The History of Ordinary Lives

A friend, just back from Thanksgiving, said she had gone through old photographs with her mother while home for the holiday. I told her that was good, that I wished I had done more of that, while my mother was alive. I had started trying to learn something of my family’s history in a limited way before my parents died, but didn't ask as many questions as I should have. Going through my mom's house, I found photographs of people that I will never know who they are. I did get some information though from both my parents, and am glad that I did, but I wish I had done a better job of it.

Several years ago, based on what my mom could tell me, I had checked out some of the databases that the Mormon Church has assembled and made available on line. I eventually subscribed to Ancestry.com and assembled a massive family tree based on linking to trees other people had done that were of unclear accuracy. I only worked on it intermittently, and although there was something very gratifying about figuring out which of several people with the same name in the census records actually was the person I was looking for, I wasn't very systematic and didn't find out anything that was particularly interesting. Without stories or context or knowing about the people, extending a family tree back into the 18th century seemed a pretty empty exercise.

Then a couple of months ago, I started being a little more systematic, and trying to confirm some of the people and relationships that I wasn't sure about. And in the process, I got hooked, trying to reconstruct these 19th century lives from census records and engraving on tombstones and Civil War pension records. I hadn't known, before, how deep were my Southern roots (I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, and never considered myself a Southerner, even though I now live in Atlanta), but my ancestors over the generations made their way from Pennsylvania and Maryland to North Carolina and South Carolina and Georgia and then west to Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas and then to Texas and eventually to Oklahoma. As best I can tell, my relatives who were here by the late 18th century were on the right side of the Revolutionary War (a great-great-great-great-grandfather, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, had trouble getting his pension because he was illiterate and couldn't read the discharge papers he needed to establish his service record) but they were uniformly on the wrong side of the Civil War. Two great-great-grandfathers fought in different units of the Confederate Army, and both had brothers (or brothers-in-law) who died. I've never been particularly interested in Civil War history, but it does make me wonder what cause these hardworking subsistence farmers were fighting for. (A cousin several times removed has relayed a family story that our great-great-grandfather said later in his life that the whole thing had been a bad idea. It may have had something to do with having been there when his nephew was shot in the head during the siege of Port Hudson.)

So I am looking for records from Marion and Fayette Counties in Alabama, and Itawamba County in Mississippi. There are other counties, too, that I haven't looked for yet. These are places whose histories are documented by local historians, working as volunteers for county historical societies, mostly. A massive amount of information is on line now, through commercial sites like Ancestry, but also through noncommercial volunteer-built sites that are part of the USGenWeb project. There are lots of local histories that are written by local historians and published in limited runs by small presses. Once they go out of print, they are really hard to find (and expensive if you do find them), but presumably there are copies in the local library or at the county historical society.

Until I got interested in places like Itawamba County, Mississippi, or Fayette County, Alabama, I never thought much about who documents the histories of small places. With so much mobility, is it doomed to disappear, without a critical mass of local people to keep it going? (My family moved to Woodward, Oklahoma, in 1969. Although I've enjoyed visiting the local historical museum over the years, the history there wasn't the history of my family, who came to Coal County and Greer County from Texas, back when Oklahoma was still Indian Territory.) Of course, now there is the internet, which I know has been huge for genealogy. Has it done the same for local history? For while most of us no longer live in the same communities that our parents lived in, much less our grandparents or great-grandparents, all you have to do is type a name in Google, and you can find more than you imagined about the people who came before you, or the places where you live. And people like me are looking for histories of Fayette County, Alabama, and seriously considering becoming dues-paying members of the Itawamba Historical Society. The baby boom generation is approaching retirement age. Maybe technology will make up for some of what has been lost with the mobility of my generation. For what it’s worth, I did mail that check yesterday.