While I am supposed to be on hiatus - I wanted to let you know about a number of thoughtful gifts I received from my brother-in-law and sister that you may want to add to your bookshelf or closet. The first is Harm De Blij’s 2009 book - The Power of Place. It’s a must read for location based genealogists to understand the larger patterns and processes that swirl around a location and that manifest themselves in vital records, genealogies, and family histories. Written in response to the “world is flat” paradigm, De Blij’s powerful location based observations are relevant from the dawn of civilization to today. From the inside jacket:
“Geography continues to hold billions of people in its unrelenting grip. We are all born into natural and cultural environments that shape what we become, individually and collectively. From our “mother tongue” to our father’s faith, from medical risks to naturale hazards, where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming the obstacles in our way.”
The second is Andrew Curtis and Jacqueline Mills 2009 book - GIS, Human Geography, and Disasters. From the first paragraph in Chapter 1:
“Disasters are inherently spatial - both in terms of the physical processes as well as the human implications. Hurricane tracks, the location of fault lines, how tornadoes are generated - these are the patterns or processes that have or leave spatial footprints. Where people live in relation to potential hazards or the societal impact left after a disaster can again be described in terms of spatial patterns. Within these patterns are human places, cultures, and interactions. An earthquake devastated city is not just a landscape of damage, morbidity, and mortality but it also comprises lost (and recovering) neighborhoods, disrupted social networks, variations in resiliency, and social and environmental (in)justice. As geographers, we have the technologies and spatial skills to map, predict, and ultimately understand these landscapes.
As location based genealogists - we can also benefit from the tools, techniques, and methodologies reflected in this blog as well as this facinating book to map and understand these landscape and geography of past disasters to understand and better predict what happened to our ancestors and why.
The third is Catherine Nash’s 2008 work - Of Irish Descent. From the inside cover:
“Of Irish Descent [explores] the contemporary significance of ideas about ancestral roots, origins, and connections [by tracing] the place of ancestry in interconnected geographies of identity - familial, ethnic, national, and diasporic. Underlying these different practices and narratives are potent and profoundly political questions about who counts as Irish and to whom Ireland belongs.”
This is a rigorously thought out book that forces one to confront the motivations for certain ethnic research. Nash writes:
“Ideas of ancestry and origins…have a complex relationship to ideas of national identity, ethnic diversity, cultural purity, and indigeneity. They feature within the model of an organic, national community; bound to the land and sharing origins, ancestry, blood, and culture, and within accounts of national ethnic pluralism. Genealogy can be used to define collective group membership and to rank individuals according to lineage as more or less “well bred” and more or less pure in pedigree, to affirm connections, and to reckon different degrees of relatedness between individuals and between groups. However, ideas of origins and ancestry have tended to occupy a less complex place within late 20th century cultural theory, in which genealogical imaginations have been mostly associated with the national valorizing of purity and the geographical fixing of culture, blood, and people that Lisa Malkki has called a “sedentarist metaphysics.”
If you are of Irish descent or conducting research of people of Irish descent - this book is far you. Moreover the concept of sedentarist metaphysics applies to all ethnic based research. Paraphrasing from Matalena Toffa’s work:
“Global discourses of indigeneity readily assert indigenous peoples as having an inherently spiritual and sanguinial relationship with land. Sedentarist metaphysics argue that territorial and familial metaphors naturalize indigenous nations as discrete, territorially grounded and bounded entities. In this way indigenous identity and places are thoroughly imbricated, and simultaneously spatially and culturally bound. “
Location based genealogy is focused on leveraging the geographical fixing of a culture and people to aid in family history research. But in doing so are we “valorizing” and “purifying” our ethnic heritage? I for one do not think so as my own ethnic research in southern Italy leaves tantalizing clues of Greek, Spanish, and even of Phoenician influences and potential ancestry in the region and my own heritage. But Nash’s work challenges motivations and I love the introspection it forces.
The last gift was from my sister - a sweatshirt emblazoned with the following quote from Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great orator and defender of the Roman Republic:
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain perpetually a child. For what is the worth of a human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history…”
Happy New Year to all and here’s to busting down brick walls with location based strategies in 2010 – to discover and weave those who became before us in the fabric of history.
Good hunting,
Bernie
