Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History

PREFACE Family History,A Way to Know Our Selves and Our Times

ix P R E F A C E Family History, a Way to Know our selves and our Times Family is the well of self. It makes childhoods, imprints memories, and offers models for a lifetime. Doing family history is a way to investigate its powers, to take control of personal history. It provides a distinct type of selfknowledge , which is timely and even indispensable in this age of abstractions , ideological battles, and mass culture. As we set off on this quest for truth, variety, and individuality, 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. In this book I seek out fresh themes and approaches for rethinking family history. I do this by example, exploring these ideas while writing a history of a typical multi-ethnic, undistinguished, and poor North American family —my own, through seven generations. Though I concentrate on migrations and settlements, individual circumstances and fates, I find myself also recounting a national story of the poor, of the shift of the nation’s population from land to town to industrial city, and of the unprecedented transformation of material conditions, which took the majority of Americans from scarcity and necessity to abundance, leisure, and choice. Jacob’s Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History is a companion work to my recent Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History. In the latter I proposed fresh approaches to local history, which has been largely left in the hands of its amateur practitioners. In this book, I seek to expand the historical imagination of those who wish to write family histories that have significance for national, economic, and social history. Jacob’s Well x 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. The family we live by today, placed at the heart of our values and sentiment, increasingly becomes synonymous with the nuclear family. We forget that families were not always composed of two parents and their children, they did not always exist in the same household, and they 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 the stability and form of the family. Only over the course of centuries, starting with the wealthy, has the family been transformed into a social institution that fostered the individual and theintimateperson.Correspondingly,incontradictiontoChristianfaithand theology, the family evolved in popular belief and sensibility to become the principal unit of the afterlife. We once identified ourselves locally in terms of a specific place on earth and collectively “in the Great Chain of Being,” which vertically linked being from God, creator, to the smallest mite. But in the last hundred and fifty years or so, we have come to define ourselves not in place but in time, in what historian John Gillis calls “the Great Line of Progress.”1 As a consequence of this revolution in worldview, the family has its meaning not in a defining origin but in its democratic and progressive advance across time. So as we discard the regressive search for noble origins and pure lineages, wecometoknowourselvesliterallyasthemakersofourfamilyandthedefiners of family tradition. We recognize that history is an active craft. The historian learns and makes as he proceeds. Moving back and forth between memory and research, fashioning and refashioning connections and contexts, and weighing and judging events, the historian simultaneously shapes narratives and deepens explanations. And as much as history serves as a medium for discovering the past, it also is, we confess, a means to invent it. Family History xi The academic study of the family, which took form in the last decades of the twentieth century, also rebuts mythic and stereotypic histories of the family. The discipline offers the family historian a comprehensive approach to the Western family. With a felicitous metaphor, historian David Levine, who traces the origin of the modern Western family to the Middle...