Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History (review)

Book Reviews Jacob’s Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History. By Joseph A. Amato. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Press, 2008. xvi, 279 pp. $32.95. ISBN 978-087351 -613-6. Tracing one’s family history is a popular pastime, as evidenced by the multitude of materials that are available to instruct the researcher in discovering the records that their ancestors created. Amato suggests that the typical genealogy has little historical significance because it fails to increase our knowledge of national, economic, and social history. This book successfully demonstrates how a researcher might broaden his or her perspective by incorporating a variety of historical resources, and it suggests materials that the family historian can consult to accomplish this goal. In Jacob’s Well, Amato illustrates, with his own family, how a family history can have broader appeal and validity by correlating the experiences of his ancestors to those of the region, nation, and world. In his example, we learn about the financial and social forces that propelled people from their ancestral homes to a new and unknown world. He demonstrates how crushing poverty caused his grandparents to become two of the seven million Italians to travel to America between 1871 and 1914. He tells of his Boudrot family, who were “among those tragic Acadians, who, in 1755, were uprooted en masse from their homeland in Nova Scotia” (p. 63). Amato tracks settlement and migration patterns of nineteenth-century America as they relate to his ancestors, illustrating personal, emotional, and financial motivations that led to the distribution of people across the country. The ejection of his grandmother Frances Boodry Linsdeau’s ancestors from Acadia may have led to her restlessness and continuing search for “forty acres, and all mine” (p. 45). Careful reading of land records and tax rolls may expose the financial standing of a family and help to explain their movements. “Their migrations, unique to them, were typical of hundreds of thousands of poor American families who had their hopes and sought their place in the interior of the new and expanding republic” (p. 87). Amato posits that death and dying are “powerful sources of stories” and another way that we can learn about ourselves (p. 128). Drawing from family stories and articles in the local newspaper, he recounts the T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 146 story of his great-grandfather James Boodry’s death from rabies. Amato provides contradictory accounts of the death from two family members, illustrating how stories can grow and change with retelling and demonstrating the importance of consulting every available source when trying to establish fact. Amato uses his great-grandfather Jacob Linsdau, who arrived from Prussia in 1866 at age eighteen, as an example of how the immigrant poor had a difficult time escaping poverty. Jacob owned a saloon, worked in the mills, and served as alderman for four terms, yet his prosperity was tied to the fortunes of the mill, as were so many others in company towns. When the U.S. declared war on Germany in 1917, Jacob and his family were treated with suspicion because of their ancestry to the point that business at his bar declined. The family attempted to deflect social stigma by changing their surname. Expanding family research beyond the confines of direct lineage can provide a broader understanding of the family’s place in society. In the chapter “Cousins of the Tongue,” Amato describes how cousins “illustrate a family’s potential for variety” (p. 176). Although cousins share much of the same genetic material, they also incorporate new and different influences, connecting us to society. He does not omit unpleasant or unsavory stories to protect the family’s image because these stories are part of the whole and explain subsequent behaviors and attitudes. “Hiding and revealing, confirming and conflicting, in their testimony, stories stand guard as the inner significance and outer meaning of a family ” (p. 125). Yet he condones the practice of selective forgetting when it can lead to healing (p. 241). A companion piece to his Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History (Berkeley...