I started researching my family history at the tender age of 12, haunting cemeteries, libraries, and the National Archives in search of information. My approach was every bit as haphazard as you might imagine, but—thanks to the patient librarians, archivists, and cemetery managers I encountered—I slowly began to understand how genealogists do their work. It didn't take long before I was hooked.
I realize now that these adolescent experiences still inform my approach to research. I hear from time to time that I'm an unusually resourceful researcher; I think that has less to do with skill than it does to applying a genealogical mindset to the work at hand. When you're doing genealogical research, finding a repository of information about your subject or having well-developed context for a specific question is a rare and wonderful treat. You use the history of the place and period you're working in as a guide, but the bulk of the work is cobbling together disparate small bits of information—pebbles of history, as it were—to support an understanding of the particular experience of a community or individual.
Working at this human scale is slow, precise, frustrating, and absolutely enthralling. You need to develop a strange blend of skepticism, imagination, stubbornness, intuition, and logic, and also an understanding of when to call forth each of those qualities. You have to be able to focus intently on a tiny detail one moment, and on the entire picture the next. There are stretches of boredom and heady moments of insight, some so profound you almost can't believe they were catalyzed by a speck of information about a single person. It will keep you up at night, but reward you with a quality of understanding you can't get any other way.
I want this blog to be a place to celebrate the practice of human-scale history, somewhere to share both what I've learned about working effectively at this scale, and some favorite flashes of insight. Thanks so much for stopping by—and I do hope you'll check back to read my next post, "Maria Howard in Mourning," which will be published this week.