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January/February 2008 · Historically Speaking 45 Why Family History?* Joseph A. Amato Family is the well of self. It makes childhoods, imprints memories, and offers models for a lifetime. Doing family history provides a distinct type of selfknowledge , which is timely and even indispensable in this age of abstractions, ideological battles, and mass culture. Family history shows us the specific historical creatures who shaped our parents and their parents , making us see ourselves, too, as actors in an immediate, lived history—and this is worthy of reflection. Although I was trained as an intellectual and cultural historian of early modern Europe , I have spent more than two decades working on local history, which shares long and open borders with genealogy and family history. Having learned to give life to the dead of other tribes, it followed that I should seek to animate my own. There are challenges, of course. A family history can be limited by narrowness of subject, distorted by gaps of information and evidence, and constricted by the interests and imagination of its creator . Furthermore, family historians must take care that their ideals don't distort their histories. We forget that families were not always composed of two parents and their children. For coundess centuries, families were dedicated to reproduction and economic survival rather than fostering individual emotions and happiness. Until roughly a century ago, the household was a work unit, necessary for survival in both countryside and town. And even with this in mind, it is easy to forget, when contending with sentiment and nostalgia, that variations in circumstances , environment, and institutions determined die stability and form of the family. Beyond satisfying our curiosity about, as Rabelais joked, "die kings and thieves" that alternately bejewel our past, family history provides detailed and concrete ways to talk about society and ourselves. It confirms our family's stories, testifies to duties and indignities borne, and validates individual acts of wrong and evil and die price of risk, loyalty, and sacrifice . Likewise, this same history joins us to other histories, as we discover that we are not of pure heart or certain lineage, of single class or race or ethnicity , or of definite origins or fixed causes. Chances weigh heavily—tiiey are in fact preponderant—that we are of mixed breed, an incalculable and perhaps unfathomable result of diverse combinations and unexplained but indisputable mutations. Woven of * Excerpted fromJoseph A. AmatoJacob's Well: Rethinking Family History . Copyright 2008 by the Minnesota Historical Society. All rights reserved . An Italian family of berry pickers, Cannon, Delaware, 1910. Library of Congress , Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-nclc00097 ]. fad and fancy, commerce and technology, war and revolution, freedom and necessity, our individual histories testify to the singular but crooked paths along which we traveled to the present. We are of the fleshy, spirited, contradictory stuff democratic poet Whitman sang. When we write family history, we join that song. Formed on North American shores for more than 250 years, my family was woven out of strands of Sicilian mountaineers, French Acadian swamp dwellers, English Midlanders, West Prussian farmers , and pre-famine Irish Protestants and Cadiolics. My family's past was composed on the largest looms of North American history, with its laws, economic transformations, industrialization, migrations, and wars. Yet it can only be recreated in die spirit of the long and patient handcraft of quilting, joining bits and pieces from church, work, and cemetery records; ship manifests, censuses, and property tides; excerpts of newspaper articles, personal letters, and notes; and one extensive journal. In the process of reconstructing the family past, I found myself juxtaposing distinct padis of migration, studying numerous localities, examining individual marriages, and pondering the meaning of many stories and singular fates. Like the family histories of many, if not most Americans, mine is a history of mixed ancestry, which has proved, contrary to common prejudice, to be rich in information and filled with surprise. Formed of rural and pre-national peoples, of no single literate or national culture, my family surely was more a creation of nature, environment, and local conditions dian any pure ethnicity. More than anything , our story is coincidental with the history of the American...

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