Contextualizing Family History through Old Maps

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

PhillyGeoHistory Maps Viewer is an amazing tool that allows the user to overlay seventeen different historical maps of Philadelphia from 1808-1962 over a present-day Google Map to see how the city evolved over the past two centuries. For example, when I visited the old neighborhood, this lone standing home is all my cousin and I found at the corner of 8th and Emily, where my great-great-grandparents and their unmarried children lived in the 1910s and ‘20s.

8th St. today

All the empty lots on this side of S. 8th made it impossible to guess where #2007 had been. But the 1942 land use map produced by the Works Progress Administration (inset into the photograph) shows that #2007 stood on the empty lot at the right of the photograph.

By the 1930 census, these great-great-grandparents were living at 1146 S. 5^th St. Where I had expected to see this home, instead I found most of the block taken up by a public school whose cornerstone was dated 1935. This section of the 1910 Bromley Philadelphia Atlas shows where their house once stood – opposite an iron foundry! What must it have been like to have lived there?

S. 5th St. in 1910

This fascinating detail was just one of many examples where the rich annotations of these historical maps showed me what blocks had been like when my family resided there. It’s wonderful to find addresses in records, and it’s memorable actually to visit those addresses — but for me the most satisfaction came from knowing exactly what my ancestors saw when they looked out their windows and walked around their neighborhoods. These small details help me to understand better what their lives had actually been like.

This site is a great example of how to uncover the kind of historical context that adds so much meaning to our work as genealogists. Not all cities have tools as easy as this one (go Philadelphia! for once!), but historic maps exist for so many places inside and outside of the US. We just need to take the time to review them! The context will enrich our understanding of our family immeasurably.

(Adapted from an article previously published in The Chronicles.)

Free Negroes Bought Their Families

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

I have been fascinated by African American genealogy since I watched the first African American Lives in 2006, both for the often-insurmountable research challenges, as well as the immense personal obstacles faced by those ancestors. This Sunday’s episode of Finding Your Roots, which focused on the “free negro” ancestors of three African-Americans, bypassed the usual research challenges, but came up against the stunning choices they had to make to maintain their imperiled status.

Those ancestors, in Henry Louis Gates’ words, “defy our most basic assumptions about life in the United States during the slave era”: John Legend‘s ancestor, Peyton Polly, who was freed in 1847 when his master died; Wanda Sykes‘ eighth great-grandmother, Mary Banks, who was born free in 1683 (!); and Margaret Cooper’s ancestor, Susannah Speed, who was freed in 1782. At that time free people of color had to carry papers to prove their status, which remained always at risk:

(Spoiler alert.)

After Peyton Polly, his brother, and his son were freed in Kentucky, his brother purchased Peyton’s seven other sons and daughters. Evidently this tactic was common! The reunited family moved to Ohio, a free state, for safety. But three years later armed white men from Kentucky kidnapped back the children, ages 4-17. Peyton could not risk going after the men himself. He put his trust in the white legal system, and eventually the intervention of many Ohio politicians managed to free four of the children. Virginia refused to free the others, who remained enslaved for over a decade until all slaves were freed.
Mary Banks was born free because her mother, Elizabeth, an indentured servant, was white. Her father was an African slave. (In these early years of slavery, the line between the races was quite flexible.) Shortly after the Revolutionary War, Mary Banks’ descendants were recorded as owning slaves! In this case there’s no evidence if they were protecting family.
In the waning years of the Revolution, Susannah Speed sued her master for freedom. The law permitted this!!! And a month later, her freedom was granted!!! Like Polly, she had to take extreme steps to protect her family. In her case she consigned her children to indentured servitude! This strategy was also not uncommon.

Living in a sick system, Polly and Speed had to take appalling steps to protect themselves and their families. Their lives and Banks’ shed light on this “little known but crucial chapter” of the history of slavery in the US. As a whole, this episode of Finding Your Roots shows that it’s impossible to trace and comprehend your family tree without learning something substantial and even surprising about history. (Ask me about the Oleomargarine Act of 1886!)

For each of the three guests, these lines of free negros were just one set of ancestors in their trees. The rest fell within the typical experience of the 90% of African Americans who were not freed until the Thirteenth Amendment. But how much nuance was added to our understanding of US history just by recalling their lives!

Genealogy’s Chicken Little Moment

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

Yesterday a bombshell hit the genealogy community: NBC canceled Who Do You Think You Are?, its weekly show in which it traces the roots of a celebrity. The stock price of Ancestry.com fell 18% today as investors worried how this would affect the company’s growth. After all, “Ancestry.com’s prominent presence on WDYTYA, a partnership with NBC, contributed to a 42.6% spike in its online subscriptions, to 1.87M, in the two years since the show debuted” (source). But for those of who care about the success of the genealogy industry beyond the valuation of our stock portfolios, what does this news really mean? Should we be panicking?

For the time it was on the air, WDYTYA clearly ignited many people’s latent interest in their family’s history. And while there couldn’t possibly have been more Ancestry commercials during the breaks, the show itself was the best possible advertisement for genealogy. It made it look fun and accessible. The detective work was suspenseful, and the breakthroughs enormously satisfying. And most of all, the emotional impact of the stories on the celebrities was real and heart-felt. None of this was marketing hype. This really is what genealogy is all about. The personal payoffs are as real as the show portrayed. And it was this connection that the show created between the celebrities’ journeys through their family history and the potential journeys that await us, the viewers, that created the surge in subscriptions for Ancestry.

Too many of us are responding to the cancellation by bemoaning the shallow time in which we find ourselves and forgetting that the latent interest that preceded the show is still out there! Sure, Ancestry lost a major channel for outreach, but they — and we — still have a huge potential audience waiting to be reached. All of us in the genealogy community — bloggers, researchers, companies, even little start-ups like Treelines — can pick up where the show left off to make our passion as accessible as possible. Every single one of us who’s already researching his/her tree can be an advocate for genealogy amongst our own family and friends. We can improve our research tools and guides to help novices dive in more easily. We can broaden our offline societies into online social networks to better assist newbies in breaking down their brick walls. And most of all, we can wrap the dry research and data management with the same warm emotions that the show did to help people see, for example, that a ship manifest is not just a ship manifest, but a window into the life of a very brave ancestor whose choices made us who we are. No TV host is required for any of this! (We at Treelines are hard at work on this last suggestion.)

The sky isn’t falling if we can take what made the show wonderful and use it to make genealogy as fun and accessible as the show portrayed.

Henry Louis Gates on Genealogy as History

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Tammy Hepps

Henry Louis Gates‘ day job is professor in the American History department at Harvard, though his work is better known through the family history programs he’s hosted over the years on PBS, such as African American Lives (2006), African American Lives 2 (2008), and Faces of America (2010), and the currently airing Finding Your Roots. Since that first program, I have always admired the way Gates merges the scholarly techniques of academic research with the emotional drive of our favorite pasttime. He puts heart into history, rigor into genealogy, and shows that while the former may reside in the Ivory Tower and the latter in the living room, the two fields should not be so far apart.

In his recent interview on NPR, Gates makes quite an articulate argument for how to bridge the two:

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian’s footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small. As we do our family trees, we add specificity to the raw data from which historians can generalize.

So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and … Wanda Sykes and John Legend … we’re adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that’s the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.

What an inspiring vision to think that the small details we learn about our ancestors’ lives can add up to a more enhanced understanding of history itself! Often when I read about the events my family lived through, such as the Homestead Strike of 1892, I try to fit what I know about my family into the picture the historian paints about that time. But Gates’ conviction that historians can learn from the individual experiences of my small group of recent Hungarian immigrants learning to be Americans during such upheaval motivates me not only to finish fleshing out this particular story, but also to find a way of sharing it where it can inform the historians’ dialog.

“There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees,” Gates concludes. His personal goal is “to get everybody in America to do their family tree.” In creating Treelines, my goal is to make it as easy as possible for those of us who love working on our family trees to share the amazing stories we’re constantly uncovering with the right sharing tools. From Gates’ remarks, it’s clear that the potential audience is far broader than just our relatives and friends! Our small contributions provide a much bigger window onto the past than we often realize.

Welcome… but to what?

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Treelines

Treelines are storylines for your family tree. We aim to become your go-to tool for curating and sharing the amazing family stories you’ve uncovered. Intrigued? You can read much more on our About page.

When will we open our doors? Your guess is as good as ours. Hopefully sooner than the amount of time it took the State of Pennsylvania to fulfill to Tammy’s last request for a death certificate search. (Yes, Pennsylvania Department of Health, Division of Vital Records, we are calling you out.)

But for now we’re adding our voice to the ongoing discussion around family history. We hope you’ll add us to the genealogy blogs you’re already reading and keep an eye on our front door – we’ll open it soon enough to welcome you inside.

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