Donna Cox Baker, Author at GENOHISTORY.COM — Page 3 of 3

Donna Cox Baker

Sinful Souls and Church Discipline for the Genohistorian

4 Comments / Church Records, Genohistory on Purpose / By / 6 minutes of reading

I had been predisposed to see the worst in my great-grandfather, George Lewis Cox of Randolph County, Alabama. I saw him through the eyes of my grandmother—his daughter-in-law—who remembered him without a speck of fondness. As she recalled it, he was a drunken philanderer who drove his betrayed wife to suicide. But he was also, apparently, a church-going man. Might he have been called out under church discipline?

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Formal Education: An Investment in Excellence

6 Comments / Education, Genohistory on Purpose / By / 5 minutes of reading

Genohistory on Purpose will be brief and to the point this issue. After an intensively valuable week at the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research, I am exhausted in the best sort of way. This was my fourth course at IGHR and, like everyone else, my first time to attend from the comfort of my own home. This year, like every other year, I am reminded of the importance of committing to and investing in formal education.

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Your Guide and Defense: Genohistory with Research Plans

4 Comments / Research / By / 11 minutes of reading

I spent eight years in doctoral study in history without knowing how to create a research plan. Oh, I planned, and I researched, but it was a nebulous process, without structure. When I went back to genealogy after the Ph.D. and discovered the wonderful tool called a “research plan” that genealogists were using to do really smart research, I wondered how much better my doctoral work might have been with that one tool.

I have written about this epiphany in my earlier blog, The Golden Egg Genealogist. I won’t reinvent the wheel here. I include below a repeat of the earlier post. It was designed for genealogists and answers a lineage question, as you will see, but I ask us all to read it today from the perspective of a genohistorian. Think about how you might apply this tool to the questions of time and place that serve our broader function at the middle ground between genealogy and history.

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

2 Comments / Genohistory on Purpose, History / By / 10 minutes of reading

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.

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The Supreme Court Shopping Binge: Unlayering a Court Document

8 Comments / Genohistory on Purpose, Legalities / By / 9 minutes of reading

Not long ago, a historian friend surprised me with an email referring to “the high-rollin’ kids” of my ancestor, Jacob Mayberry. He included a link to a summary report of the Alabama Supreme Court case of Sanford v. Howard.[1] In the eleven-page summary, I learned that Jacob’s kids had created a Supreme Court–caliber stir by shopping. They had racked up a huge tab at a local store, buying luxuries in 1852, the year after their father died. Their uncle, executor of Jacob’s estate, had refused to pay the tab.

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Degrees of Connection: What the Neighbors Meant to Your Ancestors

12 Comments / Genohistory on Purpose, Interconnected Families / By / 10 minutes of reading

My mid-nineteenth-century small-town ancestors would be utterly baffled at how little I know about my neighbors. Neighbors were their family, in-laws, society, colleagues, entertainment, education, support system, and source of marriage partners, gossip, trade, and annoyance. They were the cast and crew of our ancestors’ life dramas.

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Mapping Ancestral Lands

15 Comments / Genohistory on Purpose, Land and Maps / By / 10 minutes of reading

Welcome back, genohistorians. I hope you got a good sense of what I mean by “genohistory” in the introduction I posted two weeks ago. This week, as we start this genohistorical journey together, let’s get our heads around something important. Something huge. Ready for it? Here goes. We are preparing for time travel.

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Genohistory: The Middle Ground on Purpose

54 Comments / Genohistory on Purpose, Introduction to Genohistory / By / 7 minutes of reading

For nearly thirty-five years, I have been moving back and forth between my two passions: genealogy and history. They are sister passions, admittedly. Knowledge of one feeds the other. But I’ve come to realize something: I don’t want to move back and forth between them; I want to cultivate the spot where they intersect.

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