The Genohistorian’s Grain-of-Salt Approach to History

History is not the past. It is not “what happened.” History happens after that. It is an interpretation of what happened, based on the fragments of information or memory that have survived. Even if the event happened two hours ago, and it happened to you, the history you might record of it is already likely imperfect. It is also potentially very valuable.

Genohistorians must ingest lots of published histories. This is essential to our work. But for our own work to be credible, we must ingest them always with a grain of salt.

History Is an Interpretation

As a genohistorian, reconstructing the historical world around your ancestors, you will want to consult any and all histories of that place and time. You do not have enough days in your life to reinvent the work done by all the historians who preceded you. But you do need to know how to judge what you are borrowing from them—the quality of their sources, their interpretations, and the filters through which they researched and wrote.

Primary, Secondary, and the Matter of Trust

There are good reasons historians and genealogists are encouraged to get to the original (primary) source, whenever possible, in drawing conclusions in their research. For genealogists extracting data, an original record may have become illegible, damaged, defaced, or modified as it was copied. Even worse may happen, as it is transcribed or paraphrased. And while skilled historians are concerned about that, too, they are equally concerned with the inherent dangers of drawing conclusions or basing new histories predominantly on old histories, what we call “secondary sources.” 

A secondary source is an interpretation of sources, primary or otherwise. If you are using a secondary source as your main evidence for a statement you are making, you are putting your trust in a history you did not research or write. Sometimes it is a good bet; sometimes it is not.

You want to get really smart about how you use the work of other historians or genealogists.

Does It Hold Up to Peer Review?

To assess the quality of a history book you are depending upon for your research, I encourage you to seek out peer reviews of the book. Look for critical reviews by academic scholars or other reputable historians—not popularity reviews on Amazon.

Most scholarly history organizations publish book reviews in their journals. Major American journals are the Journal of American History and the Journal of Southern History. Other countries and even continents have something similar. There are also journals for localities, like the Alabama Review, and genres, like Church History or the Journal of Genocide Research. You can begin to mine a partial list of them on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_history_journals.

It is easiest to find reviews of a history using a tool like JSTOR, Project Muse, or Academic Search Premier, which might require a visit to a university or public library for full resources. You might find that your university alma mater offers access to these databases as a perq for alumni.

Evaluate the Historian

In determining just how much credence you will give to a published history, evaluate the credentials of its author, starting with what the book itself tells you. If the author is a university professor, you can usually find information on the university’s website—often a full curriculum vitae (résumé of academic accomplishments), showing the publications, areas of expertise, honors, and awards. There might even be an email address, if you have questions for them.

If the author is an independent scholar, look them up on Amazon and in Google to see what sort of a “footprint” they have created in the history field. The author might have a website with credentials and an email address. And it’s even possible they have been reviewed by academic scholars in the journals mentioned above.

Of course, every historian starts somewhere, and the first or only book might well be excellent, though the author has no noticeable internet footprint. Just take special care to find supporting evidence for their conclusions (or check their sources), if you are not finding trustworthy credentials.

The Shelf Life of History

While history can stay on a bookstore shelf longer than most books and may live forever in a library, even history tends to have a shelf life. And it is not just because new histories require the space. Even the most revered old histories get past their “best used by” date eventually, though they can still be edifying with a grain of salt.

First, earlier historians did not have the electronic resources we have. Their sources and evidence might be thin, comparatively speaking, with newer histories. On the other hand, you are more likely to find the reputable historians of seventy-five years ago doing local history, because they could not get to sources far and wide as easily as we can. The old history might be the most current available, however. Perhaps you will be the one to update it.

Here is a second reason to watch for datedness. Earlier historians were coming at the subject of history through the filters of their own time, no matter how skilled they were then. If you ever encounter a book called Slavery in Alabama by James Benson Sellers, for example, you have found such a book. Sellers was doing his research in the 1940s and his book reached the public in 1950 from the University of Alabama Press. Historians of the Cold War era tended to write histories that glorified the U.S. as leader of the free world and promoted unity of thought about that. Perhaps Sellers was bold to take up the subject of slavery in this period, but his sources were the documents of white slaveowners and government officials—all with a vested interest in telling the story of slavery that minimized the horror. In Sellers’s Alabama, enslaved men and women were happy and better off then they would have been otherwise.

A classic in its time, perhaps, it now requires salt.

Finding Value in Dated History

Even as we consign Slavery in Alabama to the dated and even racist category, we have to acknowledge something. While we disagree with his conclusions, his tone, and the filter of his sources, he gave us something of value. He mined archives for details of slavery from a large number of manuscripts. He has statistics that are of great value. And his work points us to where our work might need to go. Fortunately, the University of Alabama Press reprinted the original in 1994, with a foreword by one of my former teachers, Harriet Amos Doss, illuminating both the value and the expired ideas.[1] She offered the grain of salt needed to recognize what is useful in the work.

This is going to be true of many of the local histories we might encounter in the places our ancestors lived. You might find a thin book with a quaint title like Ma’s Recollections of the Old Pine Valley or Centreville—The Early Days. It might be sprinkled with undocumented anecdotes and a lingo that chafes, describing “darkies” and “spinsters.” It might not have a single footnote. But in these histories are clues.

The genealogists among us will quickly associate this with what we are told about borrowing from other people’s family trees on Ancestry. They are not so much evidence as clues. You take them with a grain of salt and see if they edify.

In the dated histories, amidst the now-smelly depictions and language, are mentions of things that exist nowhere else. They might offer the location of structures long gone. In casual mentions, we might find traditions and daily practices that were so mundane in their time that it would never have occurred to someone to define them for a 21^st-century audience. And maybe deep in a “recollection” will be the answer to a question you have been working over for years.

It’s All Good with Salt

Wherever we are going with our ancestral work, histories are valuable. We want to be savvy enough to recognize their flaws and limits—skilled enough to know when we need other sources to support or undermine a supposed “historical truth.” We want to acknowledge the prejudices and limitations of the historians who tread this ground before us. The dated ideas are also history in themselves, illuminating the evolution of perspective. So add a pinch of salt, and extract what you can from them.

We also want to recognize that the historians, genealogists, and genohistorians who come along behind us will see what we could not see. They’ll find the flaws in our work, too. So be humble as you supersede the work of historians past.

Let’s hope those who follow us are smart enough to recognize that we left them clues. We left them history of value. We left them our attitudes for understanding our own time.  And with a grain of salt, they might just be nourished.

Call to Action

As you work on a genohistory, consult all relevant histories. I would start with the most recently written. It might give you the needed salt when you read the earlier ones. Extract the clues from the earlier histories.

As you build your genohistory, be very conscious of what facts or evidence you have drawn exclusively from someone else’s history. Ask yourself if you need to go to their sources or find more of your own to evaluate fairly if what they said is credible.

As always, please add your comments below. What has your experience of using histories been like? How do you distinguish credible history from a smelly clue? This is a conversation. Consider sharing this post with friends who might find it valuable. And if you have not yet signed up for the newsletter, do that, so I can let you know about future posts.

Linked versus Embedded Attachments

Before you get too deeply into your work in Zotero, you will want to make a decision about where you will store your attachments (documents, spreadsheets, maps, photos, music, etc.) and how you will link to them. Zotero lets you sync your work to its web libraries for free, up to 300 MB. And it does not count your text notes and source data in that number. If you embed attachments into Zotero, the syncing will quickly use up the 300 MB. If you link to attachments, you may not use it up for years, but you will need another cloud option if you want to see your attachments when away from your computer.

If you keep your attachments on your own hard drive—not being synced to Zotero—you can have your citations and notes accessible from Zotero anywhere you go with internet access. In this case, you will create links to your attachments. Right-click on your source record, choose Add Attachment—Attach link to file. When you are on your own computer, this will work seamlessly, like your attachments are a part of your Zotero data. If you are traveling, away from your own computer, and want to access your attachments, you will need to have them stored in a cloud somewhere. The links will not work until you are back to your own computer.

On the other hand, you might want your attachments to be embedded in Zotero, syncing fully to its servers and accessible wherever you go. When embedding an attachment, right-click on the source record and choose Add Attachment—Attach stored copy of file. In this case, your 300 MB of free space will not last long. You will want to purchase cloud space from Zotero. Log in to your account at Zotero.org and click the Web Library option on its toolbar to access your Zotero library online. In the top-right corner, you will see an option to Upgrade Storage. You can see here how much of your 300 MB allotment you have used and the prices for various storage plans.

[1] James Benson Sellers and Harriet E. Amos Doss, Slavery in Alabama (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 1994), https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Alabama-Library-Classics/dp/0817305947.

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