My past and present have finally caught up to each other. I think I knew they'd been battling all along, but it took finding Hendrick Fosmire, my American Revolution era ancestor, to convince me. And I shouldn’t have been shocked. After all, I’ve been teaching classes on creating legacies and on memory for years. In both, I use examples of how each of us re-tells our own past differently at different times to better suit our presents. What do you emphasize? What do you leave out?
As a life-long student of history, I now realize that things are no different. Revisionism is the name of the game! In my grad school days, the rage was talking about the history of the overlooked—slaves, working people, women, immigrants who never attained the level of “great men in American history.” Today, as I go back and read about old Hendrick’s era in New York and about the early colonies and birth of our nation, I’m struck again by how the flavor of the history has changes in each telling. The tradition of revisionism is alive and well! (As it probably should be.) We see the past and interpret it in light of what we know—perhaps what we need to know--about the here and now.
So, when it comes to doing history or even genealogy, which do we trust? Is it the accounts closest to events written by those involved or is it those researched and footnoted decades, even centuries, later by researchers who go over the old records? I think the answer is a bit of both.
The former can give us a glimpse into the thinking of those involved in events and their roles in them. It’s based on what each perceived at the moment, usually from his or her limited information. But it’s not necessarily based on the full breadth of facts and hindsight often available to the modern researcher—the larger world view, if you will. And when each of us looks at those facts, we look at them with our sensibilities of the present, of our lives and concerns and issues. What gets emphasized and how is often colored by our own concerns and issues. For example, in the early 1970s, I was researching Deborah Franklin, Benjamin’s wife, left alone to fend for herself and her family for days on end. A professor at the time helped shape the view of her as somehow deprived, abandoned by a bon vivant husband out shaping the world. Having now read many letters and papers of colonial women and the men in their lives, I realize just how limited that view was.
In the early 1970s, the modern women’s movement was just getting started. Women were struggling to find “meaningful,” independent roles in the family and in the larger community. In a sense, we were just reclaiming the sorts of roles and influence women in earlier times exercised just by virtue of necessity.
I don’t think either view is completely right or wrong. I do think we need to keep both in mind as we make judgments, as we read history and even as we do genealogical research. Be careful how much of our own issues and times we being to the interpretation.
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Here we have important historical buildings—most ripped out of the places that gave rise to them and the marvelous ideas they represent. There are firsts (oldest) and lasts of their kinds… Edison’s home and lab, the Wright brothers’ house sit in the midst of streets nearly empty the day I was there, amid manicured lawns where almost no scrap is thoughtlessly tossed aside.
