Who do we think we are?
By: Nikki Sullivan
Tags: Museums, Family History, History

Who do we think we are?

The growing fascination with Family History is no secret. In 2014 Time journalist Gregory Rodriguez reported that genealogy (which was once a means of proving noble lineage) ‘is the second most popular hobby in the U.S. after gardening … and the second most visited category of websites, after pornography.’ In 2019 Anthony Regalado claimed that twenty-six million people have taken at-home ancestry DNA tests, and that as many people purchased these tests in 2018 as in the previous years combined. And yet, family history research is dismissed by some as a rather flimsy hobby pursued by ‘misty-eyed and syrupy’ conservatives driven by a nostalgic vision of the ‘golden age of family.’ (Evans, 2011:49–51) — a criticism which, as Liz Grandmaison notes, ‘is particularly cynical and dismissive of people of the African and Black diaspora who, as a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade, do not have the luxury of such romantic notions.’ Even those critics who concede that it is not all bad, tend to view family history as distinct from and inferior to history proper, that is, the rigorous (re)creation of the past by academics and other such ‘experts’. If, as such critics suggest, genealogy has no place in scholarly history what role, if any, might it play in history museums?

History Trust of South Australia

As employees of the History Trust of South Australia many of my colleagues are involved in genealogy either professionally, personally, or both. Discussions with a few of them, as well as my own experience of family history research, have led me to think of academic history and genealogy as not only less distinct than some might like to imagine, but more importantly, as potentially mutually beneficial. This position is shared by many, including historian and genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills who claims that ‘genealogy is history. It is micro-history and historical biography.’ (2004:2). Mills argues that data about individuals is integral to macro analyses of historical structures, that, for example, ‘in order to determine political affiliations and migration patterns, [historians] need to know the relationships between the actors on their historical stages, because kinship so often fueled economics, politics, and migration,’ 2004:3). For me, this line of argument is not only theoretically compelling; it is also supported by my experience working in a social history museum where it is widely agreed that visitors connect much more readily with ‘history’ when it is presented through personal stories.

Migration Museum curator Corinne Ball’s account of the development and ongoing impact of an exhibition (In This Place) about the history of Adelaide’s Destitute Asylum, the remaining buildings of which now house the Museum, clearly illustrates the symbiotic relationship between history and genealogy, and historians and genealogists.

As with previous versions of the exhibition, we consciously looked to tell stories of the ‘indigent poor’, women, the working class and others who have historically been excluded from larger narratives of Australian colonial history. Working with families of Destitute Asylum residents was a vital part of the development of the gallery, as we chose to highlight personal stories as a way to unpick the complexities of the welfare system. Content for two of the four family-focused interactives came about because members of those families approached us about their ancestors’ lives. Other stories featured in the exhibition were supplemented by research, assistance, and input from family members. Without these stories our attempt to explain the development of the welfare system in South Australia would have been abstract, less engaging, and far less meaningful to most of our visitors.

In This Place. Image by Andre Castellucci

Interestingly, the work of family historians sometimes challenges the traditional notion of history as a set of fixed, objective facts uncovered by tertiary trained specialists. It can also trouble the museological practices that sustain this idea(l) as Catherine Manning’s account of an experience she had whilst working as a curator at the Migration Museum demonstrates.

After a visit to see a framed family tree that had been donated two decades earlier and was now on display, the donor’s daughter contacted me. Her three children, she explained, had not been born at the time the framed work was donated, and she would like to add them to the tree. Making changes to an object that is in the Museum’s collection would, of course, contravene best practice protocols. I queried whether I might not ‘bend the rules’ with then-director of the museum and was told no, we couldn’t make an exception, despite the fact that the original donor expressed every desire to see his grandchildren added to the family tree.

History Trust of South Australia, HT200.0161

Together, Catherine and the family came up with an alternative: the donor’s daughter donated a framed picture of her children which was hung next to the original family tree. But as Catherine notes, if the donor had held onto the family tree for a few more years it would have continued to grow, but once it came into the museum’s collection its status as a living entity was arrested; it became ‘frozen in time.’ This anecdote highlights a criticism that is often made of traditional museological practice and the idea of the museum that underpins it, namely that ‘museums kill objects’ (Witcomb, 2003:3) and petrify history, constructing both as singular, fixed and unchanging. The role of genealogy in this example is to question those assumptions, to show that meaning is always in-process, multiplicitous, and contested. What it also illustrates is the way in which systems of power and privilege function to reproduce dominant ways of knowing, being, and doing, and the role that museums play in this.

History Trust of South Australia, HT2012.0012

Corinne’s account of the development of In This Place also makes clear the important role that family historians have played in ‘questioning traditional and largely accepted historical narratives about Australia’s early colonial past’ (Evans, 2011:52), and exposing the politically forged ‘silences and denials’ (Zerubavel cited Hackstaff, 2010:666) that support them. As she explains, ‘For many families the untangling of shame associated with illegitimacy, poverty and destitution, and the re-centering of the historical narrative through publicly sharing stories in museums, on the web and at memorial events goes some way to righting the historical wrongs done to their previously marginalised ancestors.’

The articulation of eradicated histories and redressing of past (and present) injustices is, as Ashley Barnwell argues, ‘a means of gaining individual and transpersonal identity’ (2013:262–3), and this is made poignantly clear in First Nations’ curator Jade Turner’s account of her first encounter with aspects of her family history.

I remember the first time I saw a picture of my Aboriginal great-grandmother and great-great grandmother. It sits in a collection my white grandmother has meticulously kept over her lifetime. When I looked at the pictures, they both looked like such strong, proud and knowledgeable women. I had heard so many stories of them, but to see them was like feeling connected in different way to seeing photographs of my white ancestors. At a time when Aboriginal people were being forced from their family, forced into silence and even forced into denying their Aboriginality they still survived. It is something about the existence of these photographs that became a symbol to me of how these women still survive in my family now.

Despite my white grandmother having spent much of her life with her head in [the] sand about my grandfather’s Aboriginality these photos still had their place in her collection. It’s interesting to find that the very woman who has spent much of her time ignoring and denying this blak history is one of the only ones to have recorded it. This is just one layer of a family greatly affected by the complex legacy of colonisation and white ideals of race. However, I look at my mum, sister and nieces and I still see these strong and proud blak women in them. We have all inherited not a family history of denial, but one of survival.

John and Audrey Turner, courtesy of Jade Turner

The political import of First Nations peoples’ deployment of the radical possibilities of family history to reconstruct identity and challenge national ‘histories that ignore the construction of the nation through racist policies and brutal violence’ (Evans, 2011:5) cannot be underestimated. Such work clearly supports Hackstaff’s claim that personal genealogies not only play an integral role in political struggles for greater justice and for selfhood, they can also elicit ‘hope for a different future that inspires and is inspired by the study of the past’ (Hall cited in Hackstaff, 2010:667).

At the same time, however, genealogy can be — and is — used to ‘realign … white identity with the side of the oppressed in post-colonial debates’ (Barnwell, 2013:268). Nowhere is this more apparent than in Tom Hayden’s Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America (2001). Like Cartman, who, in a cleverly satirical episode (episode 13, series 1)of South Park sets out on a quest to find his ancestral roots, and thus himself, Hayden, a fifth generation American, who both claims and aspires to be ‘Irish on the inside’ finds evidence of his latent identity in his affinity with Irish marches and protest songs, the Irish language, a resistance to British rule, the work of writers such as James Joyce, and the IRA (which he attempts to join). One of the most troubling effects of the genealogical naturalization of Hayden’s alleged ‘Irishness’ is the (re)construction of him as ‘no longer a white American, but a politicised “black” Irishman’ (Barnwell, 2013:265) whose implication in and responsibility for current postcolonial problems is thereby nullified.

Unlike an anecdote that was shared with me by my colleague Liz Grandmaison, this problematic approach to and use of family history functions in direct contrast to genealogical research that asks ‘provocative questions about identity, authenticity, history, responsibility, and belonging’ (Barnwell, 2013:261), and the complex ways in which they intersect to produce oppressions and opportunities. While reading a recent article in The Guardian, Liz, who was born and raised in the U.S and migrated to Australia in 2011, came across the following the paragraph which stopped her in her tracks.

Edward Stirling — member of the South Australian parliament and father of the SA constitution, pastoralist and director of the colony’s bank — arrived about 1839 with the silver spoon of £1,000 bequeathed to him by his father, Archibald, a Jamaican slaveholder (Daley, 2020)

Edward Charles Stirling, HTSA, GN01280

Clicking on Edward’s hyperlinked name took Liz to Legacies of British Slave-ownership, a website maintained by University College London, which states that Edward was ‘the son of Archibald Stirling of Keir [Scotland]…with a creole woman of colour, possibly called Jeanne.’ Further investigation revealed that Archibald was ‘awarded all or part of the compensation for the enslaved people’ on a number of Jamaican plantations including Grange Hill in Westmoreland. Liz’s biological father, a light-skinned Black man, was born in Westmoreland, Jamaica in 1920. She is yet to discover if the connection is any more direct, but says she finds it interesting that she and the father of the South Australian constitution should have had such a similar ancestry. At the same time, Liz recounts, ‘I use a less sanguine adjective to describe my thoughts and feelings about the fact that Stirling’s son, Edward Charles Stirling, gave himself the authority to populate the colonial archive with Aboriginal remains, collected by means of the most barbarous acts. Conversely, my ancestors in Jamaica were catalogued as property in imperial ledgers and the ancestors of Aboriginal people here were deemed suitable only as archival objects.’

Map of Jamaica, British Library, shelfmark DS9888c22

In conclusion, then, it is clear that family history comprises a broad range of practices deployed by an increasingly diverse range of people and pressed into the service of competing political ends. As such it shares much with the academic practice of history. Like history as it is commonly conceived, genealogy is shaped and limited by the hegemonic assumptions that underpin it — assumptions about family formation, heterosexuality and parenting, naming practices and property to name but a few. But at the same time, family history research as a practice that is heterogeneous, changing, and generative, can contribute rich ‘micro’ data to macro accounts of historical structures, events, and trends. More important still, it has the potential to offer critical insights into the narrative construction (and material effects) of history, identity, power and privilege, and to thereby challenge the inevitability of ‘truths’ we no longer wish to accept. Given this, as history museum professionals how could we not be involved in family history research?

References

Barnwell, Ashley (2013) ‘The Genealogy Craze: Authoring an Authentic Identity through Family History Research,’ Life Writing, 10:3, pp.261–275.

Daley, Paul (2020) ‘ The room of the dead: how a museum became a halfway house for bones and spirits,’ https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/05/the-room-of-the-dead-how-a-museum-became-a-halfway-house-for-bones-and-spirits

Evans, Tanya (2011) ‘Secrets and Lies: The Radical Potential of Family History,’ History Workshop Journal, 71:1, pp.49–73.

Hackstaff, Karla B (2010) ‘Family Genealogy: A Sociological Imagination Reveals Intersectional Relations,’ Sociology Compass, 4:8, pp.658–72.

Hayden, Tom (2001) Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish America

Mills, Elizabeth Shown (2004) ‘Bridging the Historic Divide: Family History and “Academic” History’, https://historicpathways.com/download/bridghisdivideivide.pdf

Parker, Trey & David Goodman (1998) ‘Cartman’s Mum’s a Dirty Slut’, South Park, episode 13, series 1.

Regalado, Anthony (2019) ‘More than 26 million people have taken an at-home ancestry test,’ MIT Technology Review, https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/11/103446/more-than-26-million-people-have-taken-an-at-home-ancestry-test/

Rodriguez, Gregory (2014) ‘How Genealogy Became Almost as Popular as Porn’, Time, https://time.com/133811/how-genealogy-became-almost-as-popular-as-porn/

Witcomb, Andrea (2003) Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, London: Routledge.