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  • City of Remembering: A History of Genealogy in New Orleans by Susan Tucker
  • Rebecca Sheehan
City of Remembering: A History of Genealogy in New Orleans. By Susan Tucker. ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016. Pp. xii, 228. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-0621-5.)

In City of Remembering: A History of Genealogy in New Orleans, New Orleanian Susan Tucker seeks to show the lineage of genealogy in the city as well as the rich "stuff" from which genealogies are made, including private and public records, stories, artifacts, neighborhoods, and even daily activities (p. 107). This is a tall task, especially considering the extremely complex racial and ethnic milieu of New Orleans. Throughout the detailed text, Tucker provides countless impressive color images, labeling each and adding helpful commentary for guidance concerning the implications of each figure. After the introduction, chapters 2 and 3 provide the reader with a history of leading figures and institutions—including priest Père Antoine, New Orleans's St. Louis Cathedral, Susa Young Gates, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS)—concerning genealogy in the city and the nation. Tucker emphasizes how migration and geography at multiple scales informed record keeping and how multiple genealogical and historical societies emerged in colonial, new nation, and nativist contexts and sentiments. In chapter 3 Tucker aims to trace "The Journey to a Populist Culture of Searching," and in chapter 4 she explores "Public Genealogies around Creole and Other Ethnic Identities."

It is not until chapter 4 that Tucker provides more than limited attention to issues of race and ethnicity. While this chapter richly delves into these issues, with the exception of Native Americans, whiteness goes mostly unmarked in the first three chapters. Tucker's journey to a populist culture of searching emerges as one generally of white people, yet this focus is never discussed but rather assumed. She also does not discuss how groups that created resources and practices of genealogy like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the LDS have pasts embedded with discrimination against people of color, especially black people. Thus, Tucker sometimes misses opportunities to critically connect with how a former slave society had and has shaped genealogical research.

Chapters 5 and 6 show how genealogists connect private source materials, such as Bibles, family trees, registers, scrapbooks, genetic testing, family art, and memory objects, with semi-public and public notarial, judicial, sacramental, and obituary records. To be sure, the semi-public and public records of New Orleans are some of the oldest in the country and provide a tapestry ripe for detailed and productive genealogies, though one heavily weighted toward white people and the affluent. That being said, chapters 7, 8, and 9 largely succeed in showing the archival complications of various constructions of racial categories over time and the difficulties associated with a dearth of private and public records of people of color and discrimination. Chapter 8 also includes a welcome exploration of gender. In chapters 7 and 8, Tucker demonstrates the practice of genealogy through two individual lives, elucidating how collective memory is revealed and how gender and race are mediated through different actors in the practices and materialities of genealogy.

Finally, in chapter 9 she explores how genealogy has the potential to help us "heal some of the wounds of racial tensions" and "understand the complexity of the past, the multiple versions of our yet shared society," through the detailed [End Page 490] interweaving of past and present, local and national, and black and white in New Orleans and beyond (pp. 162, 163). This book will be useful to practicing genealogists, historians, historical geographers, and others interested in socio-cultural historical resources in New Orleans and in the United States as well as those interested in how stories of remembering and forgetting and of belonging and excluding come to be through genealogy.

Rebecca Sheehan
Oklahoma State University
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