Writing Genohistory: Waldo and the Now of Then

Some say it is not history until you write it. I have a bit more expanded view of history. Inevitably, though, we who are starting to call ourselves genohistorians will start to think of writing genohistory projects. I have tiptoed in with my blogging. As we expand in this field, what will writing genohistory look and feel like?

Meeting Waldo at Last

For many years, the spiritual literature I have absorbed often has mentioned reverently the innovative American speaker, poet, and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. I have always imagined a kindred spirit in him, based on the second-hand references. However, I’ve only in the past week actually read anything he wrote. I began with his essay titled “Nature.” In it, he launches with a challenge to traditional religion that also takes a provocative side-swipe at history. He wrote:

OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?[1]

Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Nature”

I knew from this first paragraph that he and I were going to be friends. I call him “Waldo” now. We could have some wonderful conversations, he and I, about what can be lost in inherited religion—a memorized relic of the forefathers, rather than an experience now. But I will save that imagined conversation for a blog of its own.

Would he and I agree, however, on the subject of genohistory? From what I can tell so far, Waldo finds the real joy of life in the now, being in the moment, watching the ever-changing yet utterly consistent landscape around us and drawing wisdom from it. To him, the “retrospective,” when venerated as the timeless truth of who we are, is a dead weight, hindering what can be. I see his point.

As we together shape this new form called genohistory, how can we create something that is not dead weight but brings the same joy of discovery that nature brought Waldo?

I think it gets down to perspective. Surely we do not want to “build the sepulchres of our fathers,” though much of the history written now and in ages past does that. Rather than creating just another traditional retrospective, what if the genohistorian masters the art of exploring the now of then? I think Waldo would be intrigued.

Traditional Historical or Genealogical Writing

The words “traditional” and “history” seem to go together, do they not? I think that is the way Waldo used the word “history,” an inherited tradition lacking in original thought. While I find traditional histories useful as a reference, I usually feel disconnected from them—finding little joy in the reading. Let’s look at the traditional forms of history and genealogy that are closest to genohistory’s purpose: local histories, lineages or genealogies, and family histories and biographies.

Local Histories

Think of the histories of towns you have come across. How often do these histories follow the same template?  If it is an American town, and has been written in the past century, the first chapter may well be a description of the original Native American inhabitants, with hundreds of years covered briefly. An older local history might leave them out entirely.

The real story in this form of history begins with a founder driving the stakes for a municipality. The municipality is your main character, and the people of the story are those who shape the municipality—usually the mayor, aldermen, wealthy benefactors, and maybe the local minister. You rarely meet any other people in these towns. There may be power skirmishes and scandals to dress up the story a bit. We read descriptions of the schools, churches, and other useful edifices and institutions that represented the growth of the municipality. The book will describe the town’s major events: wars, epidemics, the arrival of a railroad (or not), civil rights struggles, and maybe woman’s suffrage. And the book wraps up with a chapter that brings us up to today.

Local people will buy the book, many will love the pictures, and some will read it. Genealogists will often borrow from it, for better or for worse. The quality of the book’s research could be excellent. Or it could be a faithful retelling of the town’s myths, with sources selectively chosen to support the time-honored and beloved stories—retrospective at its worst.

I honor every effort by well-meaning and hard-working historians, but too often I find myself tossing a book aside with the thought, “Same story, different town.” I might pick up facts from it, if they seem trustworthy, but I rarely read it cover to cover. I fall asleep about five or ten pages in.

Lineage Histories or Genealogies

Even duller, though perhaps much better researched, are the typical lineage histories. More template-driven even than the local histories, computers often generate them these days. They give us the facts of the characters who populate a family tree. They tell us birth and death dates, who begat whom, and who married whom. They may offer short colorful anecdotes if any be known. And hopefully, if the researcher has done his or her job well, we have excellent footnotes. Such books can be quite valuable, representing extensive labor. They may be treasured by the descendants. The anecdotal summaries may be perused with interest. And again, people treasure photos above all. But rarely will they read these histories cover to cover. They are reference books, first and foremost. The quality of many histories drawn from them will depend upon the quality of the original researcher’s work.

Family Histories or Biographies

Some histories do tell a coherent and interesting story of a family or individual. Rarely will anyone put time and effort into writing a family history or a biography unless the person or persons are significant in some way—not just significant to our isolated family. They must have left a mark of some kind. Perhaps they were famous in their time or have become since. The family produced a president of the United States or founded a famous international corporation. Or perhaps it was a family of famous preachers, the Beechers or the Mathers. Or perhaps a history is about a family or person who deserves to be famous and will be if someone tells their story. They invented something or overcame some great adversity.

Such histories leave much more room for creativity, and we are more likely to read them cover to cover. While they have the potential to be less traditional than the other two, they often are not. They usually focus on a famous someone or family and tell us the story in chronological order. But the perspective is retrospective—me, now, looking back at them, then.

The creativity of such stories recently tends to come from more progressive choices of who we think is worthy of a book. While the telling of the story might be traditional, the story might be about a gay activist or the descendants of enslaved people. At least in this, we are getting more interesting.

I realize there are many other types of historical writing, but these are the types most often emerging from those who research local and family history. And I know there are exceptions to the rather dismal picture I’ve painted here. But I have to call it as I see it. Though I love to research history—family and otherwise—I often hate to read the rehash of another researcher’s work.

The Genohistory Perspective

And then there is us. Genohistorians. Is there such a thing as a traditional genohistory? While I am certain that genohistorians have been among us for a very long time and that some of them have written from that perspective, we have the good fortune of being decades ahead of that day when there will be such a dull and dreaded thing as a “traditional genohistory.” Surely, one of the most important goals of genohistory is to see the past through new eyes. While we may borrow with gratitude from the traditional histories described above, we will usually be viewing the past through the eyes of ordinary people who left no journal or autobiography to illuminate their world for us.

I am not talking about the history of “ordinary people” in general. That’s where history grows muddy. When we try to conglomerate everything we find to create a picture of the average family in a place or time, we create a picture that matches no one specifically. Muddy history is not only dull; it can be misleading.

The genohistorian looks out from the front porch of an ordinary family. Maybe ordinary rich or maybe ordinary poor, but real people. The people are our perspective—the spot we have chosen to enter for our walk through that time and place. Rather than a distant retrospective, we are using the chosen family as our host in a visit to then. In going there, we enter the now of then.

Writing Genohistory

How might such a historical perspective manifest itself in our writing? One written genohistory might be vastly different from another: an essay, article, or book; a movie script, a play, or a novel. And within the format, there could be any number of variations in approach.

Take my Mayberry ancestors, for example, who you have met a few times now. I might choose to tell the story of their world through the eyes of their enslaved people, creating a very nontraditional perspective of this time and place—and of my ancestors. True, I would need to draw heavily from the records of many other enslaved people and slaveholders to create the likeliest picture of their situation. But in using one particular set of enslaved people as my focus, I humanize the history. I anchor the “likely” to the known and come as close to the real picture as we can get.

Or here’s an idea. We can write genohistory as creative nonfiction, a well-told story that draws wherever possible from the facts but fills in gaps with intelligently reasoned likelihoods. So your family, or whatever group you have chosen to use as your perspective, creates the bedrock of your story. You start with the facts of them and work outward only as far as their story—their perspective—would take you.

Maybe you devote each chapter of the book to the world as it might have looked to a different character in your family at a particular moment in time. Perhaps you let the featured character be the narrator of the chapter. If a teenage girl is the narrator of a particular chapter, you find out all you can about the teenagers of that place and time—and let her describe it to us as she sees it, in the words she might have really used. She takes us into the now of then.

There are so many ways we can do this. But at this stage of the development of a field called genohistory, we are fortunate that no one has told us how it must be done yet. No one has created the “accepted template” yet. No one has created a “traditional approach” that hampers our creativity. We can experiment and see what thrives and survives.

What Would Waldo Think?

One of the things I love about this idea of genohistory is that we are seeking to put ourselves in the time and place—to be in the now of then, recognizing that then was now to them. We lose that in most histories. This is an idea Waldo would understand, I think. As new as I am to his work, I might find that he covered this already in his forward-thinking essays.  He was ahead of his time, and maybe we are, too, in our desire to find a more satisfying point of view between history and genealogy. Deciding how to write genohistory will be where the proverbial rubber meets the road.

And even if the traditional fields of history and genealogy cluck in disapproval at the departure from the accepted forms, we can enjoy the belief that Waldo would probably approve.

CALL TO ACTION

Have you already seen some successfully wrought genohistories? I know there are some out there, and I’d love to hear what you are finding.

I think, for example, of a book I brought through the editorial process at the University of Alabama Press some years back. Earline’s Pink Party: The Social Rituals and Domestic Relics of a Southern Woman (2017) by Elizabeth Findley Shores. When her manuscript landed on my desk, I was drawn to the author’s approach. She had been captivated by the artifacts her grandmother kept—knick-knacks, newspapers, magazines—wanting to understand her through what she considered valuable enough to display or store. And then drawing on the local news, social announcements, and other research materials, Shores was able to recapture the immediate world around “Earline,” as she tried to keep herself insulated from the ugliness of the Jim Crow years outside her delicate pink life. We learned about her world through Earline’s eyes. The now of then.

Do you have ideas about how a genohistory might manifest in writing? Use the comments to share those with us.

And, as always, share this with anyone you believe will appreciate it.

[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: The Ultimate Collection (Titan Read, 2015), p. 6, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00YTA5FM0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o00?ie=UTF8&psc=1.

Organizing your Writing Project in Zotero

Zotero offers a brilliant way to organizing a writing project, because it lets you place a source and its notes in as many folders as you want without duplication. My genohistory research might be organized by people, places, and subject topics—the way they will stay organized for life, I think. But if I have an article to write, I can create a folder (aka “collection”) to begin to sort material into the order I’ll use it in the article.

I can create a subfolder for every major point I want to write and drag and drop the sources and associated notes from their long-term storage into the proper place in the article organization folders. It remains also in its long-term place, but appears in the organization folder, too. If I take facts from the same source in multiple different places in my article, it can appear in all the appropriate folders without literally being duplicated.

When I get ready to write the article, I have Microsoft Word open on one side of my screen. I have Zotero open on the other half. As I get ready to discuss something that borrows from the source I chose above, I use the “Editing in Separate Window” feature to open the note to the side. I can then be consulting it or cutting and pasting, while I write the article.

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