This lovely post about writing family history in a way that is engaging even for non-genealogists got me thinking about an experience I had a few years ago.
I signed up to go to a seminar put on by a local genealogical organization. It was a daylong event that included several sessions on different topics and lunch. It was the first time I had ever gone to anything like that, and I was really excited! The topics sounded interesting to me, and I was looking forward to learning and meeting some new people. I stayed with my grandparents for a couple days to attend, because it was close to where they live, a few hours from my home.
My grandma ended up coming with me, and I was so happy that someone else was interested enough to come with! I hadn’t expected anyone to be.
Well…
The first session started with someone showing a bunch of pictures from a recent trip a group of people had taken to various parts of Europe. They had visited churches to see old records and had found the places where some ancestors had lived. That part was pretty cool, although I wasn’t really learning anything.
After the pictures, the speaker then launched into a long spiel about the research that had been done about the ancestors from the places that were visited. This consisted of slides and slides of names, with spouses and children attached and dates of birth, marriage, and death. This went on for like, an hour. It was boring. There was no context, no stories, nothing but just names and dates of people born in the 1600s. I felt like I was going to crawl out of my own skin by the end of it, and I felt terrible for my grandma, because I know she felt the same way, but probably even more as she’s not the one who is interested in genealogy!
I ended up staying for the second session, but it was more of the same, and we left before lunch. I didn’t want to put myself or my grandma through anymore torture. If someone who is a total family history nerd like I am found the presentation interminably long and impossible to care about, something was wrong! This was the first time I ever really considered what my own opinion is on how to approach sharing genealogical research and what makes it interesting in the first place. That day was the day I realized that I really couldn’t care less about extending my lines as far back as I can if I’m not able to also attach context and meaning and stories to the names and dates. If it’s just collecting names, what’s the point?
It kind of changed my approach to my own work, because I knew I didn’t want to be one of those genealogists… droning on and on about long-dead people nobody cares about. It surprised me to feel that way, because up to that point I had kind of believed that the only people who feel that way about genealogists are people who don’t care about it. And I most certainly do care! But I understood then why many people have that perspective on genealogy; if that presentation was what genealogy is, I wouldn’t be interested either! Unfortunately this type of work is quite common.
I’m not saying there’s no value in collecting dates and names—it’s an important part of the process, to be sure. But it is not the end goal for me, or a goal at all, really. For me, it really is all about the story.
Another relevant anecdote: a few years ago I signed up for an online advanced genealogy course. It included assignments that were graded with feedback.
I was really enjoying working through the assignments and learning a lot, and I was getting good feedback; I was most proud when the feedback was something like “this was so fun to read!” That’s what I care about. I was also getting great suggestions for how to improve.
At some point during the course the person who had previously been grading assignments left and was replaced. The new grader, apparently, had a different approach. The feedback I received was no longer largely positive with some tips for improvement; I was getting comments like “people normally use a more formal style when writing about genealogy…” And endless nitpicks over how citations were formatted. (I gotta say, I didn’t agree with that feedback. I used the same format they went over in the course, and having been to college, I’m not unfamiliar with the principles of citing your sources, and I’m in no way opposed to citing sources properly where they’re expected!)
It sucked all the joy out of the course for me, and I didn’t finish it. I was really disappointed with myself for not finishing, because I don’t normally give up on things part way through, but I realized I wasn’t enjoying it anymore and I had research I wanted to do that wasn’t being done because I was busy trudging through this course. I didn’t agree that my informal writing style was a problem, and it made me feel bad to keep being told that it was, particularly after having had such a vastly different experience during the first part of the course. I didn’t want to change that about myself.
I’m not a professional genealogist… I’m a software engineer. :-) This is a hobby for me. The only reason I do it at all is because I enjoy it. I do care about my research being available to others after I’m gone, and I’d like to share the most interesting bits with my family, because these stories are about their ancestors, too. I don’t want to scare them away or make people avoid me because I might start rambling on about who begat who 300 years ago.
These thoughts and experiences are what eventually led me to start my blog here on Substack, where we can tell our stories however we want. I had no idea at the time that there would be a whole genealogy community here soon after I joined! I wasn’t even planning on sharing my blog widely within my own circle; I only shared it directly with a few friends who are interested in genealogy. I never expected people to actually read it; just hoped that if anyone was ever Googling for information about the people and topics I write about, that they’d find my stuff. The reality has been so much better! It’s been so fun reading other people’s stories and sharing my own. And not a list of uncontextualized dates and names in sight… :-)
I think a lot of us have had those same ah ha moments, I know I have. Thanks for articulating them so beautifully. I think family history and genealogy both deserve good selling telling while also benefitting from all the research we can gather. As creatives, I think we need all that stuff rolling around in our heads in order to be good storytellers - which you most definitely are!
This is one of the reasons I am hesitating to start the process to get certified as a genealogist. It seems there are a lot of practitioners out there who you describe. While I understand the need for proof standards and correct citation, I sometimes see a lot of rigor around evidence for the sake of evidence… with nothing further to say about it. What’s the point if not to get to know these names as people?