that kind of captured in those core records.

19:26.964 --> 19:34.148
[SPEAKER_02]: And then secondly, every single colony required and then state required keeping records in one way or another.

19:34.208 --> 19:35.709
[SPEAKER_02]: They weren't always the same.

19:36.289 --> 19:47.356
[SPEAKER_02]: So like in Pennsylvania, for example, there's this like great reference in the original Pennsylvania colonial law that just says like every denomination has to keep these records in their responsible for it.

19:47.456 --> 19:48.456
[SPEAKER_02]: Births, marriages, and deaths.

19:48.496 --> 19:49.897
[SPEAKER_02]: What we think of as basic files.

19:50.437 --> 19:51.318
[SPEAKER_02]: Gotta keep that stuff.

19:51.658 --> 19:57.344
[SPEAKER_02]: And in other places in New England, for example, they would say the town clerk is responsible for keeping these things in the town.

19:57.384 --> 20:00.247
[SPEAKER_02]: But everyone had a requirement.

20:00.287 --> 20:02.309
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, were they for click-hept?

20:02.830 --> 20:02.950
[SPEAKER_02]: No.

20:03.411 --> 20:04.312
[SPEAKER_02]: Were they centralized?

20:04.612 --> 20:04.732
[SPEAKER_02]: No.

20:05.112 --> 20:11.179
[SPEAKER_02]: But people had a sense that there was a record system and that they could go to it and retrieve things.

20:12.320 --> 20:22.249
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I have found great examples of people writing to ministers, for example, and saying, I would like to know, you know, what date my grandparents were married could you tell me?

20:23.090 --> 20:36.742
[SPEAKER_02]: Or Quakers, like famously fantastic record keepers for our specific reasons, but writing to the clerk of the meeting and saying, I would like to know even about this on our uncle, you know, where we might think like,

20:37.791 --> 20:49.666
[SPEAKER_02]: that that information may not be immediately critical, but for them it was because they were doing this kind of genealogical framing, you know, this is not just like immediately, you know, my mother or my father, it's a kind of a wider thing.

20:50.066 --> 20:56.514
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I guess just last, you know, as you know, I've had a hard time letting go of the research for this project to keep

20:56.995 --> 21:01.479
[SPEAKER_02]: kind of going with it, which is part of why that Instagram account exists so I can just keep putting stuff there.

21:01.959 --> 21:07.744
[SPEAKER_02]: And I love, especially finding more material here in Rhode Island where I just moved, you know, three or so years ago.

21:08.545 --> 21:14.310
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'd love to use an example from the Rhode Island Historical Society of a minister.

21:14.330 --> 21:19.875
[SPEAKER_02]: This is in, seventeen, seventy, a minister who documented a marriage in his church.

21:20.555 --> 21:24.257
[SPEAKER_02]: He wrote out details, this person married that person, and here's my information.

21:24.557 --> 21:31.961
[SPEAKER_02]: But on the back side of that scrap of paper, which really is an extraordinary little glue, and it might not otherwise have survived.

21:32.281 --> 21:38.684
[SPEAKER_02]: On the back of it, the town clerk recorded, I got it, and I put it in the town record on this page.

21:38.724 --> 21:41.866
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I went and verified, yep, it is in fact on that page.

21:42.346 --> 21:47.469
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a fantastic thing because it shows us this kind of process of record keeping.

21:48.130 --> 21:54.774
[SPEAKER_02]: So there were records and people could use them, not perhaps in the fullest way that we think now.

21:54.954 --> 21:57.756
[SPEAKER_02]: But truthfully, is there any record system that's perfect?

21:59.030 --> 22:03.433
[SPEAKER_03]: I have been doing some family research of my own and my grandfather.

22:03.493 --> 22:05.114
[SPEAKER_03]: So this is not that long ago.

22:05.554 --> 22:08.176
[SPEAKER_03]: There is a dispute of what his birth date is.

22:08.456 --> 22:10.677
[SPEAKER_03]: It's within one week, one way or another.

22:10.817 --> 22:14.720
[SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, he grew up thinking one thing found a birth certificate later that said something else.

22:14.800 --> 22:21.203
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I've done sort of a deep dive into, well, this record says this, well, this record says this and which one should we trust and what's actually true?

22:22.344 --> 22:38.110
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, I mean, I think that's such a great example because, you know, we can so easily fall into the trap of in that modern records are, you know, infallible when we know that of course they're not like even when we think about like the pressures on people to produce like census information now.

22:38.470 --> 22:48.954
[SPEAKER_02]: You think about the kinds of ways that people feel resistant to information, very personal information that's being elicited from them or even extracted from them and they may not want to provide it.

22:49.534 --> 22:54.056
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, and they may, they may provide something that's not always like going to an accurate.

22:54.156 --> 23:00.218
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's think about, you know, when people are being asked to authenticate their ages for certain things and they don't always.

23:00.718 --> 23:06.060
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think those record systems in the past were not perfect and we're not complete and we're not centralized.

23:06.200 --> 23:12.202
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, but it's also not true that what we have replaced them with is somehow infallible.

23:13.271 --> 23:18.318
[SPEAKER_03]: You mentioned the Quakers and how much they did to trace family histories.

23:18.818 --> 23:27.870
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you talk a little bit about why that was important to them and how that then serves as a basis for us in some ways of keeping records going forward?

23:29.255 --> 23:31.097
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's such an interesting story.

23:31.177 --> 23:41.170
[SPEAKER_02]: So that little archival thread that I really began with was when I was working on a group of Quaker women who were writers in the eighteen century Delaware Valley.

23:41.210 --> 23:44.214
[SPEAKER_02]: I was really interested in them and many of them are related one to the other.

23:44.734 --> 23:50.316
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, of course, I was like always looking at, they would refer to one another as cousin, and I'd be like, well, which kind of cousins?

23:50.336 --> 23:52.677
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I was trying to fill out family trees and so on.

23:53.017 --> 24:00.799
[SPEAKER_02]: So I knew that Quakers would be important and, you know, I kind of had information from this group to start with.

24:01.259 --> 24:11.523
[SPEAKER_02]: But what I hadn't counted on was that understanding the depth and the infrastructure of Quaker record keeping would be so revealing.

24:12.243 --> 24:25.286
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's really important to understand that for Quakers that record keeping practice originates in the late seventeenth century and they're founding as a really beleaguered, in fact, vulnerable to nomination.

24:25.446 --> 24:33.028
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, when the Quakers are founded in the late seventeenth century, they are under an enormous amount of pressure in fact, they're being imprisoned for their beliefs.

24:33.748 --> 24:39.730
[SPEAKER_02]: And part of what they're doing is they're starting to keep records because they feel like that will make them less vulnerable.

24:40.470 --> 24:43.973
[SPEAKER_02]: to the state authorities in England in particular.

24:44.493 --> 24:52.038
[SPEAKER_02]: So they will say one to the other, the Quaker founders, George Fox and then his his later wife Margaret Fel, would say we must keep these records.

24:52.078 --> 25:00.545
[SPEAKER_02]: You keep a separate record of marriages just in case and keep a record of births born to that marriage just in case.

25:01.145 --> 25:11.296
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, this goes to the point about like why record keeping to so important for people in their whole variety of different reasons, some of them are deeply emotional, but some of them are deeply practical.

25:11.897 --> 25:21.468
[SPEAKER_02]: If a marriage is not recognized as legitimate, then the property from that marriage cannot necessarily be inherited by the children of that relationship.

25:21.948 --> 25:30.193
[SPEAKER_02]: So keeping their own separate records documented witness, this is a huge thing for Quakers making sure everything is witnessed is really important.

25:30.653 --> 25:34.456
[SPEAKER_02]: And so that the Quaker record really begins right from the beginning.

25:34.576 --> 25:36.277
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're very clear about that.

25:36.337 --> 25:41.019
[SPEAKER_02]: Now there's another piece to this, which is that the Quakers are a birthright denomination.

25:41.180 --> 25:46.463
[SPEAKER_02]: So knowing that a person was born to Quaker parents was equally important.

25:47.203 --> 25:54.390
[SPEAKER_02]: and Quakers begin to move out into the wider kind of British imperial world and beyond and establish different meetings.

25:54.490 --> 25:56.512
[SPEAKER_02]: They also need to say yes.

25:57.393 --> 26:02.057
[SPEAKER_02]: You can be a member of the Quaker meeting because you're a Quaker and we know you're a Quaker because you were born to this person and that person.

26:02.497 --> 26:03.839
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's that dynamic too.

26:05.520 --> 26:12.767
[SPEAKER_02]: It really is this idea that they need to create a record system that makes them less vulnerable, basically, to the government.

26:13.188 --> 26:15.330
[SPEAKER_02]: And that, I think, really interesting.

26:15.690 --> 26:22.918
[SPEAKER_02]: And they so fit a broader British American practice, but even within that, they have this distinctive quality.

26:24.262 --> 26:32.044
[SPEAKER_03]: You mentioned earlier that Reddit Terry nature of slavery in America and of course that goes through the maternal line.

26:32.064 --> 26:43.048
[SPEAKER_03]: I think some people might have a thought in their mind that well enslaved people never knew where they came from or it was impossible to trace back records and of course what you show in this book is that

26:43.368 --> 26:49.394
[SPEAKER_03]: That may be true for some, but is often not the case that they do very much know what their family line is.

26:49.814 --> 26:55.560
[SPEAKER_03]: Could you talk some about that and the ways you mentioned freedom suits the way that that shows up and is important?

26:56.814 --> 27:08.739
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you know, I often referenced this because it was an important moment for me, but I had the opportunity to share a lot of this work with different groups as I was developing the project over this period of time.

27:08.779 --> 27:14.701
[SPEAKER_02]: And one of the best questions I got was essentially about the nature of positive versus negative evidence.

27:14.781 --> 27:22.004
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was like, OK, so Karen, you've got all these examples of people who produce genealogical information, what about people who didn't?

27:22.544 --> 27:32.894
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, are they like the silent majority kind of, you know, how do you know that genealogy is so important if so many people, you know, you don't have evidence about their participation?

27:33.815 --> 27:41.001
[SPEAKER_02]: And my answer to that really is that people, some people may not have cared about genealogy per se, but genealogy always cared about them.

27:41.742 --> 27:52.912
[SPEAKER_02]: That is that the structure of British American law and society and governance was so deeply and profoundly structurally committed to genealogy in all these kinds of ways.

27:53.012 --> 27:57.936
[SPEAKER_02]: The law was so fundamentally about inheritance and property, including

27:58.396 --> 28:09.961
[SPEAKER_02]: around slavery, that knowing one's family relationships was extraordinarily important or knowing someone else's family relationships or insisting on that I can maintain of other people was really important.

28:10.381 --> 28:25.268
[SPEAKER_02]: So when it comes to enslaved people, of course, and this is true for indigenous people too, or even to a lesser degree, from other kinds of European kinds of cultures, like the Dutch or the French or whatever, who had slightly different legal systems than the British,

28:26.028 --> 28:44.354
[SPEAKER_02]: These are nonetheless all groups that had to participate within a British American genealogical context, which was really framed by the particularities of its law, which is really patriarchal, very focused on lineage and very focused on property and inheritance rights.

28:44.934 --> 28:49.777
[SPEAKER_02]: So I know this is a long way around answering your question about like, but what about enslaved people?

28:50.397 --> 29:03.365
[SPEAKER_02]: So it is absolutely the case that in slavers kept records of how people were related one to the other because that document to their property and both their property access and property rights and even when there were disputes.

29:04.225 --> 29:12.050
[SPEAKER_02]: But through so many of these cases, we hear the evidence of enslaved people's understanding of their family relationships.

29:12.110 --> 29:17.414
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, we also know that, you know, transatlantic slavery ripped families apart.

29:18.074 --> 29:27.761
[SPEAKER_02]: And in one of the cruelest things, which I think extraordinary group of feminist scholars have shown, I think about Jessica Marie Johnson, and so many others, Marisa Fuentes and so many others.

29:28.141 --> 29:33.745
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the cruelest pieces of transatlantic slavery is to really rip kinship from its meaning.

29:34.405 --> 29:44.947
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet to ask a few to reconstruct or to expect people to reconstruct emotional connections and family connections within this unbelievably cruel context.

29:45.307 --> 30:02.570
[SPEAKER_02]: But we know that some people really did and we know that they were able to recount those relationships and that those relationships were both emotionally meaningful and also had instrumental value just as they did for all people existing within this kind of British American genealogical regime.

30:03.986 --> 30:13.675
[SPEAKER_03]: As the American colonies become the United States and there's theoretically this focus on, you know, we don't have kings and a lineage doesn't matter.

30:13.735 --> 30:14.816
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't have royalty.

30:14.836 --> 30:18.380
[SPEAKER_03]: One might expect that there would be less interest in genealogy.

30:18.500 --> 30:23.925
[SPEAKER_03]: But of course, as you show, all of the founders were also super interested in genealogy.

30:25.240 --> 30:28.962
[SPEAKER_03]: How do we explain that or understand what's going on there?

30:28.982 --> 30:30.583
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, thank you.

30:30.623 --> 30:31.464
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a great question.

30:31.484 --> 30:34.465
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I have said that I had kind of two aims with this book.

30:34.985 --> 30:48.213
[SPEAKER_02]: I wanted people to begin to think about genealogy differently, both not as this kind of private hobby sort of entertainment thing, but is something that is just much more deeply profoundly and publicly important.

30:49.033 --> 30:51.015
[SPEAKER_02]: and having obviously a longer history.

30:51.155 --> 31:09.413
[SPEAKER_02]: And I wanted people to think about early America, definitely too, because those two narratives, as I suggested in one of our earlier exchanges, those two narratives about genealogy really starts in the nineteenth century, and early America, the eighteenth centuries, like this great age of democratic individualism, and so on, those narratives worked against my understanding

31:10.013 --> 31:14.638
[SPEAKER_02]: of this topic, and I think they work against it for all of us.

31:14.698 --> 31:22.405
[SPEAKER_02]: We would expect people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and so on to be like, why would I care about lineage?

31:22.565 --> 31:23.947
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, you know, this new man.

31:24.047 --> 31:27.510
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm less like, you know, new emblem of democracy.

31:28.010 --> 31:34.316
[SPEAKER_02]: But Ben Franklin, he writes the autobiography that we often talk about as emblematic of the new American.

31:34.957 --> 31:41.579
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet that autobiography begins with an account of doing a genealogical research trip with his son.

31:42.260 --> 31:46.361
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have just really seen past it.

31:46.621 --> 31:49.362
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess the power of these narratives is really profound.

31:49.963 --> 31:56.265
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it was really hard for me to find any of the so-called founding fathers who weren't interested in genealogy.

31:56.765 --> 31:58.047
[SPEAKER_02]: I have yet to find one.

31:58.547 --> 32:16.666
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, really I can just amuse myself, but I'm finding yet another one and then just kind of scrub around a little bit and you find that of course they were because they needed to, they needed to understand their family relationships in order to understand their own situation in the world, whether that was financial or otherwise.

32:17.346 --> 32:19.108
[SPEAKER_02]: Just the day I was reading it.

32:20.009 --> 32:24.112
[SPEAKER_02]: Just as an exercise, I was trying to find something from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

32:24.192 --> 32:33.159
[SPEAKER_02]: And I read a series of exchanges of a woman with her brother who's a soldier in seventeen seventy five to seventy seven.

32:33.439 --> 32:35.481
[SPEAKER_02]: And she says to him, she's in Philadelphia.

32:35.501 --> 32:39.124
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a merchant family, relatively recent immigrant Irish immigrants.

32:39.464 --> 32:41.786
[SPEAKER_02]: And she says to him, hey, you know what?

32:42.627 --> 32:46.550
[SPEAKER_02]: Our relatives actually are related to General Washington's wife.

32:47.410 --> 32:50.631
[SPEAKER_02]: And you might just subtly drop that hint.

32:51.091 --> 32:57.933
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I'm going to tell you all the ways that were related, so it's like from him to him and ultimately it's like a second cousin thing.

32:58.453 --> 32:59.434
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't have to say all that.

32:59.874 --> 33:07.896
[SPEAKER_02]: You can just say casually that you may know from a manuscript of your grandfather's that, you know, yes, there was this shared name.

33:08.316 --> 33:10.157
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's like it's a kind of a currency.

33:10.217 --> 33:19.261
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a language that people adopt to explain their connections one to another, and they're not at all so kind of an open, instrumental about it.

33:19.761 --> 33:32.407
[SPEAKER_02]: But it is so thick in the culture that maybe we should never expect these so-called founders to have not been invested, to have not been fluent in that language.

33:33.896 --> 33:40.039
[SPEAKER_03]: I loved the part about Abigail Adams, also going on a genealogical trip to England.

33:40.219 --> 33:44.300
[SPEAKER_03]: And I saw in there that she was from her family, was from Devon.

33:44.500 --> 33:46.641
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was like, well, I've got family from Devon too.

33:46.741 --> 33:50.043
[SPEAKER_03]: And I looked it up, and I was like, oh, that was like five miles away.

33:50.103 --> 33:52.003
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe I'm related to Abigail Adams.

33:52.023 --> 33:55.505
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's more likely my family worked for her family, but you know.

33:56.923 --> 33:58.704
[SPEAKER_02]: all the connections, all the connections.

33:58.904 --> 33:59.444
[SPEAKER_02]: Yep, yep.

33:59.524 --> 34:19.173
[SPEAKER_02]: That's one of the fun things actually in just getting to talk to people about the book finally and not just talking to my own head or to my, you know, my peer reviewers for the press or so on is that so many people have fantastic stories of their experience of doing genealogical research, thinking about what genealogy means to them of how they've encountered people, of how they're connecting with

34:19.653 --> 34:27.360
[SPEAKER_02]: this kind of eighteen-century practice, both in its kind of fantastical qualities, but also in its horrifying quality, frankly, too.

34:28.747 --> 34:41.996
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe we could talk just more broadly about why family history is important, why more people should be thinking about family history instead of just maybe institutional history or something.

34:42.176 --> 34:46.600
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, when I started this podcast, I always joked that like, I want to know everything else that was in the president.

34:47.400 --> 34:53.284
[SPEAKER_03]: So obviously the president showed up here, but it's a much bigger, more important, more monumental story.

34:53.344 --> 34:56.847
[SPEAKER_03]: I think then what you might get if you just sort of follow the president's.

34:57.920 --> 34:58.180
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

34:58.741 --> 34:59.122
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.

34:59.402 --> 35:11.780
[SPEAKER_02]: I keep telling myself that one of these days, I'm actually going to start doing on social media what I do with my newspaper every day, which is to highlight all the ways that family is either a subject of policy.

35:13.022 --> 35:14.904
[SPEAKER_02]: or is a subject of a story.

35:15.464 --> 35:22.771
[SPEAKER_02]: So family history or an individual family's history or the history of how we have thought about families is so deeply important.

35:23.331 --> 35:32.599
[SPEAKER_02]: It's in some ways like the failure of our discipline right to have said for centuries that what's important in history is like politics and economics.

35:34.340 --> 35:56.775
[SPEAKER_02]: war, but not the thing that frames most people's existence, which is families in one country, extra, sometimes a warm and supportive one, sometimes a really violent one, but also that governments have shaped themselves so profoundly around thinking about and trying to understand and trying to shape and restrain

35:57.475 --> 36:02.576
[SPEAKER_02]: families for so long it's really a loss not to be thinking about that.

36:02.977 --> 36:17.881
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know I start to think about like okay if these are the subjects that are so obvious in the archives and yet we've kind of overlooked them is that the same thing we're doing like with with family now and I think yes basically yes.

36:19.622 --> 36:29.191
[SPEAKER_03]: What it asked you, you were one of the founders of women also know history, which I love, and I've used a lot when trying to find people to talk to on something histories.

36:29.291 --> 36:33.915
[SPEAKER_03]: So I wonder if we could just talk about the the impetus behind that and what it, but it works to do.

36:34.840 --> 36:42.146
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's super proud of women also know history and special shout out to Katie Telling who has been our social media manager for a couple of years and done an amazing job.

36:42.566 --> 36:55.257
[SPEAKER_02]: Keisha Blaine and Emily Pryfogal and I started women also know history quite some years ago now who were inspired by a political science group led by Christina Walrecht at Notre Dame called women also know stuff.

36:55.937 --> 37:03.483
[SPEAKER_02]: which was profiled, I think in the Washington Post and I read it, like I want to say, you know, was it in two thousand eleven, two thousand twelve?

37:03.543 --> 37:04.604
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know something like that.

37:04.644 --> 37:13.832
[SPEAKER_02]: And we read about their work to really highlight the work of women political scientists and to kind of create a kind of media tool.

37:14.372 --> 37:17.575
[SPEAKER_02]: So we got in touch with Christina and said, could we do women also know history?

37:17.675 --> 37:22.019
[SPEAKER_02]: And now there's like women also know law too, which is very cool and M's been involved in that as well.

37:22.579 --> 37:27.822
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's a media and curriculum tool for highlighting the work of women and minority historians.

37:28.443 --> 37:42.971
[SPEAKER_02]: And we feel like it's been really important because, although things are getting better, the typical stereotypical idea of a historian has long been, a white, older guy wearing tweed, you know, and elbow patches.

37:43.511 --> 37:47.094
[SPEAKER_02]: Actually, I think it was always like Harrison Ford in those movies, right?

37:47.174 --> 37:48.595
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, actually, he's an anthropologist.

37:49.475 --> 38:01.860
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, so we wanted to create a site where people could build profiles and share their expertise and then journalists and others, including other folks who were trying to find other people for conference proposals and stuff like that.

38:02.281 --> 38:03.241
[SPEAKER_02]: Could locate one another.

38:03.401 --> 38:04.161
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's been great.

38:04.181 --> 38:12.845
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I don't even know how I think it's like six thousand scholars who are listed on the site now, which is pretty great.

38:12.865 --> 38:15.726
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to encourage listeners to read lineage.

38:15.846 --> 38:17.267
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you tell them how they can get a copy?

38:18.110 --> 38:18.850
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, thank you so much.

38:19.351 --> 38:27.475
[SPEAKER_02]: So you can order directly from Oxford University Press, your local independent bookstore, highly encouraged your local library.

38:27.755 --> 38:39.142
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of the most fun things I've heard from folks from research over the last several weeks since the book was published on July second is people telling me that their library had a couple of copies, but it's got a waiting list.

38:39.202 --> 38:41.043
[SPEAKER_02]: I always come fully lead throughout.

38:41.443 --> 38:43.524
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, that's absolutely the best.

38:43.744 --> 38:44.685
[SPEAKER_02]: So thank you all very much.

38:45.525 --> 38:47.926
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?

38:49.567 --> 38:58.032
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just so happy to have a chance to rattle on about this thing that has been in my head for so long and I'm so happy to have like readers and listeners to talk to.

38:58.132 --> 39:03.615
[SPEAKER_02]: People have been contacting me through my website, KarenWolf.com and that is super fun too.

39:03.715 --> 39:06.777
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been learning so much about people's thoughts about genealogy.

39:06.857 --> 39:07.417
[SPEAKER_02]: It's been great.

39:08.117 --> 39:09.838
[SPEAKER_02]: Karen, thank you so much for speaking with me.

39:10.899 --> 39:12.260
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for having me.

39:12.400 --> 39:12.820
[SPEAKER_02]: It's been great.

39:14.518 --> 39:16.999
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening to Unsung History.

39:17.019 --> 39:21.982
[SPEAKER_00]: Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app.

39:22.042 --> 39:25.603
[SPEAKER_00]: You can find the sources used for this episode in a full episode transcript.

39:44.123 --> 39:46.007
[SPEAKER_01]: at unsung historypodcast.com.

39:46.648 --> 39:52.739
[SPEAKER_01]: To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by unsung history are in the public domain, or are used with permission.

39:53.560 --> 40:00.513
[SPEAKER_01]: You can find us on Twitter or Instagram at unsung underscore underscore history, or on Facebook at unsung history podcast.

40:01.094 --> 40:04.741
[SPEAKER_01]: The contact is with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions.

40:05.202 --> 40:07.746
[SPEAKER_01]: Please email Kelley at unsung historypodcast.com.

40:08.487 --> 40:12.455
[SPEAKER_01]: If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know.

40:12.795 --> 40:13.016
[SPEAKER_01]: Bye.