Family Stories and Historical Context: Setting Expectations

One of the skills genealogists must build is being able to differentiate between things that are provable, probable, possible, and unknowable.

In a lot of cases, dissatisfaction and frustration with genealogy comes from having unrealistic expectations and spending tons of time and money chasing something that is unlikely to exist.

Some things, at the end of the day, just aren't provable.

In many cases, unless it generated a record (or a DNA trail), it is likely to be lost to history.

Things that fall in this "lost" category might include the following:

• An ancestor's opinions, personal challenges, and desires

• Details of non-familial relationships (an ancestor's best friends, the fiancé they didn't end up marrying, mentors, bullies)

• Family events that were not typically documented by church or government, from the happy things like holiday traditions and pets to more difficult life circumstances (miscarriages, unofficial divorces, health issues, or domestic abuse that was never addressed legally)

Of course there are exceptions, if you're lucky enough to have an ancestor who left a diary or a giant trove of letters. These little facts might also appear if your ancestor ended up featured in a detailed newspaper article, interviewed in a court-related deposition, or was especially talkative in their military pension file. (Many of these documents, though, are increasingly rare the further back in time you go.)

In 1845 in Washington County, Republic of Texas, Michael Harrison sued his wife Mary for divorce on the grounds of "a total want of affection and kindness" for him, and for "harsh, cruel, & unkind language." Ultimately, though, Michael dropped the suit and the couple remained married. The attempted divorce is part of the historical record, but why Michael chose to stay married is the part of the story we may never know. We can speculate in an educated way: it's possible his complaint didn't meet the legal standards for divorce and that he wasn't able to convince the jury of his cause (no-fault divorce was not a thing in 1845 and divorce was very hard to obtain!) It's possible he ran out of money. Or perhaps, he and Mary simply reconciled. But we don't know!

And of course, just because you can't get the exact answer you want doesn't mean you can't come close!

In the absence of direct proof, sometimes family lore preserves elements of the stories. And even more often, historical context can fill in some of the gaps and open the door to informed hypotheses and speculation. These factors can take a family story into the realm of probable or possible--even if you don't ever find a single document where they tell you directly "this is why we did this thing."

An Irish family coming to Boston in 1850 was probably fleeing the Great Famine that killed over a million of their countrymen.

A Pennsylvanian in 1825 may have left York County for backcountry Virginia in search of cheaper land and used the Great Wagon Road to get there--and you can learn about those topics on a general level because the Great Wagon Road and the fact of cheaper real estate in frontier areas are documented historical facts.

You may also be able to document that he didn't go alone--that perhaps he went because his sister's husband went first in 1822 and you have a deed for him in Virginia that year proving it. You can even reasonably presume that maybe Mr. In-Law could have sent word back, but you likely will never be able to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt by means of a surviving letter.

In these examples, you can see the various levels of provable, probable, possible, and unknowable.

The other part of this, of course, is that it's important to know your history. Trying to research your ancestors without knowing anything about the society in which they lived is setting yourself up for failure!

A good genealogist is a well-read genealogist!

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